Tuesday of the Twenty-Second Week in Ordinary Time
Scripture Reading: First Reading, 1 COR 2: 10B-16
Brothers and sisters:The Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God. Among men, who knows what pertains to the man except his spirit that is within? Similarly, no one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God.
We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God. And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms.
Now the natural man does not accept what pertains to the Spirit of God, for to him it is foolishness, and he cannot understand it, because it is judged spiritually. The one who is spiritual, however, can judge everything but is not subject to judgment by anyone. For "who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
Reflection
There are people who have amass a lot of wealth, yet they cannot spare their time or even a bit of their “spare cash”. They may even label or make you feel foolish for volunteering for charity as it is unpaid work instead of using that time making money. Perhaps, they are really “too poor” to help others as God is of infinite wealth and they choose to have no room for Him. Nevertheless, being foolish for Christ - a living God - is better than being foolish for an inanimate object.
On the contrary there are also many people who are always giving, whether little or everything they have to others. This world has a lot of different types people, so similarly there would be a lot of different types of spirits. So, it would be prudent to scrutinize all spirits.
Spirituality is out of this world, so it would only make sense that something out of this world would understand it best – the Holy Spirit. How can we worldly human possibly understand a being from out of this world? We can study it, observe or make educated guesses but only the Holy Spirit will be able to “understand the things freely given to us by God”.
