NOTES for Wis 2:12-22
A priest once said, “I knew a saint. It was impossible to live beside him.” Today’s Old Testament reading beautifully illustrates the measure of truth in this joke. A righteous person gets on normal people’s nerves simply by not being like everyone else. His very existence—even without his words—is a rebuke. It is completely incomprehensible how such a person can exist, because his conduct contradicts all the laws of human relationships known to science, such as “man is a wolf to man.” Those around him therefore develop a simple and understandable desire to conduct an experiment: to force this righteous person into the framework of the aforementioned laws and see what happens. Will he become convinced that his righteousness is utterly meaningless, or not? If a person’s righteousness is “art for art’s sake,” righteousness for the sake of righteousness, the experiment usually succeeds. But if a person does not set himself the goal of being righteous and simply lives in God’s love, the world no longer has power over him, because that love itself is the righteous person’s reward, and no one and nothing can take it away.