Getting Wiser

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle, and on Page 7 is posted the weekly homily, and the one for 12/30/25 is written out below, and is entitled Gain Wisdom: “Wise teachers of old counseled the young to seek wisdom.”

My response: It is wise of old to advise the young to seek wisdom for knowing how to act and choose benefits all, including the self directly. If the young listen to their elders, while increasingly as they mature and think critically, their journey towards wisdom can be hastened and deepened.

Homily: “Jesus, as a human being, received His wisdom from God. He listened and learned by drawing close to God. We would do well to do likewise.”

My response: The skeptic may scoff and suggest that it is contradictory, how Jesus, even as a divine but human youth, who is also almighty God, all-knowing and all-wise intrinsically, innately and automatically by virtue of being the supreme deity, the son of the supreme deity, would need to gain wisdom when he is naturally and supernaturally wisdom personified.

My answer: That is a cute gotcha question, but I don’t care if Jesus is simultaneously all-wise intellectually while as a human youth, was growing and gaining in wisdom by listening to His Father from heaven.

There are many contradictions to point out in the Bible, and we should reconcile them as best we can, and then accept that somehow they make sense, accepting the contradiction on faith as true, and letting it go at that. I cannot understand all mysteries no matter how hard I try, so I am just going to live with this inconsistency, while accepting that as Jesus grew up, He gained in wisdom, for Jesus as a human being was developing, and a mortal, trying to become wiser, would become wiser.

By becoming human in part, Jesus was able to understand what it was like to be human, and that insight lived and experienced, that subjective set of experiences and memories, gave him subjective insight into the lived human condition, from a vantage point that Jesus as an abstract intellectual of unlimited intelligence, having lived as a human being, would somehow better know the human outlook and story, a lesson gained no other way than by living and dying as a mortal, a short life of constant teachable moments. Wisdom is comprised of knowledge but also the wise person learns by feeling what it is that others are going through by living that oneself, and out of this increased understanding, love and empathy grow as one personally receives and learns to cope with painful inputs from living, by fighting evil, by encountering pain, loss and finally death itself.

Homily: “We would do well to do likewise. Gain more of God’s wisdom this week in church. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years. Luke 2:41-52.”

My response: If we become close to God, we too will grow in wisdom with the years.