foolishness

Aug 20th

Today’s first reading contains a line that I should use as my life’s maxim. “Forsake foolishness (immaturity) and live, and walk in the way of insight (understanding).” And that is the line running through the readings of today.

So, what is foolishness? To answer that it is important to ask another question, that is, what is insight or understanding? Insight or understanding is the comprehension of God’s will for us. Thus, foolishness is acting against that comprehension. Funnily, following the wisdom of God would be associated to following foolishness to most other people. This is because we as human beings cannot fathom the depths of the wisdom of God.

When we are told to forsake foolishness, we are in fact told to follow God’s way. In Buddhism, the Way is the Middle Path. In Taoism, the Way is the Tao. In Christianity, The Way, along with the Truth and the Life is Jesus. And this triple threat actually completes another of Christ’s teachings, the teaching on “Seek and you shall find”.

You see, many people doing are searching for something and how do we know that? Because many people would describe themselves as lost. Many people live their lives one day at a time with no sense of direction. They can’t see where they are heading and they think that this is because they just do not know the way. It now comes to be our task to go up to the lost sheep and reintroduce them to the way again. That is so much easier said than done.

But why, if there are so many people lost and looking for direction would they not go towards The Way. I think Jack Nicholson said it best when he said, “The Truth? You can’t handle The Truth!” Yes, many of us are looking for The Way but we just can’t handle The Truth. This is because The Truth is also our truth. When we look at Jesus, we cannot but see ourselves. We feel inadequate next to him and feel like we aren’t worthy. So what are we to do now? We want to know the way but we are afraid of the truth.

For this, we need to realise that there is a third aspect to Jesus. He is The Life. When Adam and Eve first sinned against God, they were forbidden from eating from the Tree of Life again. When Jesus came down, He was hung on an ordinary tree that became the Tree of Life for on the tree hung Life itself. And the new Tree of Life re-establishes the situation of the Garden.

So in other words, God has already forgiven us. He’s given us back the Tree of Life and so now all we have to do is to eat from it. And now we come to the Gospel. The people in the reading just could not accept that Jesus would give his flesh for us to eat but we have to eat it because He is The Life. If we do not eat of Him then we have no life within us.

Now, what does it mean to eat of His flesh? Whenever we eat, we process our food in different parts of our body, and when everything is finally digested the nutrients we obtain flows to the parts of our body that need them the most. We need to put our food through a process of digestion because the morsels are too big to enter our bloodstream. Now, when we eat of Jesus do we do likewise? We need to spend time to break down Jesus so that we can understand Him better. He is beyond the understanding of our finite minds because He is infinite. After breaking Him down and understanding Him, we need to put Jesus into the parts of our lives that need Him most. And the parts that need Jesus the most are the parts of us that are dead and need The Life.

Now that The Life is fully working within us, The Truth becomes easier to bear and The Way becomes much clearer. We are no longer lost because Jesus our Good Shepherd has found us. And we have found Him. We now know the Way and thus should follow The Way. And when we choose not to follow The Way then that is foolishness indeed.