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July 5, 2009
Ezekial 2:2-5; Psalms 123:1-4; II Corinthians 12:7-10;
Mark 6:1-6
“With the coming of the Sabbath He began teaching in the
Synagogue and most of them were astonished when they
heard Him” (Mark
6:2).
An anonymous writer has given us this
story of an American tourist's visit to the 19th century
Polish Rabbi,
Hofetz Chaim, who was looked upon by the people of
his time as an extremely wise and saintly person. On
his
arrival at the rabbi's residence, the tourist was astonished
to discover that it consisted only of one simple room.
The walls were lined with books; a table and a chair
were the only furnishings. "But rabbi," the
tourist asked, "Where is your furniture?" to
which the rabbi replied, "where is yours?" "Where
is mine?" said the puzzled tourist, "I'm only
a visitor here, just passing through." "So
am I," answered the Rabbi, "so am I."
In
today's Gospel Lesson, Jesus returns to Nazareth, His
childhood home, for the first time since His public
ministry began. His reputation has preceded Him. His
fellow villagers have heard accounts of His revolutionary
teachings and his awesome miracles. Now, here He is,
in the flesh, back home again, teaching in the local
synagogue. And the villagers were "astonished when
they heard Him. Where did the Man get all this? What
is this wisdom that has been granted Him, and those miracles
that are worked through Him?" (Mk. 6:2)
The Holy
men and women of the Far East have always made wisdom
the supreme human virtue. The custom of disciplined
solitude in the pursuit of wisdom profoundly affected
Oriental religious thinking. For most of us in today's
Western Society, there is little or no time in our
busy schedules for practicing the pursuit of wisdom through
serious, uninterrupted, quiet reflection about who
we
are and what we ought to do with our lives.
We are crippled
in our search for wisdom by a society which describes
success as the ability to acquire knowledge
and to skillfully apply that knowledge for personal
gain. We have reached the point of progress wherein our
capacity
to gather, store and interpret data is almost limitless.
This knowledge-gathering explosion has brought us some
good things. However we need to be reminded that it
has brought us problems and complications which humans
have
never faced before. Our burgeoning storehouse of knowledge,
loaded with new facts, new statistics, new data of
all kinds, tends to obscure the reality that we humans
are
newcomers in a universe which is billions of years
old. Our own planet has been developing for millions
of years,
yet recent technological progress has accelerated the
pace of history so much so that we are unable to interpret
and comprehend the significance of events which impinge
our daily lives. In other words, as a society and as
individuals, both, we are acquiring knowledge at breakneck
speed without slowing down, ever, to reflect on how
to handle it, what to do with it, how to use it to uplift
the human spirit and to better human relationships.
As
our educational systems continue to advance, ever-widening
the gap between generations, the need for deeper devotion
to the pursuit of wisdom becomes more intense.
In our
fast-paced, fact-gathering, knowledge-acquiring culture,
pursuing true wisdom is like swimming upstream.
Yet, it is in the midst of the onslaught of noise and
mind pollution that the pursuit of wisdom must take
place.
The human mind is so fantastic that
it can develop a technology for almost any task. How
to put a man on the
moon? Just ask the human mind. How to blow up the world
with a few missiles? Just ask the human mind. How to
create a global "Information Highway?" Just
ask the human mind. The knowledge is there for us to
draw upon in order to answer all such questions. But
what of the question, "How to live?" The question
cannot be answered on the mind level alone. The answer
requires a wisdom which proceeds from the combined resources
of heart and soul, body and mind.
The Source of all Wisdom
is, of course, God Himself. To discover the meaning of
life, the Bible tells us,
we must be in touch with God, we must love the Lord our
God with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind.
And we pursue Wisdom only to the extent that we are in
touch with God on this level of our whole being, our
whole personhood. In other words...
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