Homily for Wednesday, 25th Week of Ordinary Time

Homily for Wednesday
25th Week of Ordinary Time

Sept. 26, 1982

Proverbs 30: 5-9
Our Lady of Lourdes, Bethesda, Md.

If you’re a daily Mass-goer, you’ve noticed that this week we switched in our 1st readings from St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, from which we read extensively starting on Aug. 30, to the Book of Proverbs this week.

In fact, our visit with Proverbs is a brief one, only 3 days, 3 short passages out of a book that consists of 31 chapters.  Tomorrow we’ll move on to Ecclesiastes for 2 days, omitting a 3d day on Saturday when we’ll celebrate the archangels; and next week we’ll take up Job.

Solomon Writing Proverbs (Gustave Dore')

[At one time, Proverbs was attributed to Israel's wisest king.]

In short, we’re in a stretch of readings from the Old Testament wisdom literature, a rapid overview of it.  Most of these wisdom Scriptures aren’t especially religious, as you may already have noticed this week; Job and the Psalms are exceptions.  But all of it is still the inspired Word of God.

We may ask, What is God saying to us thru these proverbs, these collections of human experience, this human wisdom?

There’s a harmony in the universe.  There’s a harmony between human learning and our Creator.  The pursuit of truth—the truth of the created world, the truth of the human character, the truth of our daily experience—all point us toward the One who is Truth.  A person of integrity tries to conform his or her life to the truth of the universe.  We can say that Old Testament wisdom presents us with a “natural theology,” a vision or record of God that we learn from observing the world—not without challenges, however, as some of the psalms and the whole Book of Job confront.

In our 3 short passages from Proverbs this week, we were urged to treat our neighbors—our fellow human beings—decently, to be humble and truthful, to avoid the wicked, to attend to the poor, to be upright before God, to respect God’s word and trust him, to seek moderation in our lives.

The reference to the Word of God in today’s reading (30:5-6) is interesting, out of character for the Book of Proverbs as a whole.

Or is it?  If all of nature is a word of God—Ps 33 says, “God spoke, and it came to be” (v. 9)—then we must listen to nature, to natural law (even our Declaration of Independence says so), to the law of God deeply inscribed in our hearts.  This law, like the proverbs of the wisdom literature, tells us to be truthful, to treat everyone with respect, to honor our parents, to note and heed God’s designs in our sexuality, to be humble before our Creator, to remember our mortality, to trust that God is just and in an afterlife will right the scales of justice with regard to the just and the wicked.

The Collect for last Sunday, which we prayed also today, harmonizes with the wisdom of the Old Testament:  all God’s commands are based on love of him and of our neighbor.  May God grant us eternal life thru our observance of his precepts—of his law—which we may discern in the world we live in and in our hearts.