Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 18, 2024

I believe many of you know, because I've spoken about this at times, that I have been helped greatly by the sciences of psychology and psychiatry. And we recognize that these disciplines are addressing the human person in our complexity.

And we are the most complex creatures of God. And I bring this up because our readings today mention wisdom. And I am thinking about one school of thought in psychology and it's okay to have many, many different schools of thought. Again, it's because of our complexity. There are so many ways that we can approach the human person. And I'm thinking about stages of normal human development. And I'm going to the end. I'm going to the last couple of stages. There are maybe eight or nine, or it looks like some people have added more. But anyway, according to my references, the second to the last stage of personality development is called generativity. And we hear that and we think, "Oh, yes, having children." That is obviously one way to be generative. But for those of us who do not have children, we can also exercise generativity by being creative, for instance, in the arts in one way or another. And generativity leads to what is considered the final stage.

And that's called wisdom. And it is interesting that our Scriptures today in the first and second readings mention wisdom. You may also have noted in the fourth verse of our opening hymn ["Here at This Table"] that there is a reference to wisdom. It's not as if through the course of our life we were totally without wisdom. But the final stage of our earthly life is for the sake of summing up, recognizing the wisdom we have acquired. It might have been at many different turning points during the course of our life. And it may have been through mistakes we'd made. In any event, wisdom is saying to us, "Yes, you can look upon your life as worthy." You can recognize that you have lived on behalf of very, very important values.

And so we have in Proverbs the invitation to the banquet offered by wisdom. There's also a banquet offered by folly, by foolishness. And we didn't read that, but you can read it on your own. Just go to the ninth chapter of the book of Proverbs. And then St. Paul in Ephesians goes on to address wisdom as well. And he specifically indicates the problem of getting drunk on wine, as he says. Apparently such behavior did upset many of the earliest Christian communities. So we take all this into account and then we return to Jesus' instruction on himself as the bread of life. And he is very, very earthy in this particular passage. He is saying, "You must eat my flesh and drink my blood." And people just don't know what to do with this. They say that's impossible. At the same time, they're probably thinking it's disgusting as well to say that. And all the more they're saying, "Drink my blood, that's impossible." The dietary regulations totally forbid the ingestion of blood. It may seem as if there is no wisdom to be gained here. You and I are thankful that we have been introduced and exposed to this incredible gift of the Son of God who became one of us. He has loved us completely, all the way to death, followed by resurrection. And we are united with his love in a most intimate way, the most intimate way that we can imagine through our partaking of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. So we give thanks for the gift of wisdom. And we know that next weekend, the last of our five weekends in which we have detoured from Mark into the Gospel of John, we look forward to hearing the profession of faith of Saint Peter, when people go away, but Peter says, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of everlasting life."