A homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 30, 2024
Wis 1:13-15; 2:23-24, 2 Cor 8:7, 9, 13-15, Mk 5:21-43 or 5:21-24, 35b-43
When I searched Google for the phrase “God helps those who help themselves,” the search engine yielded about 71,600,000 results in 0.37 seconds. Which, among other things, suggests to me that God helps those who look things up on search engines.
Furthermore, I read in a few citations that, despite the popular belief that this is a biblical quotation, the phrase originated from English politician-philosopher Algernon Sydney in 1698 in an article titled “Discourses Concerning Government.” Never heard of him. Oh, well.
OK, so it’s not in the Bible. Nonetheless, does God help those who help themselves?
Oh, if that only were a simple question.
Let’s start with a simple answer: Yes.
Yes, God does help those who help themselves.
But now, let’s break it open. Because the answer is complex and complicated, which makes sense, because the question is complex and complicated.
At every step of any problem-solving activity, whether we’re talking about weeding out crabgrass or performing brain surgery, divine assistance is available … and needed.
The first step is identifying the problem. Simply put: What’s the matter? What’s the big picture?
Failure to launch? Failure to illuminate? Fever? Some ailment the Pepto-Bismol Quartet sings about in the cringe-worthy commercial?
What’s the matter?
And so, God’s Wisdom gets the ball rolling.
Once we’ve recognized the big picture, Wisdom leads us to the components. Wisdom leads us to diagnose the individual parts, any or many or all of which may not be working as they should.
Wisdom guides us from macro to micro.
Wisdom guides us to find that one flange or bolt or wire or vein or cancer cell that’s out of whack, causing the whole organism or mechanism to malfunction.
Now, as a longtime DIY tinkerer-fix-it kind of guy, I have to pause here to acknowledge that I’ll often dive into the micro aspects of a problem myself … which absolutely has to make God’s Wisdom nervous. I’ll dive into a rabbit hole and sometimes keep going even after my figurative whiskers have touched the sides. And then I’ll need an expert to rescue me and undo whatever I did.
Most of us instead listen to Wisdom and rely on the experts immediately.
And therein lies another key element of how God helps.
God has created each of us with a variety of talents and interests and abilities to remember and extrapolate. We’re all good at things, great at things. We’re able to astound other people with what we can say or do, or how we interrelate.
God embedded human wisdom in each of us. (I come up short on the Common Sense™ brand of wisdom more often than I — or the people around me — would like, but that’s a story for another day.)
God gave us the ability to say and to do, to communicate and connect, so we can share what we know and share our know-how.
Gifts from God’s Love, for us to use and share through the love and kindness within us.
So, back to our opening ruminations about God helping…
Language can be a funny thing, especially when words leave an incorrect or incomplete impression.
In all the years I’ve heard that God helps those who help themselves, the aphorism always was tossed at me with a singular or solo intent:
Do.
It.
Yourself.
I’m sure that contributed greatly to my DIY tendencies. And perhaps to my letting it slip my mind that God is intimately involved. As many of us do, all too easily.
But if there’s even a smidgen of Scriptural inspiration behind this late-17th-century saw, it has to be in the use of plurals: “those” and “themselves.”
God helps all of us when we help each other.
God helps all of us when we mesh our God-given abilities and attitudes into a grand solution for whatever ails us or ails this world, with its overheated climate and even more overheated rhetoric.
God helps all of us when we turn to the experts God has delivered to our midst.
God helps us when we have enough faith — as the hemorrhagic woman and the synagogue leader did — to ask for help and believe God will provide it. Because God always does.
God helps us when we have enough human wisdom and gratitude to heed divine Wisdom and acknowledge that we can’t do it — whatever “it” may be — alone.
To acknowledge with a deep faith that we can do it, with God’s help.
