In today’s first reading we read from the Book of Wisdom which was written about fifty years before the coming of Christ, likely in Alexandria. That places the author in a deeply Hellenistic environment, where Jewish communities were immersed in Greek language, philosophy, and cultural pressures. It reflects a real tension between 

The author’s name is not known to us. The primary purpose of the author was to give moral support to fellow Jews in a time when they were experiencing suffering and oppression from secular society and especially from Jews who had left the faith because of the lure of Hellenistic thought and privileges that came from being part of the ruling class. It was their own version of “culture wars.”

It reflects a real tension between Jewish covenantal faith (rooted in Torah, righteousness, and fidelity to God) and a Hellenistic worldview, which could include philosophical skepticism about divine justice, materialism or hedonism (in some popular forms), and other tenets of that worldview. In addition, the ruling, wealthy and business class were of the Hellenistic world and so Jews might well feel pressure to culturally assimilate. It almost seems to be their version of “a culture war.”

The passage taken from Wisdom 2 presents the reasoning of “the ungodly,” who say things like: life is short and meaningless, enjoy pleasure now, oppress the righteous person, test whether God will save him. It has all the hallmarks of popularized versions of Epicureanism or maybe recast in our times, a caricature of moral relativism. It can feel like a “culture war” text, though with nuance. The “culture war” here is not just intellectual, it is moral and existential. The core question is will one remain faithful when righteousness is mocked as foolishness? One voice claims our world is sunsetting. Our faith tells us we are at the sunrise of an every new age.

In its time, it was a question for faithful Jews in a hostile cultural setting. In Christian reading it foreshadows the passion of Christ. Both these motifs are seen when the wicked plot against “the righteous one.” “Culture war” is a helpful modern analogy, but the book is doing something deeper. It is defending righteousness against nihilism, affirming divine justice against apparent injustice, and proclaiming immortality against despair. It proclaims faith in a just, purposeful cosmos vs. the temptation to believe that life is accidental and morally empty.

It is the challenge that Christian faithful have faced in every age. It is not a call to close oneself off from the world, to proclaim that you are one of the “faithful remnant.” It is a call to find your own voice to be a Book of Wisdom to a world that does not share our view of how we are called to live. 

Call it what you will, culture war or persecution, ridicule or derision, in every age we are still called to go to the ends of the earth with the Good News. This is the Way.

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