Worldly Wisdom vs. God's Wisdom

Homily for the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Almost every world religion has set aside a place or places as God’s dwelling.  Temples are sacred spaces in which we can encounter the divine. As we listen to another excerpt from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, we are reminded that our God dwells in a temple not made by human hands; rather God dwells among us. We are God’s Temple, God’s dwelling place because the Holy Spirit, sent to us by Jesus, lives in us. It is important to note that Paul uses the plural of the second person pronoun when he pronounces, “You are God’s Temple.” When we gather in assembly in unity and holiness, God dwells among us.

Unfortunately, once Paul left Corinth for the next community to which he traveled, he was followed by a group who polluted and destroyed the unity and holiness of the community by contradicting Paul’s teachings. They are known as Judaizers, for they believed that one had to be a Jew first in order to be baptized as a Christian. Another group known as the Gnostics made claims about their special knowledge of God. Obviously, this teaching brought with it a great deal of dissension and division.

Paul names the root cause of this dissension and consequent destruction of the Church as intellectual or worldly wisdom. It was this worldly wisdom that divided the community into factions which followed a particular teacher or leader in the Church. They began to evaluate and criticize the way in which the message was delivered rather than holding fast to the message itself. The correctness of the rhetoric, the weight of the oratory, the subtleties of the argument began to be more important than the message itself; namely, that they were all one in Jesus Christ.

Worldly wisdom is always argumentative. It cannot keep silent and admire; it must talk and criticize. It cannot bear to be contradicted; it must prove that it and it alone is right. It is never humble enough to learn; it must always lay down the law. Worldly wisdom is also characteristically exclusive. It tends to look down on others rather than to sit down beside them. It tends to cut people off from one another rather than unite them.

So Paul suggests that the one who would be truly wise should become a fool. This is simply a way of urging us to be humble enough to learn. Only through humility will we be able to overcome worldly wisdom. Only by realizing how limited we are will we begin to realize what God can do with us if we push aside our foolish pride. The Corinthians had begun to destroy God’s dwelling place by splintering into cliques and factions based upon who baptized them, upon who was the greater preacher, upon who was the most charismatic leader. Paul reminds them that they were baptized into Jesus, not into the one who poured the water over them. The wisdom of Jesus is the wisdom of the cross. Jesus became the most foolish person in the eyes of the world because he did not use the power he possessed as the Son of God to thwart the designs of those who put him to death. He allowed himself to be humiliated so that God’s wisdom could put down the proud and exalt the lowly. The Resurrection was the reward that Jesus won for himself and for all of us by dying on a cross. This is God’s wisdom and strength. It confounds the men and women who cling to power and status and wealth and opens the Kingdom of God to the poor, the meek, and the persecuted.

It is only the person who has learned God’s wisdom that can understand the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, setting aside any desire for revenge or any grudge. It is the truly wise person who understands Jesus when he says that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. When we have learned God’s wisdom, then we shall be children of our heavenly Father.  

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator