Liturgical Colour : Green

Wisdom comes from God, and God alone. We mankind may try our best many times to try to understand the Lord, but most likely we will not even get half of it right. Our feeble human understanding and knowledge cannot hope to comprehend the mind of the Lord, who knows everything and has His plans for everything.

It is human pride that often stands in the way of receiving true wisdom and knowledge from the Lord, and it is human arrogance that often prevent us from understanding God’s true meaning and purpose for all of us. The result being that we misinterpreted the true desire of the Lord, and in our state of misinterpretation and confusion, we fail to do the things that the Lord truly wants from each one of us.

In our pride and arrogance in our human knowledge and intellect too, we have missed the point in serving the Lord, instead of serving Him with love and making Him more available to all, we tend to limit Him and prevent Him from being known by all, through our own lacking interpretation of His will and His laws. We assumed wisdom when we actually have none, because we trust in ourselves rather than in God.

Jesus criticised one of those assumed wisdom, as He brought the people to a clearer understanding of God’s will and desire for us. That was precisely just like king Solomon sharing his wisdom with the Queen of Sheba who praised him for his great wisdom, and in Jesus, there is something greater than Solomon, for while the wisdom of Solomon came from God, Jesus is Himself God.

Jesus revealed that while the Jews followed a rather strict dietary law, today called the kosher law, and something similar was mimicked by the Muslims who followed a different yet similar set of dietary law, with its set of allowed and prohibited food items, that these laws are truly obsolete and unnecessary. And following these laws do not make anybody righteous or condemned in any way.

By common sense it is indeed true, even in terms of our own simple intelligence. Sometimes, there is more truth in simple thoughts rather than complex ones. Food that goes into our mouth indeed goes through our body and then is passed out as waster through the other end, and the same happens to whatever we drink and consume into our bodies.

In no way indeed, for us all who knows about the science of how our body works, that these food affect anything other than our body functions and our digestive system in particular. Whether the food is allowed or forbidden has no bearing on our faith or our worthiness before God, and it is indeed foolish to think that eating good and allowed food makes us righteous and eating prohibited food makes us sinful and damned.

Jesus rightly pointed out that it is what comes out of us that bear our sins rather than what we take into ourselves. Food are non-living objects, and they do not have intelligence or wisdom to think or do something. Yet, compared to things that come out of us, namely actions, words, deeds, and others, what came out of us all these while are the products of our intelligent, sentient, and living wisdom.

Yes, we have wisdom in us, but an incomplete one. How did we get it? Remember the Book of Genesis? Our ancestors, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and ever since, the knowledge of things good and evil is within us. We know what is good and what is evil, and we share that knowledge to our children, and pass it on throughout the generations.

It is the actions, words, and deeds that come out of us that either justify us or condemn us. When we do things in accordance with God’s will, that is doing things considered good, then we are justified, but if we do things not in accordance with the will of God, then we are condemned. It is as simple as that, and yet many refused to believe in the true wisdom of Christ, who as God is the source of all wisdom and revelations.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, how about us? Will we believe in Jesus, and trust in His wisdom? Or do we rather prefer to trust in our own strength and wisdom? In our own intelligence and knowledge of the things around us? Do we prefer to trust in a source that is always and completely right? Or do we prefer to trust in a source that is unreliable and changing as much as it suits us?

These are the questions that we should ask ourselves, and indeed we should no longer ask question or doubt the wisdom of our Lord. Let us entrust ourselves to the Lord and let Him decide what He wants to do with each one of us, trusting ourselves to His most divine and wonderful wisdom. Amen.