PRE-PRAYERING
We are invited to consider prayerfully in today’s liturgy for the apparently uncomfortable grace of following Jesus. The Master presents us with a new form of wisdom which does take some time to make our own. Humanly speaking we think we know what is best for the “good life.”  We pray for the humility to accept that we do find it hard to figure out the important things.

We can pray as well for the grace of governing and not merely in the political sense. Each of us has many forces and powers which need consult, temperance, gentleness and a strong sense of what is right. Governing is what parents do, teachers do, and anyone in authority does. We pray that God’s Holy Spirit can guide us and that we have the desire to govern as God does, with compassion.

REFLECTION
We hear a reflection by King Solomon who, in the verses before the ones we hear makes a humble petition for wisdom. He feels burdened by his role as leader of God’s people and having to build a temple which is to be a perfect reflection of heaven.

So what we hear is a thoughtful and a bit depressing poem on how difficult it all is to know the mind of God. The things of the body and earth are so timid and limited.

The last verse though is a proclamation of hope that God does send human beings help with a spirit of true wisdom which guides, comforts and inspires. Solomon has a bit of Jeremiah’s “poor me” spirit until that last verse. He desires to respond to God as did his ancestors Abraham and David.  It reminds me of the song that the king sings in the musical, The King and I; “Tis a puzzlement!” Are we left to our own devices? We humans have the desire to know it all, but our bodies, our humanity is like an encore which weighs the mind and spirit down, down, down. It is good to remember that Solomon is saying this as a prayer-complaint. God is not saying his reflection and words are true. In Scripture prayer-complaints are usually ended with a boast of hope and trust. They seem to form the framework for such a prayer of fidelity and child-like surrender.

The Gospel pictures Jesus, having left the banquet to which he had been invited and during which he spoke directly of a higher invitation and how some might excuse themselves from responding.

We hear some very direct and dramatic words which Jesus offers again as invitation. These words can seem to make Jesus too demanding and actually cruel in regard to family relationships and solidity. “Hating” father, mother; what does this mean? How are we to “hate” our own lives when Jesus came to love us and asks us to love our being loved by God?

The Gospel has too little imaginative pictures of the value of having the goods to get the job done. Then Jesus says that anyone wishing to learn more, that is becoming a student or disciple, must let go of everything in order to be a true follower. If one were to read these verses alone, Jesus would not seem attractive. We need some encouragement to let go of everything and begin to build and wage war to completion.  Jesus is offering a new kind of “wisdom” and at the end of this chapter Jesus does invite those who have ears to listen to its depth and import.

I was sitting on the shore of a quiet lake one early morning recently delighting in the silence and beauty.  Slowly, into my consciousness like a little bug at first, came the sound of a motorboat.  My silence was being invaded; my space was being desacramentalized. The boat kept coming towards my prayer-perch and eventually zoomed right past me.  As the noisey intrusion diminished and my temper did the same, the waves of the boat’s wake spanked the shore and I smiled.

Jesus was and is still a bit like that and we see it clearly in today’s Gospel. He came to disturb us with the noise of his wisdom. The waves remain beating against our resistant shores. We do not like our space, our comfort-spots to be rearranged. His Wisdom has practical implications and asks for the orientation of total following.

I often ask myself and the congregation of the parish with whom I celebrate the Eucharist, “What of all that Jesus says, do I not want to hear?” I have ears, but I have “shores” and a comfort-place which loves the familiar. “Hating family” seems like a tidal wave knocking us over and down. Who can figure it all out? We need the wisdom, not of Solomon, but that of the Spirit for which Solomon prays.

Jesus gets the attention of his listeners which is his normal way. He speaks to the very heart of parent/child relations which were the center of cultural life then. Jesus did not nibble at the edge of what was held as important and sacred. Honoring father and mother was a religious and secular centerpiece. Jesus in a sense says, “Well, now that I have your attention…” Simply, Jesus is offering a wisdom which places fidelity to the reality of God as the highest principle or condition of true life, the “good life.” Loving our parent, siblings, everybody will flow from knowing and living in the prime relationship with God from Whom all love flows. What Jesus is asking us to let go of is making anything, any person, any philosophy into a god. Parents and children, siblings and friends should lead each other to the experience that God alone completes us.

If we wish to be a disciple, and that is a question worth pondering on whatever shore you might find yourself, then you are invited to a  life of being disturbed by the motorboat of Jesus and the waves of his teachings. I was clinging to silence and beauty and my space and as many times before, Jesus zoomed right into it all and left me smiling with how many little gods he has washed right out of my hands and heart. There are still more and every time I pray I begin hearing his far-off buzzing. Is it love to leave me alone or is love the blessed-bugging of his constant wave-making?