Tuesday in the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time, August 30, 2022

1 Corinthians 2, 10-16

Brothers and sisters: The Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God. Among men, who knows what pertains to the man except his spirit that is within? Similarly, 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. Now the natural man does not accept what pertains to the Spirit of God, for to him it is foolishness, and he cannot understand it, because it is judged spiritually. The one who is spiritual, however, 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.

St. Peter speaks of St. Paul’s Letters “in which are certain things hard to be understood” (2 Peter 3, 16).  Perhaps Peter himself scratched his head as he glanced over them.  Three principal difficulties hinder our understanding Paul’s letters:  Paul sometimes addresses questions in letters from original readership, and we may not be aware of this (see Romans 1); Paul is creating the theological language of our Faith, adapting older terms and using them in unfamiliar ways; he frequently writes while he travels and sometimes loses his train of thought.  In sum, he is trying to capture the truth about heavenly realities and make them plain in an earthly world.

His Letters often deal with very practical matters, such as whether men and women ought to marry or whether a convert should be circumcised.  At times, though, he seems rapt up in visions and his words seem strange to us.  In the section of his First Letter to the Corinthians used for today’s First Reading, this seems to occur.  “The Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God.”  This sounds impossible to understand until we realize that Paul is speaking about the unity of the Holy Trinity.  This unity does not come from the outside, as it were, but from the interiors of the Persons.  The Spirit, the Bond of love that binds the Father and Son together, proceeds from within both and so knows them intimately.  He searches out and knows the love of the Father and the Son for each other.  “Among men, who knows what pertains to the man except his spirit that is within?”  Paul compares this knowing by the Holy Spirit with the situation of mortal man.  We have nothing comparable to the Holy Spirit.  God knows himself, but we cannot know ourselves to the extent that he knows himself.  The little we do know of ourselves as humans comes from our souls.  We can know our limitations and especially our mortality from our souls, but also we can know that he possess free will.  But no one can know the precise abilities and limitations of a given individual than that individual, from his soul.  “Similarly, no one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God.”  If we cannot know others as well as we can know ourselves, we can hardly know the inner life 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.”  The “spirit of the world” is the thoroughly secular way in which most people think of themselves, as though they are just animated bodies and as though they possessed no immortal soul.  But the baptized believer receives the Holy Spirit so that his soul might be informed by the Spirit of the truth of the human person.  That is, the Spirit helps the soul to recognize its limitations and mortality but also the hope of it gaining immortality through the Death of the Lord Jesus, the Son of God.  The baptized believer knows himself in a very different way than a secular-minded person does.  

“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.”  Paul puts forth the very problem of theology: how to explain in human words the meanings of which are grounded in earthly things the spiritual realities of heaven.  The early Christians ingeniously invested old words with new meanings, adapting physical, philosophical, and religious words for this purpose.  The Greek ekklesia, originally meaning a social assembly, became used for “the Church”.  Presbyteros, which meant “elder”, was used for “priest” instead of hieros in order to distinguish the Christian priest from the pagan.  Later, theologians would coin words such as homoousion and transubstantio when not even adapting older words could suffice.  Even so, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard: neither has it entered into the heart of man, what things God has prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2, 9).

“Now the natural man does not accept what pertains to the Spirit of God, for to him it is foolishness, and he cannot understand it, because it is judged spiritually.”  This is the man with the secular mind for whom the concepts of God and of the world beyond this one make no sense and has no attraction.  “The one who is spiritual, however, can judge everything but is not subject to judgment by anyone.”  The Christian understands reality far better than a secular person who studies it professionally because the Christian understands, for instance, that all is created by Almighty God to manifest his glory.  He understands a things purpose as well as its end.  He understands that God’s Providence governs the world and so there is purpose.  “For ‘who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel him?’  But we have the mind of Christ.”  Paul quotes from Isaiah 40, 13.  He uses the quote to remind his readers that although we have greater knowledge of the human person and of the world than secular-minded people, our knowledge is still limited.  That we have it at all is due to the revelations made by the Lord Jesus and the help of the Holy Spirit.

The Gospel reading for today’s Mass is taken from Luke 4, 31-37.  The Evangelist describes an exorcism the Lord Jesus performed in a synagogue.  The secular-minded person would read this and ascribe the sufferings of the possessed man to some psychosis, some physical cause.  But the spiritual-minded understand that this life is a warfare, with the forces of hell arraigned against us.  At times, the devil gains the upper hand, but the power of Jesus Christ, “the holy one of God” frees us.  With all our faith, we are still astounded by his power: “What is there about his word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.”  The secular-minded misses it altogether.