Bound in Love

Let me draw your attention to three things we heard from the readings today:

First, Solomon is blessed by God for seeking wisdom, specifically the wisdom to serve God well as king.

Second, St. Paul tells the Romans that God has an eternal plan for every person.

Third, Jesus tells his disciples that the kingdom of heaven is both incredibly precious and oddly hidden.

Let us meditate, therefore, on the wisdom of God’s plan and our search for the gift of the kingdom of heaven.

From these words that we read today, we can see that they resonate with what are called the transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness. Solomon’s desire to be a good king by gaining wisdom is a pursuit of both truth and goodness. The merchant recognizes that this is a pearl of great price, and he reorders his life to pursue it and obtain it. As Christian disciples we need to be seeking truth and goodness, and we are called to respond when we do see it.

Some of you may be familiar with Martin Luther, who was an Augustinian monk who ultimately left the Catholic Church and created the new Lutheran faith. Historians argue that Luther probably suffered from depression, for he said he had his greatest insights when he was down in the dumps. And one of his greatest insights was that human beings were utterly depraved, and only by God’s grace covering them over were they able to attain heaven. (This should be a warning to us all that deep thoughts when we are in a deep funk might not be thoughts from God.)

The analogy Luther gave was snow-covered dung hills. Now dunghill is a bit of an archaic term, so let me define it for you more clearly. Dung hills are the things that you might find in the kitchen if the toddler doesn’t wear a diaper. Okay? So Luther thought that’s what we were, and are, and always will be, except God gives us this blanket of beautiful snow to cover us over and allow us to slip into heaven despite our utter depravity. (I told you Luther was prone to depression.)

Luther found this insight through reading his Bible, and this should be a warning to all of us who think we can understand the mind of God through Bible study without recourse to the teaching office of the Church.

For Luther has it exactly backwards. We are not piles of dung with a snowflake cover. In actuality, each of us is a pearl of great price, made by our God that we might live with him forever. We are beautiful snowflakes. We are unique. We are beautiful. We are intricate and complicated. Somehow, we have let that beauty and that goodness be covered over with bits of dung. So that is what is on us but it is not who we are.

Solomon in the reading today recognizes he needs God’s help to be the man God calls him to be. He desires the gift of wisdom to live out his vocation properly. When we look at the full life of Solomon, we can see that he neglected to fully respond to that gift of wisdom. He got distracted by money and his 700 wives. So he really only got half of the formula correct. He saw what was true and good and beautiful, but he didn’t really do much about it. He had his intellect right, but his will did not follow through. He could not maintain.

The perseverance and resilience of maintenance is what we are called to do as Christian disciples. We first need to open our eyes so that we can see what we really are. We need to be able to admit that we are down at our core deeply good. We also need to admit that down very close to our core we are deeply wounded. Some of those wounds might be psychological, coming from childhood trauma, but the Church understands that the root cause of the wounds is that original separation from God that happened in the Garden of Eden. So we are each a beautiful snowflake, but we all have some flaws in our crystals.

Now we can never entirely overcome those flaws in our beautiful snowflake crystals. The Christian walk is the Way of the Cross. It requires perseverance and resilience. We need to see through the flaws to our beautiful origin just as Christians see through the pain and suffering of Good Friday to the glorious resurrection of Easter Sunday. But seeing isn’t enough. Our intellect is not enough. We have to do as well. Our will must choose the good. And our doing is much like Jesus on the Way of the Cross. We have to carry our flaws on what can be a painful journey but is ultimately a victory lap. How we carry our Cross is how we treasure the pearl of great price that we are in God’s eyes.

Just like the weeds that grew up amidst the wheat in last week’s gospel, our victory lap will involve constant effort and a long term outlook. We will be presented with all kinds of worldly temptations, just as Solomon was. We need to maintain that excellent heavenly eyesight to see what is good — truly good — amidst things that look pretty and nice and useful. God’s plan for marriage involves one wife, but Solomon ended up with 700. God’s plan for the Church is that it be one, but confused people like Martin Luther have managed to break off many pieces. God’s plan for you and for me is that we find our way home to heaven and spend eternity resting in his love and beholding his glory. And we can either be like Solomon and Martin Luther and impose our own will on God’s plan, or we can be like St. Paul and realize that God’s plan is so much better than our plan. Then we should drop everything and adopt his plan, just as Paul did.

The choice is ours. God gives us free will. Let us respond as Joshua said at Shechem, “as for me and my house, we will choose the Lord.”