TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – YEAR B
“Inquiring Minds Want to Know.” That phrase may have originated as a sales pitch for the tabloid, National Enquirer, but it expresses a profound truth.
Many of the great theologians of our religious tradition, among them Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Avila would have subscribed to that slogan. They adopted it, as a matter of fact, from philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. And the slogan, “Inquiring Minds Want to Know,” might very well serve as the slogan for this Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, because the readings introduce us to a number of inquiring minds who want to know.
In the Book of Wisdom, the wicked want to know what will happen to a just person if they persist in bullying him to death. “Let us see…” is their refrain. “Let us see if his words be true.” “Let us see if, according to his own words, God will take care of him.” Oddly, the passage today comes to a premature stop before the results of that experiment come to light. If the lectionary had not brought us up short, we would have continued into the passage that has become familiar to us from its use at Funeral Masses. “The souls of the just are in the hands of God…Though they seemed in the view of the foolish to be dead, they are at peace.” Perhaps the liturgy just wants to keep us in suspense until we read the Gospel today with Jesus’ stark prediction that he will be the victim of just such an experiment.
In his Letter, St. James anticipates the questions of his correspondents whose inquiring minds want to know where the conflicts among them come from. James is certainly not reticent about the answer to that question. He is straightforward, concise, and utterly on target. “Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet but do not possess. You kill and envy but you cannot obtain.” Inquiring minds want to know why prayers are not always answered. Again James is right on the mark. “You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.”
James would have been delighted to read a story that made the news this week. In Athens, Georgia, ten-year-old Ivey Zezulka’s foster parents, Paige and Daniel, surprised her with the news that they had finalized plans to adopt Ivey and her biological siblings Kai, 3, and Lita, 2, who had all spent years in foster care.
“She’s been living with a question mark of what will happen,” Ivey’s mom told ABC News. Paige and Daniel broke the news to Ivey on a framed note they had wrapped and placed inside a gift box that they gave her as the last of her birthday presents. James would have applauded Paige and Daniel’s gift as one that “calls down from above the wisdom that is pure, peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits.”
Likewise, Jesus would have loved to have set Ivey in the center of the Twelve in the house at Capernaum when their inquiring minds wanted to know who is the greatest among them. Those same disciples who were so eager to know which one of them was greatest had closed their inquiring minds a few hours earlier when Jesus announced how he was going to be handed over to men who would kill him. “They did not understand the saying and they were afraid to question him,” according to St. Mark. Oftentimes inquiring minds of disciples stop short of learning about the cross and how necessary it is for spiritual growth.
But what if inquiring minds do want to know about the prediction that Jesus will be killed and three days later will rise? What does that have to do with us? That question calls for a sort of scientific experiment that involves bringing bread and wine forward, placing them on the altar, and praying over them. Then we must break the bread and share the contents of the cup among ourselves. If instead of jealousy and selfish ambition, disorder and foul practices, we find ourselves overpowered by the wisdom from above, pure, gentle, peaceable and full of mercy and good fruits, then indeed the death and resurrection of the itinerant rabbi from Galilee have accomplished their work. They might even move us, like Paige and Danie,l to receive a child who looks to us for attention, guidance or affirmation or simply to do some deed of mercy for a disadvantaged person no matter what his or her age.