Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry,
but he thwarts the craving of the wicked.”
NL Daily Devotion for Wednesday, August 2, 2023
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
What are we to make of these proverbs? Some, like this one, are deeply counterintuitive to what we experience in our own context. Others actually (again, to modern eyes) seem to encourage negative behavior rather than positive. Still others contradict one another. All of them appear to be black-and-white dichotomies, when the reality of wisdom, as I understand it, is in recognizing the dialectics: the “both/ands” of truth.
Does this mean we are to judge Solomon’s “wisdom” as anything but? Do we discard them out of hand? Of course not. As with much of scripture, these proverbs are an invitation to have a conversation with the text and ask God to lead us to the wisdom that underlies even those passages which baffle us. The fact of the matter is that many of the “righteous” do go hungry, and the “wicked” get everything they want and far more than they need. So how can we glean wisdom from this in our modern context? Perhaps it is a call to action—that we are to be the hands and feet of God working to make this proverb a reality, by ensuring that no one—righteous or wicked—goes hungry.
How do I find wisdom in scripture that I find counterintuitive?
