The Wisdom of God: Homily for Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Today we celebrate Saint Basil and Saint Gregory, the Cappadocian Fathers, as they are known. They were bishops, they were monks, and they were close friends. And they wrote about the wisdom of God in many respects, how to live the spiritual life, both for the monastery and for the outside world. The wisdom of God. What exactly do we mean when we say the wisdom of God? Well, if we look at the Old Testament, we'll see that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. And that's what John demonstrates in today's gospel. I don't know that we necessarily think of our relationship with God in the way that John would describe it. Seeing Jesus as the one, as John says, whose sandals strap I am not worthy to untie. I think sometimes in our modern age we have such a high image of ourselves that we think that God's only a little bit better. But the truth is that we believe in an infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God, far beyond our ability to understand, far beyond our ability to figure out, far beyond our ability to really have any sense of who God is. We get only glimpses of God because it's all our small minds can understand. I remember when studying St. Thomas Aquinas, it was used as an example of knowledge to compare us to the angels. And I remember the idea was to let us know that as human beings we're very good with sense knowledge. If it's limited, we're very good at it. We can figure out what we see, we can draw conclusions, we can live in a world that's charged by the senses, and we're very good at figuring that world out. But when it comes to the spiritual world, this is the way it was described, to kind of reflect what St. Thomas believed about the spiritual world. Angels, bright, shining Son of God, human beings, dim 20-watt bulb. It's a different kind of thing. It's a different kind of knowledge. And that's what the Scripture readings are challenging us to, because the only way we know anything about God is because God told us. It's His revelation that is the only way we know anything. And that's really what we revel in in this Christmas season, that God sent His Son to us, the Word, so that we might come to know a little bit better who God is. Let us ask the Lord today to fill our hearts by wisdom and with wisdom, so that we might see the world and that we might see things the way that God sees things. And let us ask the Lord in this gift of wisdom to help us to have an attitude that helps us to see our faith for what it is, the pathway to eternal life. On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.