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I Lent Wednesday – Proverbs 2: 1-22
1 My son, if thou wilt receive the utterance of my commandment, and hide it with thee; 2 thine ear shall hearken to wisdom; thou shalt also apply thine heart to understanding, and shalt apply it to the instruction of thy son. 3 For it thou shalt call to wisdom, and utter thy voice for understanding; 4 and if thou shalt seek it as silver, and search diligently for it as for treasures; 5 then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. 6 For the Lord gives wisdom; and from his presence come knowledge and understanding, 7 and he treasures up salvation for them that walk uprightly: he will protect their way; 8 that he may guard the righteous ways: and he will preserve the way of them that fear him. 9 Then shalt thou understand righteousness, and judgement; and shalt direct all thy course aright. 10 For if wisdom shall come into thine understanding, and discernment shall seem pleasing to thy soul, 11 good counsel shall guard thee, and holy understanding shall keep thee; 12 to deliver thee from the evil way, and from the man that speaks nothing faithfully. 13 Alas for those who forsake right paths, to walk in ways of darkness; 14 who rejoice in evils, and delight in wicked perverseness; 15 whose paths are crooked, and their courses winding; 16 to remove thee far from the straight way, and to estrange thee from a righteous purpose. My son, let not evil counsel overtake thee, 17 of her who has forsaken the instruction of her youth, and forgotten the covenant of God. 18 For she has fixed her house near death, and guided her wheels near Hades with the giants. 19 None that go by her shall return, neither shall they take hold of right paths, for they are not apprehended of the years of life. 20 For had they gone in good paths, they would have found the paths of righteousness easy. 21 For the upright shall dwell in the earth, and the holy shall be left behind in it. 22 The paths of the ungodly shall perish out of the earth, and transgressors shall be driven away from it.
Yesterday we spoke of our need to have courage in the midst of troubles and thereby acquire the virtue of hope. Today the Lord encourages us, saying, “…he [the Lord] treasures up salvation for them that walk uprightly; he will protect their way; that he may guard the righteous ways: and he will preserve the way of them that fear him.” St. John Chrysostom comments, “When God is the guard, there will be no fear. Fear God and you will have no other fear: just as those who do not fear Him have fear at every point, they need to fear everything. It is therefore better to fear the master and not one’s fellow servants.”
Just as those who do not believe in God will believe just about anything else, no matter how ridiculous, so also those who do not fear God will fear everything else, no matter how harmless: for them life really is the predatory jungle of Darwinism, and everything and everyone is a potential enemy. For the Christian, the opposite is the case: Fearing God, he fears nothing else, and, far from imagining that everyone is an enemy, he regards even his actual enemies as his friends, for their hatred provides him with the secure path to salvation: forgiveness and non-condemnation. St. John Chrysostom remarks in another place that our enemies are not only our friends, but our best friends! They teach us what we really are; the pain they cause us is a knife that cuts out from our hearts the corruption of vanity and egotism.
Our fallen nature rebels against all this, of course. Grace-filled courage in the midst of troubles and persecution is just that, a grace, and we have to ask for it. If we really feared God, if we were always mindful of the hour of death and God’s righteous judgment, if we understood, even dimly, what Paradise is, and what hell is, if we regarded ourselves as men already dead to this world since our Baptism, we would have invincible courage like the martyrs. We would in fact become martyrs, that is, witnesses, to the Resurrection of Christ.
The Lord is waiting to give us this good gift. He desires to give the truly good things to those who ask Him, that is, the virtues, which will not perish at our death, which are in fact the only treasures acquired in this life that we will take with us to the grave. Let us today implore Him earnestly for that true fear of the Lord which drives out all other fears, courage in the midst of temptations, forgiveness of our enemies, and invincible hope in our salvation.