28 June 2015
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
If we had the ability to think of God only in positive terms, it might make a difference in our lives. It might even change the world! We wouldn’t blame God for our misfortunes, get angry with our Creator for taking away our loved ones, or question his ways when they seem unjust.
Our first reading this Sunday offers us that very “wisdom.” Written about 50 years before the birth of Christ, the Book of Wisdom was somewhat revolutionary in its time.
Wisdom offers a steadfast belief in an afterlife, using the views of Greek philosophy as way of understanding human nature in terms of a soul-body split. For the Greeks, the body is like a prison that the soul can't wait to escape. The author of Wisdom uses this idea to extend the Jewish notion of humanity made in the “image and likeness of God” (from Genesis) beyond one’s mortal life.
The idea of living beyond the grave (Hebrew: Sheol) was, by historical standards, a relatively new resurrection from the dead, which helped the disciples of Jesus to finally recognize and accept Christ’s bodily resurrection (and our hope of resurrection of the body). See Daniel 12 and Romans 6.idea at this time. The Book of Daniel, written about 150 years earlier, shows the first unambiguous statement of a Jewish belief in
What Wisdom proposes is a little different, but what is driving the idea is similar and “spot on.” In Wisdom, we encounter a deeper, more positive view of the relationship between Creator and creation than was common throughout most of the history of Israel. Sunday's reading affirms that it was never God’s intent to bring evil and corruption into the world and into human souls. The Wisdom writer believed that it is not within the nature of God to cause evil or destruction, and so logically the soul that is a "friend of God" (righteous) could live beyond the death (corruption) of the body.
The author, Ms. Barbara Gawle, leads Bible studies at her parish, Incarnation Church of Wethersfield, CT. She is a CBS graduate and the 2012 recipient of the Biblical School's highest award, the Lawrence Boadt Memorial Medal.
BJ Daly Horell, editor
