Week Thirty-Two Summary  August 3 – August 8, 2025

Thomas Moore, Writing in the Sand: Jesus and the Soul of the Gospels (Hay House, 2009), 164–165, 167. 

Friday 8 August 2025  Wisdom in Action

Father Richard teaches that to become wise, we must move into life itself, encountering people and places that challenge our ways of thinking.  

Jesus came to teach us the way of wisdom by bringing us a message that offers to liberate us from both the lies of the world and the lies lodged within ourselves. The wisdom of the gospel creates an alternative consciousness, solid ground on which we can really stand, free from every social order and every ideology. The preaching of the gospel pulls the rug out from under us, and we have to put our life on a new footing. First we have to act. We have to cross over a threshold and live differently, so that we’re compelled to think differently and ask challenging questions.  

To get a real grasp of the gospel’s truth, we have to cross over and enter into solidarity with at least one person who’s different from us. For example, if we’re afraid of a different culture or religion, then we’d best head in that direction. If a certain set of people scare us, then we have to get to know them. For a while, we have to endure being with people who live or think differently and learn to view reality from their standpoint. Jesus says we have to love our enemies, because doing so is the only way to grasp the whole picture. It’s the only way to learn to love the other side of our own soul.  

We can’t try to solve it with our minds; we simply must act. The problem isn’t solved in the head but in the gut, in the whole body (including the head, but that doesn’t come until later). That’s what I mean when I speak of the risk and leap of faith. This is a very Franciscan approach to life. St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus put love as prior to knowledge, probably building on Francis’ own headlong dive into life. First, we agree to give ourselves, and then we will understand, not the other way around. Otherwise, we get caught in all kinds of protective reasons why we don’t need to give ourselves to life and we never make the dive.  

First I have to act, and then I’ll understand—meaning the whole person will understand. Then I’ll know what I know. But I really won’t know why I know, nor will I be able to offer proof to anyone else. It’s the mysterious wisdom of faith, the wisdom we learn only when we are on the way. Nobody else can teach us this lesson, neither the pope nor biblical authorities; we have to go down this road ourselves. That’s what the “primacy of action” means. Persist at that deeper place in yourself where the “both-and” is located. This is the place of the soul and the place of wisdom toward which we have to move. Don’t be afraid! Fear comes from a need to control, and we are not in control anyway.  

Thursday 7 August 2025   A Teacher and Sage

Religious historian Diana Butler Bass explores what it meant for Jesus to be called “teacher” or “rabbi”: 

Although Christians call Jesus by many names, those who knew him best mostly called him “teacher.” Of the ninety or so times Jesus is addressed directly in the New Testament, roughly sixty refer to him as “teacher,” “rabbi,” “great one,” or “master” (as in the British sense of “schoolmaster”). In the gospels, the preponderance of action that occurs is Jesus teaching. He teaches at the Temple, on a hillside, by a lake, in a field, by a campfire, at a dinner table, while at a wedding, and in the center of the city. He teaches individuals, his disciples, large crowds, small groups, his friends, and his foes…. 

The word typically translated as “teacher” was the title “rabbi” or “rabbouni,” a fairly new—and even revolutionary—term in the first century. The word “rabbi” did not mean a Jewish clergyperson, as it does today, nor did the title appear in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, it was just coming into use during Jesus’s time for one whose teachings bore spiritual authority—a sage, a storyteller, an insightful interpreter of the Law, or a particularly wise elder….  

To be a rabbi in the first century was to be a teacher who was crafting a new approach to Hebrew texts, traditions, and interpretations. And, sadly, both Christians and Jews have forgotten how completely innovative and challenging Jesus was as a rabbi.  

Biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine describes how Jesus worked as a rabbi:   

Jesus did not spend his time engaged in a (somewhat) systematic understanding of Torah or developing a plan for the sanctification of daily life through practice and prayer. Rather, he addressed issues when they presented themselves or when he was questioned about them. He is better seen as a charismatic teacher, healer, and speaker of traditional wisdom than as a rabbi who, in a study house, focused on understanding the words of Torah and determining how best to implement them. [1] 

Bass emphasizes Jesus’ role as a teacher of wisdom within his Jewish lineage:  

As a teacher, Jesus is not contradicting Moses or demeaning other Jewish teachers. He is offering his interpretation of the law, teachings that surprised his followers with their originality and insight. To understand Jesus as a teacher in this sense—even if one does consider him divine—is to remember that teachers, even those with great authority, teach within a long line of communal interpretation, something that Jesus himself would have known. Jesus does not replace. Jesus reimagines and expands, inviting an alternative and often innovative reading of Jewish tradition….  

As a rabbi, Jesus was remarkable, challenging, and inventive. His teachings remain compelling, influencing people throughout the ages and well beyond Christianity; and those teachings stand on their own as beautiful without needing to diminish others…. If Christians really followed the one they claimed as Teacher, the world would be a more just and loving place. 

Wednesday 6 August 2025  The Wisdom of Parables

Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan describes how Jesus’ parables invited listeners to find wisdom in their daily agricultural circumstances: 

When we look afresh at the parables through the eyes of Middle Eastern farmers, fishers, herders, and orchard keepers … we can clearly see that Jesus was offering them both the intangible gift of hope and tangible options for survival. Jesus guided his hearers into rethinking for themselves how to survive and build community at the very moment that they felt overwhelmed by unprecedented pressures.…  

The imagery and cadence we find in the aphorisms and parables of Jesus are those of a gifted storyteller who reached his listeners through colorful but cryptic symbols, curious riddles, and circular plots that engaged listeners as participants in the process of making the story whole. There was no need for Jesus to stand behind a podium or pulpit to pontificate. Instead, he interacted with his listeners’ hearts and minds in a manner that became integral to the story itself. The only way the story could be made whole and would make wounded listeners whole was by engaging them with deep participation.  

Nabhan helps us hear Jesus’ lively, earthy storytelling in his retelling of the parable of the Sower and the Seed:  

Hey! Listen up, those of you who think you have ears!…
A farmer went out to sow,   
and from his hand he would throw…  

[Jesus] gestured with his hand, as if flinging seeds out toward them in every which way.   

…a broadcasting of the seeds,   
           but most of them landed  
far from the sower and too close to the barren road….   
           Some of the seed they cast out  
fell where bedrock reached the surface.  

He knelt upon the stony ground before them, knocking his knuckles against the hardened earth to demonstrate its impermeability. They heard a low thud. They knew all too well that seeds cannot penetrate very far into compacted earth…. 

Others of the seeds he sowed  
           landed among some thorny brush….   

He grabbed a branch of spiny, tangled crucifixion thorn and forced his fist up through its barbs until the skin on his hand dripped with blood. The people themselves had felt their own arms and legs scratched and bloodied by the piercing of these thorns….  

At last, the sower came to a place  
where the earth felt welcoming, full of tilth,   
where he could gently fling some seeds into sweet spots  
where they made their way to deeper, richer soil.  

He knelt down again and used his bloody hand as a trowel, but this time, he brought up fragrant, richly textured, glistening humus from beneath the stones on the surface. He raised it up, then he bowed to the fellaheen [food producers] who had gathered to hear him. He stretched out his other arm out toward them and opened his hand in deference, as if to remind them that they themselves were essential elements for sustaining the fecundity and generative energy of this earth.