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I have a friend who is a Roman Catholic nun. She’s a lady who’s a member of what seems to be a dying order, which recently had to move its convent from a small Missouri town to an acreage near Kansas City.

'I didn’t want to move,' she said with a little smile on her gentle face, 'but when I got here and when I heard the mockingbirds, I knew I had come where God wanted me to be.'

That’s true wisdom.

God is faithful, even in hard times, and true wisdom is to see that.

'[God] has caused his wonderful works to be remembered,' the psalmist says; 'the Lord is gracious and merciful.'

But sometimes that’s easy to forget.

Sometimes as we face grief and death, it seems God has left us.

'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him,' Mary Magdalene told Simon Peter.

And then later, just before she saw two angels, she stood weeping.

The resurrection had already occurred, but she’s like us, and so she’s crying.

True wisdom. It’s easy to talk about true wisdom when things are going well. It’s easy to look at stories such as the Joseph story and to see how everything that happened to Joseph — even when his brothers tried to kill him —finally turned out well because Joseph trusted in the Living God; he had true wisdom.

It’s easy to say, as the writer says in Proverbs, that if we cry out for insight we will find the fear of God.

But for me, at least, it doesn’t work that way. For me, there’s no tragedy greater than the tragedy of death.

'For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,' Paul says, and in my head I know that’s true, but in my heart I still can’t hear the mockingbirds.

True wisdom is to see that there is no human answer to the grief I feel.

'Woman, why are you weeping?' Jesus said to Mary. 'Whom do you seek?'

And she replied, 'Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.'

And he just said her name. That’s all. 'Mary,' he replied, and in her joy she answered, 'Rabboni! (which means Teacher).'

She had found true wisdom in the risen Savior.

She was like my friend’s friend, the nun. 'When I die, I want to be buried in that little out-of-the-way corner lot in the cemetery where all our nuns and priests are buried,' she told him once.

'No one else wants that lot, but I do because when Gabriel blows his horn and our bodies rise again, I want to rise up and I want to walk down that line and shake hands with all my sisters and my brothers.'

'For fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,' the psalmist said, but Jesus simply looked into Mary’s eyes, said her name, and it was in the risen Savior that she found love and hope and joy and true wisdom.

Let Us Pray

Dear God, help us put our faith in you, and help us find true wisdom in your son, the risen Savior. Amen.


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