Tag Archives: Wisdom

On Giving All we’ve Got

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The trick to preaching about the man who asks to follow Jesus but goes away when asked to give what he owns and give the money to the poor and then follow him, is to explain it without explaining it away. I’ll try to explain it, and see where that gets me.

I think we can get some help from Luke’s Parable of the Prodigal Son. (Lk. 15: 11-32) The Prodigal Son first takes his father’s money and then, rather than giving it to the poor, squanders it. Curiously, Luke uses the word ousia, which means substance, being. It is a term Greek philosophers use for this concept. That is, the Prodigal Son squandered his father’s substance. If we keep this in mind in considering the story about the man who was asked to sell everything, we can see that Jesus was asking him to give up everything he’s got. This calls our attention to how much our possessions seem to be part of our being, our substance. If I give up all of my possessions, my substance, what do I have left? Nothing apparently. This hardly softens or explains away Jesus’ admonition.

In Proverbs, the Sage gives us another angle of understanding Jesus’ admonition by urging us to seek wisdom “like silver, and search for it as for hidden treasures.” (Prov. 2: 4) Usually when we think of treasure, we imagine a chest full of gold dug up on a desert island where pirates buried it while continuing their life of crime. Even Tim Hawkins loses interest in treasure hunting after all the violence that accompanied the search on the island, suggesting he gains some true wisdom. Desirable as such treasure may seem to be in our dreams, the author of Proverbs redirects us to the ultimate treasure hunt: true wisdom. If we desire treasure, how much more should we desire wisdom? All the more as acquiring wisdom causes us to eschew the violence that goes with treasure hunting. It is worth mentioning that there is often economic violence of some sort with the accumulation of wealth. Jesus had told the man to follow the commandments, including not to steal or defraud. Had the man really followed these two commandments as he claimed? Unfortunately, systemic social violence is easily hidden, not least from those of us who practice it. When Jesus, elsewhere, compares the Kingdom of God to finding treasure, much like Treasure Island, he says that one sells everything to buy the field to get the treasure. (Mt. 13: 44-46) That is, to gain this treasure, we have to give everything we’ve got, which is what Jesus asked of the man who approached him. Contrary to the close parallels in Matthew and Luke, Mark only designates this inquirer as “a man.” He could be anybody. Maybe you or me. We only find out that he is rich when he leaves, shocked and grieving because of his many possessions. Perhaps being too rich to enter the kingdom of God is not about how much or how little we have, but how much we want to keep.

There is the saying: clothes make the person. Scripture suggests this is true, as the image of clothing is used frequently throughout the Bible, and not least in the writings of St. Paul. When he tells us to clothe ourselves “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” and above all, to clothe ourselves “with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony,” (Col. 3: 12–13) he is telling us what kind of clothes we should be made of. We can only be so clothed if we give all we’ve got to bear such treasures on our person, and bearing such treasures involves bearing with one another and forgiving one another. Insofar as a community is built with such values, the community is a treasure more valuable than gold or silver. If we give everything we’ve got in this sense, we won’t be clinging to what money we happen to have.

Benedict, taking all of the above Scripture verses to heart, enshrines these values in his Rule. He is strict about personal ownership, but that doesn’t mean that a monastic should not have use of any material goods. He says that each monastic should be given a tablet by the abbot. That is very true today, even though the meaning of the word “tablet” has changed quite a lot since the sixth century. The point is that everything a monastic has use of, whether a communal object like a vacuum cleaner, or a personal item such as a computer, is a gift, and not something one has a personal right to possess. If everything we have is a gift, then we have nothing but gifts to hand on to others. Like Jesus, Benedict asks us to give everything we’ve got. It’s not enough to sell our possessions and give the money away. Echoing St. Paul, we are to support “with greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior, to pursue what is better for others rather than ourselves, and to show pure love of our brothers and sisters.” To make these admonitions a little more concrete, Benedict would also have us give ourselves to mopping and vacuuming floors. Also like St. Paul, Benedict would have us “with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God”–a lot. (Col. 3: 15) What a treasure this is! And the more we give ourselves to it, the greater the treasure. We should prefer nothing whatever to Christ. (RB 72: 5–1) If we do that, what do we have left for ourselves? Jesus tells his disciples that by giving up everything, they will receive everything back a hundred fold. By giving up all of our substance, we become much more substantial in the hope that God will bring us all to everlasting life, our greatest treasure.

Wisdom’s Children

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In reaction to the rejections of John the Baptist and himself, Jesus said: “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.” (Mt. 11: 25-26) These words seem comforting and edifying but our reactions to these words tend to be governed by the resentment we feel for people who are members of an elite of some kind, experts in particular. But does Jesus really mean for us to assume that experts in biblical exegesis, for example, fail to see what ignorant people see? During the COVID pandemic, we saw severe outbursts of this resentment by people who thought they knew more about how to avoid catching the disease than the experts who created the vaccines and urged everybody to take them. Such virulent resentment is hardly the kind of insight Jesus is affirming. Although the experts seem to have done pretty well in the case of the COVID vaccines, it has to be admitted that in the past, experts have turned out to be wrong. The history of medicine is littered with ruinous theories and practices. A troubling example is that roughly up to the middle of the twentieth century, many expert scientists thought they had proved the “truth” of white supremacy. Nowadays, the opposite is the case. It helps when experts admit it when they are proved wrong. This example also suggests that something else is needed besides expertise in order to see the kind of truth Jesus would have us see, something different from what experts learn. As the famous song from South Pacific reminds us, racism needs to be “carefully taught.” Do small children have this knowledge Jesus wants until carefully taught otherwise by the world’s experts, as suggested by the famous story of Jesus welcoming the small children when the disciples try to keep them away?

Just a few verses before the one quoted here, Jesus refers to the antics of children to illustrate the rejections of John and himself. In the marketplace, children cry out:

          "We played the pipe for you,
          and you did not dance;
          we sang a dirge,
          and you did not mourn.”  (Mt. 11: 17)

Is this the wisdom of children seeing what Jesus’ heavenly Abba wants us to see? In one respect, perhaps yes, insofar as the children are calling out the shortcomings of their elders, complaining that they don’t rejoice with their playful joys and don’t mourn and comfort them when they are hurt. But at the same time, the children are imitating the accusatory behavior of their elders which their elders are leveling against John the Baptist and Jesus. They are pretty well along to growing up to do the same thing the grownups are doing.

The children’s taunts can give us a notion of what Jesus’ heavenly Abba wants children of all ages to see. John the Baptist, by preaching repentance could be said to be the singer of the dirge. Because of our sins, it was a time for mourning and many did that, but the rest accused him of having a demon. Jesus came to celebrate a new way of life, his eating with tax collectors and sinners being one of the ways he healed people, but that made him a winebibber and a glutton. People like John and Jesus can’t do anything right. It is precisely this accusatory attitude to life that warps the expertise of experts and corrupts small children, leading to racism among many other evils.

As was said in the Wisdom literature, there is a time to mourn and a time to rejoice. (Eccl. 3:4) Mourning with those who mourn and rejoicing with those who rejoice centers our lives on the lives of others just as Jesus centered his life on others by eating with sinners like us. Small children have no choice but to be dependent on those bigger and stronger than they. They need their elders to mourn with them and rejoice with them. That does give children a head start, but they lose the advantage when they follow their elders in the game of every person for oneself and accusing others for their own shortcomings. Perhaps those who mourn are blessed and comforted because they mourn with those who mourn while thirsting for righteousness. This purifies our hearts so that we can see what God is doing in other people so that we can rejoice together in God’s Kingdom. (Mt. 5: 4, 6, 8)

See also: Jesus’ Yoke

Eating Together

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garden1Eating is among the most fundamental activities of civilization, perhaps the most fundamental. It is the practice that brings people together to share in nourishment and social nurturing. And yet, throughout the animal kingdom, sustenance requires feeding on other living beings. Sometimes it is other animals, sometime plants. That is, a group bonding through eating inevitably bonds at the expense of other living beings.

The Christian Eucharist builds on the social bonding with its celebration of a meal that binds people together. Being bound up with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, a sacrifice made so that all other people may live, it is a meal of human sacrifice. Yet it is made a bloodless sacrifice by the serving of bread and wine that in some mysterious way are identified with the body and blood of Jesus, thus sanitizing the Eucharist of the violence in the story that is told in the breaking of the bread.

Jesus’ strange words in his long monolog that follows the feeding in the wilderness connects this feeding with the Eucharist in words that are both comforting in that they promise a deep union with Jesus, but disturbing by thrusting the violence of Jesus’ death in our faces. English translations inevitably lose much of the force of the words as there is no English word that catches the connotations of trogein.“Gnaw” comes closest but even that is not strong enough. The German word fressen, which refers to the eating of non-human animals, comes much closer. When I used the word flippantly in conversation with a German acquaintance, his reaction was very strong, about as strong as our reaction to Jesus’ words ought to be. Which is precisely the way “the Jews” react to Jesus’ words.

In reply to “the Jews’s” anger, Jesus promises that his flesh and blood are “real food” and “real drink” without which we have no life in us. Jesus goes on to make the even more audacious claim that his body and blood do not nourish us as meat and vegetables nourish us. Such nourishment is not lasting and needs to be renewed by further eating and drinking as the manna God fed the Israelites in the desert needed to be re-gathered every day. But Jesus’ own flesh and blood feeds us in such a way that we will live forever.

If Jesus can be our food in a way that sustains us everlastingly, then his own life must also be constantly renewed. This is the claim he makes when he says that he abides in his Father and his Father abides in him. This amounts to the astounding claim that it is possible to be nourished in a way that it is not at the expense of any living being. How can this be?

Since Jesus’ promise of everlasting nourishment is tied so closely to his painful death, we might get some understanding by looking at sacrifice. Sacrifice is closely tied to eating. Deities feed on animals or vegetation, or at least the aroma of them, and the sacrificers usually eat the food that was sacrificed. The Passover lamb is sacrificed both to spare the Israelites from the plague that strikes the first-born of Egypt and a sacrifice to physical hunger, and thus a source of nourishment as well. Sacrifices need to be repeated, as the author of Hebrews says. (Heb. 7: 27; 9: 6) In his sacrificial death, Jesus has obtained “eternal redemption.” (Heb. 9: 12) Thus, this author is making the same claim on behalf of Jesus that Jesus is making in John’s Gospel.
René Girard is helpful here. His thesis that civilization is founded on sacrifice and thus needs to be fueled by repetition of the same alerts us to the ongoing “nourishment” civilization receives through the periodic deaths of victims. One sacrifice lasts only for so long and then social tensions require another. Caiaphas intended Jesus’s death to be such a life-giving sacrifice for the people, (Jn. 12: 50–52) but Caiaphas got more than he bargained for. Jesus was raised from the dead and so became empowered to continually offer his life for others while no longer being subject to death himself. This is how Girard would have us understand the Church’s claim that Jesus’ sacrifice is the final sacrifice. There is no longer a need for sacrificial victims because the way has been opened for us to be everlastingly nourished by the life that was given once for all.

The death and resurrection of Christ, then, are a pledge of the heavenly banquet where we will be nourished without need of taking any life, not even that of plants, but in this life, we still need to eat living beings of some sort. Even Lady Wisdom has to slaughter animals for her banquet. What we can do is let Christ nourish us deeply in the here and now so that we do not need to sacrifice other people as we are prone to do, but rather will feed others in anticipation of the heavenly banquet.