I Lent Tuesday – Proverbs 1: 20-33
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Wisdom sings aloud in passages, and in the broad places speaks boldly. 21 And she makes proclamation on the top of the walls, and sits by the gates of princes; and at the gates of the city boldly says, 22 So long as the simple cleave to justice, they shall not be ashamed: but the foolish being lovers of haughtiness, having become ungodly have hated knowledge, and are become subject to reproofs. 23 Behold, I will bring forth to you the utterance of my breath, and I will instruct you in my speech. 24 Since I called, and ye did not hearken; and I spoke at length, and ye gave no heed; 25 but ye set at nought my counsels, and disregarded my reproofs; 26 therefore I also will laugh at your destruction; and I will rejoice against you when ruin comes upon you: 27 yea when dismay suddenly comes upon you, and your overthrow shall arrive like a tempest; and when tribulation and distress shall come upon you, or when ruin shall come upon you. 28 For it shall be that when ye call upon me, I will not hearken to you: wicked men shall seek me, but shall not find me. 29 For they hated wisdom, and did not choose the word of the Lord: 30 neither would they attend to my counsels, but derided my reproofs. 31 Therefore shall they eat the fruits of their own way, and shall be filled with their own ungodliness. 32 For because they wronged the simple, they shall be slain; and an inquisition shall ruin the ungodly. 33 But he that hearkens to me shall dwell in hope, and he shall be quiet, without fear from all evil.
In this passage Wisdom personified reproaches the wicked who would not heed her counsels, and she foretells their downfall. In the Old Testament, in which many mysteries are only partially revealed, the Wisdom of God is personified as a woman, a standard literary convention one encounters also in the wisdom literature of pagan antiquity. But in the New Testament we learn that the Wisdom of the true God is none other than the Word of God Incarnate, Our Lord Jesus Christ. St. Paul says it plainly: “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” ( I Corinthians 1: 24). Therefore, when we read the passages in Proverbs and the other Wisdom Books of the Old Testament in which Wisdom personified speaks, we know that it is actually Christ Who is speaking to us.
It is Christ, then, Who here foretells the sudden and unexpected destruction of the wicked, who in their haughtiness and trust in themselves invite their ruin: “…yea when dismay suddenly comes upon you, and your overthrow shall arrive like a tempest…”. Everything is going well for them, or so they think, and then in a moment they lose everything. St. John Chrysostom says that this passage should call to mind the Flood of Noah, when the wicked were living it up and imagining that nothing could go wrong, right up to the end.
It is indeed a rare man who is not led astray by prosperity. This is why the Lord mercifully allows His chosen ones to endure troubles in this life, in order to bring us to our senses and encourage our repentance in this life, so that we do not go unprepared into the next life, so that death does not come as an unexpected calamity, but as a longed-for release from present troubles into the true life, the life of the age to come.
The final verse of today’s passage gives us the key to living with our troubles as a Christian should. If we listen to the Lord, we will dwell in hope. Hope is the Theological Virtue that corresponds to the Cardinal Virtue of fortitude (courage). We will probably have troubles to the end of our lives, but if we live courageously, with absolute trust in God – with hope – the troubles do not signify to us that God has rejected us, but rather the opposite: that He accepts our repentance. The verse does not mean that for the faithful there will be no evils, but that the grace of hope gives us freedom from the fear of evils, and that we will live in quietness, that is, with peace of heart, which is the beginning of heaven on earth, a pledge of the joy that is to come. As St. Isaac the Syrian says, “Stillness is the mystery of the age to come.”
O Lord Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God, give us the courage to do Thy will in the midst of troubles, the grace to hope in Thee always, and Thy peace in our hearts, which the world cannot give and the world cannot take away. Amen.