Thursday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time
Wisdom7:22b – 8:1; Luke 17: 20-25
Deacon Larry Brockman
Have you ever had the experience of looking for something and not being able to find it? Frustrating, isn’t it. Especially when you think you know where to look for it. But that, you see, might be the problem. We all have expectations of where to find a missing article, and those expectations can cloud our minds; they blind us to the reality and so, we can miss what we are looking for even when it is right under our noses.
The Pharisees were like that. They were looking for the Kingdom of God in earthly terms. They were hoping and waiting for the return of the mighty earthly Kingdom like the one that Kings David and Solomon presided over. They were not looking for the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached, a heavenly Kingdom, one where the joy and happiness are inside the person, rather than a result of worldly affluence. What kind of a Kingdom of God are you looking for?
Now in the first reading we have a very poetic and beautiful description that tells us what it is like when a person is filled with the Wisdom of God. The wisdom of God, we are told, “…Is a spirit: intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, certain, never harmful, loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly, firm, secure, tranquil, all-powerful, all-seeing, and pervading all spirits, though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle.” Wow!
Can you just close your mind for a moment to everything else, and just think about what it would be like if you were filled with such a spirit? Just imagine being filled with a spirit possessing all those qualities at the same time. Because that is what it would be like to be filled with the Spirit of God. And if we were so filled with such a spirit, we would have arrived; we would have somehow achieved a harmony between ourselves and God. So we would be experiencing the Kingdom of God.
But I suspect that this is not what most of are looking for, and it is not what we are thinking about when we think of the Kingdom of God, because we are looking elsewhere. Most of us are looking for our dream of eternal happiness, a dream which is unfortunately clouded by some ignorance, limited sight, harmful inclinations, and self-centeredness. To achieve the wisdom of God, we would have to defer to the Spirit of God, by purging ourselves of all that interferes with such perfection, and this is very difficult to do. And so, we can miss the real Kingdom of God.
In the Gospel, Jesus talks about the Son of man “in his day”. He says, “Just like the Lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of man be in His day.” So, how can you look for such a thing? The answer is that you can’t look for it in a conventional sense. You can’t say to yourself: “I want to see Lightning right now”, and go outside and scan the sky looking for it and expect to find it; rather, you have to be open to it all the time in a predisposition toward the spontaneous without being in control of exactly when and where you see it. It’s making a conscious effort to always be on the lookout for the right thing and the right thing is to follow the urgings of that right spirit whose qualities we just listed a moment ago.
When you do that, let go and just be open to the urgings of the spirit then, you will find the Kingdom of God.