From Season to Season

  Stay awake and be ready! For you do not know on what day your Lord will come. —Entrance Antiphon for the 32 nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, based on Matthew 24:42a, 44   Like many early Christians, including Saint Paul and the people of Thessaloniki , the Evangelist Matthew and his community would probably have struggled to reconcile their hope for the return of Jesus with their disappointment that it hadn’t happened yet. For most of us, the eschaton —the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgment—is an uncomfortable topic that might even smack of religious fanaticism. After all, how often have we dismissed religious leaders and self-proclaimed “prophets” who have declared that Jesus will return at a specific time and place? And yet, each Sunday, as we profess in the Nicene Creed, we declare our belief that “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church develops this fundamental Christian doctrine when it s...

In the opening verse of Sirach , we read, “All wisdom is from the Lord / and remains with him forever.” Praise of Wisdom is echoed in other places in the Old Testament, including Proverbs , Wisdom , Baruch , and Ecclesiastes and certain psalms. Continuing its praise of Wisdom, however, Sirach continues: “Before all other things wisdom was created; and prudent understanding from eternity. The root of wisdom—to whom has it been revealed? Her subtleties—who knows them? There is but one, wise and truly awesome, seated upon his throne—the Lord. It is he who created her, saw her and measured her. Poured her forth upon all his works, upon every living thing, according to his bounty, lavished her upon those who love him” (1:4-10). The passage from the Gospel of Matthew that we heard on the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Matthew 11:25-30), comes in a section in which Jesus can be said to take on the persona of the Woman Wisdom, “speaking with the words and images attributed to he...