Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

I love the Deuterocanonical books. Love them. I have a special place in my heart for Tobit, the adventures of young Tobias and his friend, the disguised Archangel Raphael; I love the strange and brief little story of Bel and the Dragon; I love the beauty, honesty and yearning of the penitential Prayer of Manasseh. And I think my favorite of the Deuterocanonicals is the Wisdom of Solomon. The poetic odes to wisdom are nothing short of majestic, and the book itself shines with the wisdom it so frequently hymns. It’s an amazing book. And it’s great that we’ve had the opportunity to marinate in it over the past week or so via our Office Lectionary.

One of the bracingly lovely things about the book of the Wisdom of Solomon is it’s forthrightness—it begins by saying, quite clearly, that sin is a covenant with death over against relationship with God; that God did not create death, but that humans invited death into the world by constantly tearing at the fabric of creation, constantly breaking relationship with God, with each other and with all that God has made, revealing death to be a pattern of living away from God that leads to ruin and destruction; but living into the pattern of the good that God has always desired for the world and for us is living a life full of wisdom, and the book affirms that wisdom describes a way of being in relationship with God and all of creation that’s reflective of an original harmony that still hums throughout all creation, all history, all space, all time. To be a lover of wisdom is to love and seek God’s will for all things…which is to become a living lens through which the love of God can become visible in and to the world.

There’s also something bitterly ironic about the Wisdom of Solomon, and we catch a glimpse of it in our Office Reading today where it’s recognized (with characteristic forthrightness): every wickedness imaginable comes from idolatry, is, in fact, a form of idolatry. Because every wickedness is a preference for what is not God. Every sin is an idol, and vice versa. Every sin is an attempt to say to God, “I am not yours: I belong to another.” But what other is there to belong to? There’s God or there’s not-God. There’s a fullness of life and love, or there’s an emptiness we’ve come to recognize as death. The irony in all of this is that Solomon and his kingdom were undone by the idolatry that the figure of Solomon decries in this little book of wisdom.

The irony, though, is intentional! We’re being reminded: even the wise forget. The great among us have a tendency to fall like the rest of us. Turning away from wisdom, from right relationship with God and creation, is possible for us no matter how righteous or wise we or others may think ourselves. And…I think the author of the Wisdom of Solomon is trying to get us to understand: however far we’ve fallen, however lost we may seem, a return to the way of wisdom, a return to the way of love is always possible.

Because our sin is not the end of the story! The author of the book says to God, “even if we sin we are yours, knowing your power; but we will not sin, because we know that you acknowledge us as yours” (15:2). Our sin may deliver us up to captivity to death, but we never cease being God’s…because God never ceases to call us God’s own! We may give up on God, but God never gives up on us. And we’re called to return to wisdom, to righteousness, to love, by acknowledging the choice God has always already made for us…and relaxing into that choice, letting the One to whom we belong—from the foundations of the world and the depths of our souls—shape us by the great power of the infinite loving regard of God. Part of repentance means knowing, deeply, transformatively, joyously, to whom we belong, and knowing, by grace through faith, that the One to whom we belong has chosen, in love, in the Incarnation, in Jesus Christ, to belong to us.

Beloved, what a great gift to receive from our Office Reading today! To know that the gift of belonging to God is the way of wisdom, is the way of love!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+