Today is Feb. 24, Monday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time.
We read in Scripture at today’s Mass, “To whom has wisdom’s root been revealed? Who knows her subtleties? To whom has the discipline of wisdom been revealed?” (Sir 1:6).
Today, we move from Genesis to the Book of Sirach (we’ll revisit Genesis later this year.) To help us make the transition, the lectionary focuses on the wisdom of God.
How is this related, you ask? Here in Sirach we read a beautiful ode to wisdom — God’s wisdom — which was present before time began. St. Augustine similarly begins his famous Confessions with some of the most beautiful lines ever written by any Christian writer: “Great are You, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Your power, and of Your wisdom there is no end.”
Sirach helps us to understand how marvelous God’s wisdom is by directing us to meditate on the beauty of creation: “The sand of the seashore, the drops of rain, the days of eternity: who can number these? Heaven’s height, earth’s breadth, the depths of the abyss: who can explore these?”
‘You move us to delight in praising You’
In Genesis, we marveled at God creating the world from nothing. Then, we saw how God restored his creation after the flood. Hebrews helped us to understand how God redeemed this creation with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. And Sirach helps us appreciate how all of this — the making of the world, its cleansing and refashioning and its redemption — is brought about by God’s mighty wisdom.
That’s what allows St. Augustine to sing: “And man, being a part of Your creation, desires to praise You — man, who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness that You resist the proud — yet man, this part of Your creation, desires to praise You. You move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Let us pray,
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that, always pondering spiritual things, we may carry out in both word and deed that which is pleasing to you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
