The Word and the Wisdom

Have you ever had the experience of buying a new car and then suddenly seeing that car everywhere you go? This can happen with things other than cars too. There seems to be a relationship between us seeing something new and then suddenly seeing that new thing everywhere we look.

It’s like we can’t unsee the new thing or the new perspective. That’s the way it was for me when I started researching the writings on God’s Wisdom in the biblical texts. I was first introduced to the Wisdom tradition in Judaism and Christianity by Joyce Rockwood Hudson and her book Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity. (now in a second edition with a new subtitle). In the book, she writes about God’s Wisdom as coming to us in our dreams and also in the flow of our lives.

My studies at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago took it even further, as my Old Testament class in my first semester was on the Pentateuch (or first five books of the Bible) and the Wisdom literature, which typically includes the book of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and other related texts. Our first two readings today were offered by the ELCA as alternate readings and I chose to use them because of the Gospel reading (I’ll explain why soon). Now forgive me, but I’m going to nerd out a little bit in this sermon, though I will touch on why this all matters at the end.

Our first two readings come from Sirach and the book of Wisdom which is also called The Wisdom of Solomon. These books are considered apocryphal, meaning they’re part of a collection that are outside the canonical books. They emerged either in the last century before Christ or in the early part of the first century and even though not included in the canon, they’re highly respected in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, and by many Protestants as well. Some scholars believe that Jesus may very well have been knowledgeable of these texts.

In my Christmas sermon, I talked about the ways that Paul and the gospel writers connected Jesus to the historical tradition in Israel and linked Jesus to the covenants and promises of God. But I also said that John’s gospel goes even further, linking Jesus to the very beginning of the creation of the whole cosmos. To the very Word of God. But just like seeing your new car everywhere you go on the road, when I dug into the scholarship on this beginning prologue to John’s gospel, I saw the Wisdom tradition from the Hebrew Bible all over this writing.

Now you may remember that in Proverbs, God’s Wisdom is personified as a woman because the words for Wisdom in both Hebrew and Greek are feminine nouns. In Greek, the word for wisdom is sophia, and so that is often used as a name for this one of the many metaphors in which the Divine is seen as feminine – similar to the mother hen image that Jesus uses.

What I found when I studied the gospel of John is that pretty much everything that is said about the Logos or Word of God, had already been said in the Hebrew tradition about the Sophia or Wisdom of God.

Just one fun example of how this is true is that when John writes that “the Word became flesh and lived among us,” the Greek word translated as “lived among us” is skenoo which comes from skenos which means “tent.” So that phrase could better be translated as “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”

Now listen to this from the book of Sirach about God’s Wisdom: “Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator pitched my tent. He said, ‘Encamp in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.’ 9 Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all the ages I shall not cease to be…”

Here we have both God’s Wisdom and God’s Word living among us as if in a tent. What else is common to both Wisdom and Word? Well, God’s Wisdom was seen as present in the beginning of creation, was with God, and was God; is also present in creation, powerful, and all-knowing. It’s also written about both that all things came into being through them, that they are the source of life and a true light that shines in the darkness, while not being overcome by that darkness. Both Wisdom and Word also came into the world but were not accepted by the world and both give the power to become children of God.

We see here the evidence that John was mining deep into his own Jewish tradition to tell us what was true about the incarnation of Jesus into the world and his saving work as the Christ of God.

Why does this matter?

Well, first when we open our minds to the feminine images and metaphors for God in the Bible, we can more easily acknowledge that Spirit is neither male nor female, and we can better understand that all images of God – even that of Father – are symbols.

Like all symbols, they participate in that to which they point but also are limited in their ability to convey the truths they represent. The more we widen our symbols and language of God, the greater our capacity to be inspired and uplifted.

But even more importantly, it matters because when we notice how the New Testament writers linked the Christ to the earliest Jewish writings about Sophia – God’s Wisdom – we can better understand God’s faithfulness. God has been coming to God’s people throughout human history, trying to draw us toward the Light, toward God’s Life, to be in alignment with God’s way of being and loving.

We also see that when we turn toward this Light, we are lifted into a new state of being where we are, as Paul writes, no longer slaves, but children of God. We are no longer unimportant and weak beings who must be under the thumbs of the powers and principalities of the world that seek every opportunity to crush us. No, we are raised to a new status, where the life and light of God flow naturally to us and through us toward others.

In this state of trust, when we believe in Christ, we are plugged into the Body of Christ where we are no longer separate and alone but are now deeply and inseparably woven into God’s very life, interconnected with all other created beings in a whole tapestry of God’s grace upon grace. 

This is good news indeed! And when we live out the truth of those claims, we can’t help but draw others to Christ.