Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
The lectionary readings today have a common thread. Each one bears witness to the reality of the Spirit of God in our midst. Paul, in his first letter to the church at Corinth, admonishes the community to be sensitive to this Spirit. The Spirit is actively present among them, “scrutinizing” all things and rendering the truth of God before their eyes.
No one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God.
We have not received the spirit of the world
but the Spirit who is from God,
so that we may understand the things freely given us by God.
And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom,
but with words taught by the Spirit,
describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms.
Here, St. Paul is broadly doing what some would call a “religious epistemology” (yes, pardon my academic jargon). Simply put, he is talking to the Church about how it is that we gain the “knowledge of God”. This is a fairly weighty question, and one that has forever occupied the minds of philosophers. Over the millennia, philosophers and theologians have answered this question in in radically different ways.
So, what is Paul’s answer to this eternal question? The Spirit.
The Church comes to the “knowledge of God” through her relationship with His Spirit. Through the work of the Spirit, the Church encounters “truth” in a profoundly unique way. For the Church, our knowledge of God is not a complex philosophical abstraction, but an intimate encounter with the very heart of God.
In Paul’s words, our relationship to the knowledge of God makes the Church is a peculiar community. Those outside her bounds often deem her wisdom foolishness (not to point out the obvious, as this should not come as a surprise to any of us). According to Paul, while our relationship to the Spirit does surely set the Church in distinction from the “world”, it does not set us at odds. In fact, quite the opposite: the Church’s “knowing God” is precisely what places her in a unique position of rightly “knowing the world”. She possesses the vision as to how and why the world was created, the divine love which sustains it, and most importantly, the Spiritual reality that imbues our every moment. Thus, Paul states with confidence:
The one who is spiritual… can judge everything
but is not subject to judgment by anyone.
For “who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.
- Tyler Delong