Human vs. Divine Wisdom (23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time)

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The  OT reading for this Sunday is focused on the theme of divine wisdom versus human wisdom. Here, scripture proclaims that human wisdom is “worthless.” This is because our understanding tends to be marred by our frailty and sinfulness. We think ourselves wiser than we really are, and we allow sinful dispositions to cloud our judgment. We see this everyday when we look at how our society holds values that are the inverse of Christian values, but also see it as “self-evident” that their values are the true ones.

By contrast, divine wisdom has none of the weakness of human wisdom, because it proceeds from an all-knowing Source. God’s wisdom is revealed through His revelation, and through it, He communicates to us truths that we might otherwise get wrong or not know about. This is why Wisdom states, “We can hardly guess at what is on earth, and what is at hand we find with labor” (v. 16). Likewise, the prophet Isaiah states:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Because divine wisdom is counter to human wisdom, the world tends to not see it as wisdom. St. Paul tells us this when he writes:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (1 Corinthians 1:18-20)

However, to someone who is being guided by the Holy Spirit and conformed to divine precepts, we see God’s wisdom for what it really is. To be a Christian is to have “the mind of Christ,” as St. Paul puts it:

The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:14-16)

J. Luis Dizon