What’s wrong with being wise and learned?

A Reflection for Tuesday of the First Week of Advent

Find today’s readings here.

No matter how many times I read this passage from Luke, I always feel a bit defensive. What’s wrong with being “wise and learned” after all? For me, the attainment of knowledge has been a driving ambition for as long as I can remember. I am completely at home in a classroom. I love researching and writing. I revere the teachers and professors who have challenged and enriched my understanding. Am I and my ilk excluded from divine revelation?

I don’t think so. Rather, today’s Gospel challenges us to reflect on the role that intellectual achievement plays in our spiritual life. Has it become a golden calf, a false idol that we pursue to the detriment of humbly worshiping God? Do we sometimes deploy critical analysis to avoid experiencing the immediacy and power of God’s presence in prayer? Have we ever wielded learning and knowledge as weapons to shame or judge others, like the high priests, scribes and elders whom Jesus dismisses as the “wise and learned”?

Many years ago, thanks to the Jesuits, I embarked on the journey towards Catholicism. Fresh out of graduate school and true to form, I designed a path of rigorous intellectual inquiry. I read the documents of Vatican II; works of mystics like Teresa of Avila; books by Avery Dulles, Thomas Merton and Raymond Brown; big chunks of the Catechism; countless articles on women in the church, on prayer, on dogma. I was sure that finding God was just a matter of acquiring the right knowledge.  

The more I read and the harder I studied, the more God seemed to elude my seeking. Discouraged, I could not figure out why the academic approach that had served me so well was failing me now. One day, in a lengthy spiritual conversation with a young Carmelite nun I’d been introduced to, it suddenly hit me: The goal of my seeking was not to comprehend God, but to love God. It was a transformational moment.

 God has given each of us a multitude of gifts, including the ability to use our heads. But we need to be sure we are engaging our intellectual abilities in service to God’s will, not our own desires. As Jesus teaches us, in the life of faith, intelligence is not the principal virtue. The true ingathering of Christ’s message is not the automatic entitlement of “the wise and the learned.” Rather, it is a grace given to those whose hearts are truly open and trusting, like a child’s, whose hands are open to receiving help from others, like a child’s.  

As we move deeper into Advent, we might consider how our intellect hinders or advances our journey towards God. If we put more stock in how critically we think than how powerfully we love, we risk becoming like Luke’s “prophets and kings,” who viewed Jesus with analyzing eyes that failed to see him as he truly was. As the medieval theologian Thomas à Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ, “Surely, when the day of judgment comes, we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done, not how well we have spoken but how devoutly we have lived.” Learning is a good and useful thing, but it is a humble and loving heart that will show us the path to God’s kingdom.   

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