The Strange Ways of the Obnoxious Righteous

September 20, 2015
Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
First Reading: Wisdom 2:12, 17-20
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/092015.cfm

Do you ever get annoyed when you see someone perform with great skill? Whether it is an expert musician, an elite athlete, or even an experienced worker, watching someone perform a task you can’t do but would like to can be frustrating. We recognize how superior the performer’s skills are above our own, and we look down at ourselves and don’t like what we see. If we’re in a good place, we’ll want to improve ourselves, gain skills, put in the hard work to change. But if we’re in a bad place, we can wind up like the ungodly in this Sunday’s first reading—trying to destroy that proficient person whose competence puts us to shame.

The Obnoxious Righteous

Holy people can be just as frustrating as excellent performers. They put us all to shame by their commitment to prayer, their rigorous fasting, their consistently moral behavior, by the way that they talk, and by the things that they leave unsaid. In the Book of Wisdom, we hear a long speech by the ungodly who have made a covenant with death (Wis 1:16). The author lets them vent their frustration and animosity in chapter 2, where our reading comes from. They start off by applauding the oppression of the poor man, the widow and the aged (2:10), asserting that the only criterion for worth is utility (2:11). If anyone has become weak or worn, then they consider him useless, ready to be thrown to the curb. This over-emphasis on usefulness has become a temptation for our society. It is easy to think that once a person is no longer fit to work, productive, profitable, that they are expendable. That thinking places money and machines above human beings, reducing each of us to a mere cog in an economic system, rather than an individual uniquely created in God’s image. The righteous man is not only annoying because of his deeds, but also because he actively opposes the evil plans of the ungodly and calls them out for their sinful actions, which go against the law of God and their own upbringing (2:12).

A Child of God

Yet the righteous one does not find his identity in his actions, but in his God. He claims to know God. He even calls himself “a child of the Lord” (2:13 RSV) and “boasts that God is his father” (2:16). The righteous man’s behavior is not spiteful or aggressive. He is not trying to be obnoxious. Rather, his right living, his annoying holiness, flows from his relationship with God, from his identity as a child of God. This can be important for us to remember. Real fidelity to God, real holiness, is not composed of mere external observances. Rather, it is a matter of the heart (see Rom 2:29). The righteous man’s life is not an outside-in approach that centers on visible practices, but instead it goes in an inside-out direction. The right actions, the external holiness, originate in a rightly-ordered, interior relationship with God. You can do the external acts that seem holy while being rotten to the core. Likewise, you can look like a mess on the outside but actually be plodding the path to holiness.

Putting the Just Man to the Test

Unfortunately, the wicked are not content to rest on their bed of insults, but resolve to attack the source of their annoyance. This should not surprise us. Prophets are frequently put in prison. Moses was rebuffed. Elijah was chased out of town. Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern. Isaiah was sawn in half. St. Paul was stoned, flogged, imprisoned, and beheaded. Living a righteous life and reproving those who are not is serious business and invites serious opposition. The just man in our reading finds the wicked plotting against him. The very sight of him has become an unbearable burden to them (2:15). They view his ways as “strange” (2:15). Not only that, but they suspect him of being aloof, of retaining a secret notion of superiority over the ungodly (2:16). They know for a fact that he views the ways of the ungodly as “unclean” (2:16). The wicked decide that they have had enough.

Killing the Righteous One

They plan to deliver the righteous man over to his enemies to test whether the God he trusts in will protect him (2:17-18). Eventually, they even decide to condemn him to death (2:20). But their plan backfires. The wicked didn’t realize that God’s plans run deeper than human malice. They became blinded by their own misdeeds (2:21) and forgot that only those who belong to the devil will undergo death (2:24). On the other hand, “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God” (3:1 RSV). In the first place, this passage describes the undoing of Jesus’ opponents when he rose from the dead. The persons that put the righteous Jesus to death didn’t understand that in death he could still defeat them, still be vindicated by God, still triumph. Every saint who dies recapitulates the same story—the world, the flesh, the devil thought that they could win by bringing about the death of the saint, by extinguishing his annoyingly holy life, but his soul was in God’s hand all along.

The next time you find yourself annoyed by another person’s perfections, think back to Wisdom, chapter 2, and rethink whether you really want to adopt an attitude akin to the “devil’s envy” (2:24) through which death entered the world. It is far better to be like the “righteous poor man” (2:10), who might be scorned for his “strange ways” now, but who will eventually find himself in God’s hand.