By: By Shawn Reeves

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Oct. 14

Wisdom 7:7-11; Psalm 90:12-13,14-15,16-17; Hebrews 4:12-13; Mark 10:17-30

Like a herald who enters a city and pronounces the imminent entry of the king, we have come into that sequence of readings that prepares the announcement of Christ’s triumphant kingship over all. Beginning with last week’s readings, we are traveling through St. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews for the rest of the liturgical year, reflecting on the mystery of Christ’s incarnation into our humanity and culminating with a reading from Revelation on the Solemnity of Christ the King.

Last week, we meditated upon the mystery that the eternal Son of the Father “‘for a little while’ was made ‘lower than the angels'” (Hebrews 2:9). This is not to say that he abandoned his divinity or had it stripped away from him. Rather, for the time He “dwelt among us,” He truly manifested His divine glory through a genuine humanity, exercising His divine presence through all the limitations and “lowliness” of the human body, mind, soul, and heart that He embraced as His own.

As St. Gregory the Great wrote, “We say that the Word was made flesh not by losing what He was, but by taking what He was not. For in the mystery of His incarnation the Only-begotten of the Father increased what was ours, but diminished not what was His.”

WHAT HAS “INCREASED”?
This week, we continue to reflect on what was “increased” by the glory of this incarnation. Though often taken merely as a testimony about the gift of God speaking to us through the Scriptures, this week’s passage from the Letter to the Hebrews is also a bridge between those passages that urge fidelity to God’s covenant in anticipation for entering into God’s rest (Hebrews 4:1-11) and the beginning of the discourse on Jesus as the eternal high priest who provides this rest (Hebrews 4:13-5:10), which we will hear over the next two weeks.

Resting in between is this celebration on the “living and effective” Word of God, which is found “penetrating between soul and spirit, joints and marrow” and is also “able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.” It is particularly fixed upon the person of Jesus as much as on the Scriptures, for (as the Second Vatican Council declared) our Lord Jesus is “the sum total of revelation,” the “mystery of the Word made flesh.”

The Scriptures “penetrate” our lives as the Word of God because they flow from the eternal Word of God, who “penetrated” our humanity in the incarnation and revealed to us the wisdom of God in an authentically human way. The Scriptures are the “living” Word of God precisely because they continue and extend Jesus, the Word of the Father, penetrating us and supplying His wisdom to the reflections and thoughts of the heart.

“WHAT MUST I DO?”
While Solomon confesses “I pleaded, and the spirit of wisdom came to me” in our first reading, Jesus has no need to plead, but is instead the source of this spirit of wisdom, graciously sharing it with us. Like Solomon, Jesus “preferred [wisdom] to scepter and throne,” resisting Satan’s temptation that Jesus, true King of all, seek his own gain.

And so it is that in the Gospel reading Jesus dispenses this wisdom upon the rich, young man, delivering to him (and to us) the “living and effective” Word of God. It was a “sharp” message that “penetrated” his soul and cut to the “thoughts of the heart”: our hearts are to prefer God’s wisdom above all things.

“Beyond health and comeliness I loved her” is to be the hymn of our souls. The young man’s question is the question of us all: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus reveals to this man that God’s wisdom, expressed in the Word of His commandments, is our true source of happiness and unyielding splendor, our central “treasure.”

In Jesus Christ the spirit of wisdom has come to us, the Word of God is living among us, and eternal life in His kingdom is revealed.

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Shawn Reeves has served as the director of religious education at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center in Champaign since 2001. He and his family are members of St. Malachy’s Parish in Rantoul.