Scripture Daily

Context No. 526 of 4322 · Sirach

Context · Reflection

Sirach 31:17-31: in context

17Be first to stop for manners’ sake. Don’t be insatiable, lest you offend. 18And if you sit among many, Don’t reach out your hand before them. 19How sufficient to a well-mannered man is a very little. He doesn’t breathe heavily in his bed. 20Healthy sleep comes from moderate eating. He rises early, and his wits are with him. The pain of wakefulness, colic, and griping are with an insatiable man. 21And if you have been forced to eat, rise up in the middle of it, and you shall have rest. 22Hear me, my son, and don’t despise me, and in the end you will appreciate my words. In all your works be skillful, and no disease will come to you. 23People bless him who is liberal with his food. The testimony of his excellence will be believed. 24The city will murmur at him who is a stingy with his food. The testimony of his stinginess will be accurate. 25Don’t show yourself valiant in wine, for wine has destroyed many. 26The furnace tests the temper of steel by dipping; so does wine test hearts in the quarreling of the proud. 27Wine is as good as life to men, if you drink it in moderation. What life is there to a man who is without wine? It has been created to make men glad. 28Wine drunk in season and in moderation is joy of heart and gladness of soul: 29Wine drunk excessively is bitterness of soul, with provocation and conflict. 30Drunkenness increases the rage of a fool to his hurt. It diminishes strength and adds wounds. 31Don’t rebuke your neighbor at a banquet of wine. Don’t despise him in his mirth. Don’t speak a word of reproach to him. Don’t distress him by making demands of him.

Sirach turns here to something very ordinary: how to eat and drink. And his counsel is neither indulgent nor grim. He warns against greed at the table, do not reach out your hand before others, do not be insatiable, and praises the man for whom a little is enough, noting that moderate eating brings healthy sleep and a clear head in the morning, while the greedy man tosses all night with a churning stomach. It is homely, practical wisdom. But it opens onto a larger principle when he comes to wine, and there he says something balanced and wise that neither the indulgent nor the severe tend to hear.

Wine, Sirach says, is as good as life to a person if it is drunk in moderation; it was created to make people glad, and taken in season it is joy of heart and gladness of soul. He does not treat the good gift as evil. But in the very next breath: wine drunk to excess is bitterness of soul, with quarreling and conflict, and it exposes what is in a person, testing hearts the way a furnace tests steel. The same gift that in measure brings gladness, taken without measure turns to bitterness and reveals the worst in us. The line between the joy and the bitterness is simply moderation, the discipline of enough. The gift is good; being ruled by it is ruin.

That is a wiser word than either extreme I am tempted toward, either treating God's good pleasures as if they were sins, or letting them master me with no restraint. Sirach says the good things, food, drink, comfort, were made for gladness and may be enjoyed, but only the person who keeps to enough actually gets the joy; past that line the same gift curdles into bitterness and shows what I am really made of. Is there a good gift in my life that I am enjoying past the line of enough, letting it begin to master me and turn its gladness sour, and where do I need the discipline of moderation to keep the joy from becoming bitterness?

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