May 22, 2016
Holy Trinity
First Reading: Prov 8:22-31
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/052216.cfm
We all know that older is better. The older stories have more power, more authority. The shape of a typical conversation often flows in terms of authority, priority. A younger man will recall something about his childhood, particularly something unpleasant, only to be outdone by an older man who talks up how hard it was when he was a kid. “You had it easy,” he says. Then an even older man chimes in with tales from long ago about how difficult things were when he was a kid. We recognize a kind of wisdom of experience, a way in which the older, more ancient, possesses a level of authority over us. We defer to the older one and are skeptical of the wisdom of the young.
Tracing Wisdom Back to Eternity
Yet in our jovial conversations, we would hardly suspect that this implicit rule of wisdom can be traced back further and further, even into eternity. That is, conventional wisdom about the best fishing holes or the best way to fix a car or prepare a meal are actually part of a chain of almost infinite regress. The deferral of one generation to the pervious goes back and back, all the way to God. God himself possesses wisdom. Yet this wisdom of his far surpasses any of our good sense. His wisdom set the universe in motion. It built the system of right and wrong that we experience. His wisdom is the ultimate wisdom, the wisdom par excellence. Yet it is not just greater in degree, as if he just had accumulated the most wisdom. Rather, it is different in kind.
The Person Who Is Wisdom
God’s wisdom is so vast that it is a person. This Sunday’s first reading from Proverbs comes as the words of Lady Wisdom, spoken to the discerning young man seeking wisdom. She represents the very wisdom of God—not a mere list of rules, nor a human philosophy, but the hidden, secret knowledge of God that brings something out of nothing and governs the universe in which we live. Lady Wisdom’s speech here emphasizes her uncreated status, her origin from before all time in God.
A Christian reading of this passage has a funny twist, in that we usually think of the wisdom of God as Wisdom Incarnate, Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity—not as a “lady.” Yet here we need to be flexible thinkers and realize that the personified Lady Wisdom of the Old Testament is a type, a figure of Christ himself. The nature of wisdom as such is in fact fully realized in the mysterious person of Jesus. He is Wisdom itself.
The Mystery of God’s Wisdom
Lady Wisdom gives voice to the mystery of God’s thought. For the Hebrews, God’s ways are immensely enigmatic. In the same way that God’s speaking, his word, creates the world, here we are confronted with his thinking. If we humans are subservient to a wisdom greater than ourselves, for none of us are completely wise, then how does God who is infinitely above all things, relate to wisdom? The tension is whether God serves wisdom or it serves him. Yet Lady wisdom reveals to us that in fact, God has possessed wisdom from all eternity (Prov 8:22). She predated all of creation and was with God from before the beginning. “Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth” (Prov 8:25 RSV). Wisdom’s pre-existence establishes her priority—her very age gives her authority over all lesser, younger “wisdoms.” It turns out that God does not serve wisdom, but he is wisdom.
Wisdom and Creation
Beyond that, Wisdom contributes to the project of creation: “then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always” (Prov 8:30). Wisdom participated in God’s act of creation. Just as God’s words bring forth creation, so his wise thoughts establish it. As John’s Gospel says of the logos, the Word: “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). God thinks and then speaks and thus creation comes into being. Wisdom is essential to the process. In one sense, all of this is an odd way to talk about God himself. Since God’s attributes are identical with his essence, talking about his Wisdom as if it is other than him is a bit of a misnomer. Yet in order for us to talk about him at all we need to make some distinctions.
The main point is that God’s wisdom trumps all human wisdom since it is not only far superior, but it is far more ancient. His wisdom is far closer to the source of all knowledge since it can be identified with God himself. No source of wisdom can surpass that which has existed from all eternity and even participated in the creation of the world. When we draw close to Wisdom either through prayer or through righteous living, we come into contact with “the first of his acts of old” (Prov 8:22).
image: Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock.com
