22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
ECCLESIASTICUS 3:19-21, 30-31
My son, conduct your affairs with humility,
and you will be loved more than a generous man.
Humble yourself in great human affairs,
and you will attain the favor of God;
for great is the mercy of God,
and He reveals His secrets to the humble.
Do not hasten to heal the wound of the cynic,
for it has no cure, it is the sprout of a bad plant.
The wise man appreciates the sayings of the wise,
the ear attentive to wisdom will rejoice.
The Book of Ecclesiasticus is usually called “The Book of Sirach” today, because it is the work of Jesus, son of Sirach; the book itself says so at the end. It is probably a “family of sages.” The last of the saga, Jesus, puts in writing in Greek the wisdom received from previous generations. It was such a widely read book in the early Church that it received the name “Ecclesiasticus.” It was very likely written between 190 and 130 BC, in Egypt.
This is a typical “Wisdom Book,” a compilation of school writings, thoughts that reveal the wisdom accumulated through reflection and experience.
Today’s reading is a typical example. Three “Wisdom counsels,” derived from Scripture as an application to a pious life.
• The first connects well with the Gospel and presents the traditional distrust of the proud.
• The second is human wisdom, the fruit of long accumulated experience: the “bad people,” irremediable, with whom one should not waste effort because it is in vain. Wisdom that is doubtfully connectable with Jesus, although His relationships with Pharisees and scribes could have much to do with this type of sayings.
• The third is the usual appeal to be wise, with the wisdom that means attending to the Word of God and following it.
HEBREWS 12:18-19, 22-24a
You have not come to a tangible mountain, to a blazing fire, to thick clouds, to the storm, to the sound of the trumpet; you have not heard that voice which, when the people heard it, they asked that it would not speak to them anymore.
But you have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the assembly of countless angels, to the congregation of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, to God, the judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous who have reached their destiny, and to the mediator of the new covenant, Jesus.
We are finishing the reading of this letter, these are the final exhortations. Here the condition of Christians is emphasized, equating it to the spectacular manifestation of the Law at Sinai.
The rich set of symbolic expressions with which the condition of the Christian is dressed culminates in its peak: Jesus is the new and definitive revelation, the only mediator. A writing so Jewish as this letter, which has used all the symbolism of the Old Testament to apply it to Jesus, has to culminate with this confession: all previous mediations pale before the definitive Mediator.
It is interesting, however, to see how much difficulty those communities coming from Judaism had to detach themselves from the old molds. Their way of understanding and explaining Jesus seems very strange to us, so that we hardly find validity in most of their symbols and expressions.
José Enrique Galarreta