Words matter

Words matter.  They help provide us with a way to grasp what is often beyond our ordinary ability to comprehend. There is a word in the Psalm response today that describes the works of the Lord and says they are "great and exquisite."

Exquisiteis not often used in our everyday speech. It isn't about just any old, run-of-the-mill, familiar, or common thing. Instead, it conjures up an image of something beyond the ordinary and leads us to enjoy the particular, precise, flawless characteristics of the object it describes.

How fitting then that a word like exquisiteis used to describe God's greatness, for isn't He great and wonderful, Who made you to know the greatness of His exquisitepower and the exquisitenessof His love?

In the first reading, Paul is writing to Timothy – his great friend, sometime emissary and devoted convert – saying that he hopes to visit him soon, but that if Paul is delayed to take comfort in the good works they are doing together. In the Gospel (Luke 7:31-39) Jesus seems almost wistful as He notes the rejection that both He and John the Baptist faced, but ends with the striking line: “But wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”

If we give to the poor and protect the innocent and oppose those who would exploit the poor and the powerless, then we are looked upon with suspicion by people who wonder what it is we want. If we speak the name of God, half the people we meet despise us for our weakness in dependence upon Him, and the other half despise us because we are trying to force "our God" upon them. 

"But wisdom is vindicated by all her children."Better a fool for Christ than a fool for our society as it stands now. Better to be thought a hypocrite, than to join those who criticize and become one. How much better to spread love to those who cannot love and be despised for it, than to spread hatred and destruction and be either hated or loved.

Jesus lived in a time of divided people, and we are still and profoundly a divided people. But let each of us who hears, who prays, who loves God to be a person of single heart—not divided, half against God because we are told by the wisdom of this world that we are fools to trust Him. Better that folly than the folly of those who can trust only in the perishable—in the empires that turn to dust and the gold that cannot go beyond the grave.

Both Paul and Jesus are acutely aware of the strains of earthly existence and the pressure it was putting on their relationships. So they wrote and spoke about it to comfort their friends and perhaps even to comfort themselves.

“But wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”I hope that holds true for me.