I pleaded, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.
I preferred her to scepter and throne,
and deemed riches nothing in comparison with her.
What is wisdom? What is this thing that is so great that it is better than having power or riches? Here are three descriptions of wisdom in the Bible:
The book of Proverbs (9:10) says that: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The book of Sirach (21:11) adds: “wisdom is the fulfillment of the fear of the Lord.” And holy Job, seeking to find God in the midst of his suffering, concludes in the 28th chapter of the book that bears his name: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom.”
Wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge. It is something that has to do with our relationship with the Lord. Praise God that wisdom is not knowledge! Wisdom is accessible to everyone, not just to scholars who have mastered calculus or physics or chemistry or ancient languages.
Wisdom is something that we can all obtain by prayer, reflection, and meditation. Heavenly Wisdom is most easily obtained by mediation on the Holy Scriptures which, again, are accessible to everyone. St. Gregory the Great said about the Bible:
"The divine speech stirs up the clever with its mysteries, but provides consolation to the simple with its plain meaning.Scripture is like a river, broad and deep: shallow enough for the lamb to wade, deep enough for the elephant to swim." [Moralia in Job, Ep. IV]
The love of wisdom that we hear about in today's Old Testament reading is something that we can all experience by reading the Holy Scriptures, no matter our age, no matter our education.
Beyond health and comeliness I loved her,
and I chose to have her rather than the light,
because the splendor of her never yields to sleep.
I love this image: Long after the sun has gone down, when everyone else has gone to bed, there is still a candle burning in one window, in the house of the person who is seeking wisdom, who continues to read the holy Scriptures late into the night. Even “beyond health!” Once the love of wisdom takes hold a person, even the “good sense” that would tell a person: “go to bed, get some sleep” yields to the overwhelming desire to continue to bask in the presence of the deep things of God.
The reason that the person who loves wisdom acts in this way is because, in another phrase of St. Gregory: "the more we partake [...] the more we hunger." [Homily 36 on the Gospels] Unlike a person hungry for food, who is satisfied by eating or who even feels sick after overeating, the person who hungers for wisdom and who decides to take the Bible down from the bookshelf (often despite the fact that he or she doesn't much feel like reading), that person not only experiences satisfaction, but also finds within his or her heart an even greater desire than before, a desire that prompts one to continue reading: another verse, another chapter … and that prompts one then to pray about what one has read, first for a minute, then for an hour…. Until, without realizing it, you suddenly find yourself in the almost ridiculous position spoken of in the Scripture: "Beyond health and comeliness I loved her, and I chose to have her rather than the light, because the splendor of her never yields to sleep."
Why is this? Why does the pursuit of wisdom in the reading of the Holy Scripture give rise in us to this hidden desire that we never knew we had? St. Paul taught us in our second reading: "The word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart." The word of God cuts right to the heart of those most meaningful experiences that have made you who you are. Because the word of God is not a dead letter but is "living and effective," reading the Scriptures is different than reading other books.
Because the Lord Jesus Christ is Himself the Word of God, reading the word of God contained in Holy Scripture causes you to encounter the One for Whom and through Whom you were created, to encounter the One Who loves your soul and Who understands you better than you could ever understand yourself. For this reason, the conversation we have with God, Who is "able to discern reflections and thoughts of [our] heart"—that is, the prayer, the conversation we have with Him while reading the Bible—this conversation excites us, because we begin to feel that our deepest questions about life are answered by the presence of the Lord Jesus Who speaks to us in the Scriptures.
The reading about Wisdom that we heard today from the Book of Wisdom concludes in this way:
Yet all good things together came to me in her company,
and countless riches at her hands.
In today's Gospel the rich man “went away sad, for he had many possessions.” He decided not to follow Jesus because he loved the things he owned. But St. Peter and the other disciples who, as Peter noted, had “given up everything” to follow Jesus, were promised by the Lord that
there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters
or mother or father or children or lands,
for my sake and for the sake of the gospel,
who will not receive a hundred times more, now, in this present age.
If someone were to ask me why I follow the Lord Jesus, I would not talk about Heaven. Meditation on the Holy Scriptures and the resulting encounter with the Living God have given me, now, in this present age, a hundred times more happiness than has been obtained by anyone devoted to the acquisition of money and the preservation of a comfortable routine.
Even though our Lord warns us that those who "receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands" will obtain all these things only "with persecutions," yet even the persecutions that inevitably come to anyone who upholds the teachings of Christ are to be preferred to the meaninglessness and nihilism that overtake those who seek their happiness from the things of this earth.
And besides all this, our Lord promises us also "eternal life in the age to come."
How then ought we to live? We can either seek wisdom, or distract ourselves with the things of this world which will never satisfy our deepest longings. Do we want only what is offered us by the world, or do we desire the hundredfold in this life promised us by the Lord? If, therefore, our desires are not too weak, let us resolve to read the Holy Scriptures, speak to God about what we have read, and so follow our Lord’s call to seek Wisdom.
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