07 February. Wednesday of Week 5
1st Reading: 1 Kings 10:1-10
The Queen of Sheba comes to admire Solomon, his wisdom, riches and good judgment
When the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon, (fame due to the name of the Lord), she came to test him with hard questions. She came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones; and when she came to Solomon, she told him all that was on her mind. Solomon answered all her questions; there was nothing hidden from the king that he could not explain to her. When the queen of Sheba had observed all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food of his table, the seating of his officials, and the attendance of his servants, their clothing, his valets, and his burnt offerings that he offered at the house of the Lord, there was no more spirit in her.
Then she said to the king, “The report was true that I heard in my own land of your accomplishments and of your wisdom, but I did not believe the reports until I came and my own eyes had seen it. Not even half had been told me; your wisdom and prosperity far surpass the report that I had heard. Happy are your wives! Happy are these your servants, who continually attend you and hear your wisdom! Blessed be the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and set you on the throne of Israel! Because the Lord loved Israel forever, he has made you king to execute justice and righteousness.” Then she gave the king one hundred twenty talents of gold, a great quantity of spices, and precious stones; never again did spices come in such quantity as that which the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.
Responsorial Psalm (from Ps 37)
Resp.: The mouths of the just utter wisdom.
Commit your life to the Lord,
trust in him and he will act,
so that your justice breaks forth like the light,
your cause like the noon-day sun. R./
The just person’s mouth utters wisdom
and his lips speak what is right;
the law of his God is in his heart,
his steps shall be saved from stumbling. R./
The salvation of the just comes from the Lord,
their stronghold in time of distress.
The Lord helps them and delivers them
and saves them: for their refuge is in him. R./
Gospel: Mark 7:14-23
(What makes us impure is not what enters from outside but the wickedness in the deep recesses of the heart.)
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
A life guided by wisdom
As we read about the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon our attention is first drawn to the splendour of the scene, but the biblical author clearly puts Solomon’s wisdom at the centre of all that glitter and wealth. A little earlier we heard the young king praying at Gibeon, for an understanding heart to judge the people. Because he valued wisdom over wealth or long life, God promised Solomon riches and glory beyond other kings. This wisdom remained at the heart of his good fortune, integrating and balancing all the external splendour.
Jesus’ words in the Gospel develop this traditional idea, that external things are part of God’s good creation and meant to enhance our life without taking up our whole attention. What we eat or drink is clean and healthy, gifts from the God of life. Evil comes from within the human heart, from which flow those crimes and offenses which corrode and corrupt the world about us. Without wisdom, wicked impulses can take hold of our heart. Jesus names some of these, like the reverse of the Decalogue: theft, fornication, murder, greed, arrogance, an obtuse spirit. The wisdom by which we direct our lives must be sincere open always to the breath of God’s Holy Spirit. Central to every good life lies this intuitive, secret wisdom, responding humbly to the movements of God’s spirit within us.
some thoughts for next Sunday:
1. One hundred and sixty years ago today there occurred the first of the eighteen apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to the fourteen-year old St Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes (1844-1879). In my childhood this French girl loomed large in our lives, as did her compatriot St Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), also known as St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, or The Little Flower.
Indeed the church of my childhood was in some ways a much more feminine place than the post-Vatican II church. The two French girls were quite recent figures. Bernadette was canonized by Pius XI only 16 years before I was born; Thérèse was canonized by the same pope eight years before that, and her elder sister Céline died in French convents as recently as 1959, sixty-two years after Thérèse.
I only recently discovered why statues of St Thérèse are found in all French churches: she is the secondary Patroness of France alongside St Jeanne d’Arc, with the Blessed Virgin herself as the primary patron of the country. France projects a gentle and femine image of the Church and we can be happy that France had such a big input into Vatican II. Behind Bernadette and Thérèse we can feel the great tradition of French spirituality (marked by many mystics and spiritual guides in the 16th and 17th centuries, notably the gentle Francis de Sales who spoke untiringly of the love of God), and in Thérèse’s case there is also the sterner stuff of Spanish Carmelite mysticism, as represented by her namesake Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross.
2. The Martins were a strange family, totally devoted to the task of becoming saints; all the girls gravitated to convent life. Today we may find it difficult to enter into that world of intense piety. Yet the impact of Thérèse’s writings go far beyond this family context. We read her Story of a Soul in a theology book club here in Tokyo some years back, and I brought along an Irishwoman steeped in Hinduism and remote from the Church. She instantly tuned in to Thérèse and said “this woman speaks from eternity.”
It’s amazing how Thérèse’s sayings resonate throughout the Catholic world. This is because of the unerring simplicity with which they point to the essential things, to treasures that we carry in our hearts.
One of these is love: “Then, overcome by joy, I cried, ‘Jesus, my love. At last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and then I will be all things.” More than any other saint Thérèse manifested the centrality and the sole sufficiency of love.
Another hidden treasure is joy: “La joie réside au plus intime de l’âme; on peut aussi bien la posséder dans une obscure prison que dans un palais.” “Joy dwells in the depth of the soul; one can possess it just as well in a dark prison as in a palace.”
A foundational virtue of Thérèse is humility: “I beseech you, O Jesus, to send me some humiliation every time that I seek to put myself above others.” St Bernadette, too, cherished humility: “It takes many humiliations to create humility.”
3. Our Lady of Lourdes gave Bernadette the command to “drink at the spring and bathe in it”. In school we were told that though all sorts of people with skin diseases and so on bathed in the waters, no one had ever contracted any illness from this.
The great novelist Emile Zola wrote:
“And the water was not exactly inviting. The Grotto Fathers were afraid that the output of the spring would be insufficient, so in those days they had the water in the pools changed just twice a day. As some hundred patients passed through the same water, you can imagine what a horrible slop it was at the end. There was everything in it: threads of blood, sloughed-off skin, scabs, bits of cloth and bandage, an abominable soup of ills… the miracle was that anyone emerged alive from this human slime.”
Some people would drink this filthy water as an expression of their faith.
Nowadays however: “The water in each bath is constantly being topped up and refreshed via a pump. It is now constantly circulated and purified by irradiation.”
When I went to Lourdes in 1973 I bathed without fear, whereas now I might be more cautious.
Lourdes shows a loving, healing God bending over the mass of human filth and misery, like Christ at the pool of Bethdaida, or like Christ in today’s Gospel compassionately touching the unclean leper. The power of prayer, and perhaps mysterious gifts of healing that we carry within ourselves and rarely use, are attractively proclaimed at Lourdes, and celebrated there by five million pilgrims every year.
4. Jesus was not afraid of human beings, of their neediness, their squalor, their messiness, and even their wickedness. He brought his healing touch to bear on all situations. I’ve known one or two people gifted for ministry and able to respond compassionately to every person coming to them. They have been able to do an astonishing amount of good.
There’s a wider context to Jesus’s healing work. It’s perhaps indicated by a famous textual variant in today’s gospel reading, where instead of “moved by compassion” we read “moved by anger” in some manuscripts. Jesus is angry to see us paralyzed and blocked by hostile and oppressive forces that stand in the way of the Kingdom of God. So many people are locked in spiritual and psychological paralysis — and the physical paralysis that he cures could be a result of that spiritual paralysis; so many people are impoverished and marginalized and treated as lepers in our society; so many people are possessed or obsessed by demons of various kinds — by prejudice, hatred, fear, greed, enslaving attachments and addictions. The healing activity of Jesus is a blow to liberate us from all these forms of bondage. His message, “Your sins are forgiven you. Rise up and walk,” is a word of deliverance. After Pentecost we see the Apostles and their community continuing this healing, liberating work, in Christ’s name, and it continues to this day, whenever we pray for the sick, whenever we speak a word of forgiveness, whenever we embrace those whom society has cast out.