Homily on Wisdom

Matthew 11.16-19
Jesus said: ‘But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another,
“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.”
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.’

These brief four verses come in the midst of a chapter of woes, condemnations and apocalyptic images, which concludes with thar famous, and favourite of many passage: "Come yo me all ye that are weary; I shall give you rest."

Here, in the midst of all that we have a few verses where Jesus condemns "this generation" for being, basically, too hard to please: John was too much the ascetic, Jesus too much the party-goer. "Yet" he says, "Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."

What is wisdom?

Wisdom is the eschewing of easy, glib, trite answers. Wisdom is the searching for something deeper and the conviction that just such a depth will be found.

In Christ we are shown that through the perfectly lived life of the Human One the depths of the Godhead shine out. Depth is revealed in and through the very materiality of Jesus Christ.

And this was the pharisees mistake, as Jesus tells us in the passage: they looked only at the surface and saw Jesus as one who ate and drank with sinners, and John as one who hardly ate or drank at all. And, on the shallow basis of these superficial observations they judged and condemned them.

Wisdom, however, stand above such judgement. For, as Christ say, she is vindicated by her deeds.

Wisdom then is to know that the value of things lies beyond how they merely appear. This is what Christ shouw us in himself, as St Paul says "the wisdom of the Cross is folly to the world." The Cross seems to be about death and failure. Yet, we know its real meaning to be life and triumph.

So when Christ says wisdom is vindicated by her deeds (or children, in some translations children) we are not perhaps slipping into works-righteousness, (whereby we prove wisdom by doing stuff) but being told that the fruits of wisdom are always good, despite (at first reading at least) appearing as foolishness.

The pharisees, "this generation" as Christ here condemns them, never saw past this foolishness-level to the depths of wisdom in John the Baptist and, most supremely, in Jesus Christ.

So let it be our prayer that we may receive the grace to see beyond the foolishness, to see beyond superficiality, and to find in our own lives, and in others, the depths of meaning, the wisdom, and to recognise its fruits.
Amen.