Overview:

Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

For “who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel him?”
But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Cor 2:16)

Find today’s readings here.

We humans (and writers) sometimes forget ourselves in the divine scheme, and we have to be reminded of our proper place. “Where were you when I founded the earth?” God asks Job (Jb 38:4). It’s a rhetorical question, and it silences Job.

The prophet Isaiah quotes the words of the Lord for us: “My ways [are] higher than your ways; my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Is 55:9). 

Even further: “If you understand,” St. Augustine tells us, “it is not God.”

We get it. We are not God.

But St. Paul offers us a different message in today’s reading. “We have the mind of Christ,” he writes in First Corinthians (1 Cor 2:16). And maybe that is another gift of the good news of the Gospel: that because Jesus has sent us the Holy Spirit, we are afforded a holy glimpse into God’s wisdom. 

“The Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God,” says St. Paul. According to St. Paul, the Spirit, through the mind of Christ, teaches us the words that help us speak about the ineffable wisdom of God. My small moments on the fringe of this mysterious presence: When I facilitated Communion services at a state prison, I was always amazed by the way the Holy Spirit would pilot my reflection on the day’s readings, if I just asked. If I prayed for the Spirit to take the wheel, my few thoughts would somehow organize themselves into a cogent message, so that when I spoke, it was as though I were hearing my own words for the first time. The Holy Spirit was definitely doing the teaching on those occasions, as St. Paul promises. If I tried to navigate my way alone, my words fell flat.

When we let go of our presumptuous human wisdom and pray to enter the mind of Christ, we can have faith that the words of the Spirit will come to us and lift us above the clouds of our unknowing. “The Lord lifts up all who are falling,” the Psalmist tells us today, a consolation when we find ourselves flat on the ground. As much as we’d like to be certain of God’s thoughts and God’s plan for us, we cannot know the mind of God. But we can ask the Spirit to illuminate the road ahead, as we rely on Christ to accompany us and trust in the generosity of God’s love to uphold us.  

Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Till the Moon Be No More: The Grit and Grace of Growing Older. She lives on the Oregon Coast.