Wisdom, Word, and Spirit

Mary, Seat of Wisdom, by Br Mickey McGrath OSFS

Propers: The Second Sunday of Christmas, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Wisdom, in the Bible, began as an idea, a simple question: How do I live a good life? Not an easy life, mind you. Not even a happy life, as we tend to think of happiness today. But a good life, a life in accord with all that is beautiful, good, and true.

Unsurprisingly, there are differing opinions on this. And their debate—their argument—makes up the section of the Scriptures which we call wisdom literature: stuff like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach, Job, &c.

Some of them say that a good life is one in which you keep your nose clean: work hard, do right, and you’ll be rewarded, either by God or as the results of the labors themselves. Others think it’s about passion, the wild abandon of romantic love. And still others sound cynical, jaded about the whole “do good, get good” ethos found in their more simplistic, doe-eyed predecessors. These latter witnesses know quite well that bad things do happen to good people, and that cheaters often do prosper.

For them wisdom is found in honesty, in admitting that all is vanity, all things in this world pass away, and that death is the ultimate equalizer. Wisdom here must be found beyond this world, beyond that which we can merely see or touch. So, in summation, some are looking for goodness, some for beauty, and some for truth. And it is the great insight of the Greeks—who shared a love of wisdom with the Jews—that these three are really one. Goodness and Beauty and Truth are One.

They are infinite desires that can never be sated. We can never have enough of goodness or beauty or truth. We shall always crave more. And while we may find them in specific instantiations here below, the ideals themselves are forever transcendent. Beauty, for example, may be in the eye of the beholder—different people may find different things to be beautiful—yet the experience of beauty, and the transcendence it imparts, lifting us beyond ourselves, that is universal and eternal.

As is our experience of God. Every culture, every religion, every serious spiritual tradition understands mystical experience: the human encounter with Goodness, Beauty, and Truth; or put another way, Consciousness, Being, and Bliss. Everybody knows God, with a capital G, even if we use different words, different names, to describe the One who is ultimately beyond all description. And here I’m not saying anything that Paul doesn’t preach in his epistles or the Acts of the Apostles.

So the desire for wisdom, the desire for a good life, leads us inevitably to God, even if we don’t call Him that. People who seek out truth seek God. People who love beauty love God. People who believe in goodness believe in God. This too is wisdom. Because it leads us to awe! It leads us to humility. It leads us to wonder. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the Scriptures tell us. And that fear is awe. When we approach the world with a sense of wonder, we approach it in gratitude.

At this point, things get interesting. For if indeed wisdom is the desire to lead a good life; to live in accordance with all that is beautiful, good, and true; and if God does not simply happen to be beautiful, good, and true but is Himself the Beautiful, the Good, and the True; then doesn’t that make wisdom in some sense God? Doesn’t that mean that finding wisdom and finding God are in the final tally the same? And if so, are we really finding wisdom—or is Wisdom finding us?

Here we mark a shift in our wisdom literature, a shift in the scriptural debate. Wisdom ceases to be an idea—or even an ideal—and becomes instead a woman, a mysterious divine feminine figure who is somehow both God and yet from God. She occupies a nebulous borderland between Creator and Creation, between God and all the cosmos. Recall the words of Wisdom read for us this morning:

I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist. I dwelt in the highest heavens, and my throne was in a pillar of cloud. Alone I compassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depths of the abyss. Over waves of the sea, over all the earth, and over every people and nation I have held sway. Among all these I sought a resting place; in whose territory should I abide?

Now you tell me: Are those the words of a creature, or of the Creator?

How about this?

A holy people and blameless race Wisdom delivered from a nation of oppressors. She entered the soul of a servant of the Lord, and withstood dread kings with wonders and signs. She gave to holy people the reward of their labors. She guided them along a marvelous way, and became a shelter to them by day, and a starry flame through the night. She brought them over the Red Sea, and led them through deep waters; but She drowned their enemies, and cast them up from the depth of the sea.

That’s the story of the Exodus, the story of God leading His people Israel out from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. Yet the action here is attributed to Wisdom. She entered Moses. She worked wonders and signs. Wisdom guided the Israelites and parted the Red Sea and drowned the armies of Pharaoh. Wisdom, it seems, is God on earth, God at work among angels and humankind. What does this mean for our understanding of Jesus, or of God the Holy Spirit? What does this mean for the Christian formulation that God is both Three and yet One?

Think back to the beginning—to Genesis 1—in which God is portrayed as speaking Creation into being. “Let there be light!” He proclaims, and there is light! Now this is metaphor, of course. We do not imagine that God has lips or a tongue. Yet let us lean into the image, shall we? What do you need in order to speak, in order to manifest your intentions, your thoughts, outside of you, out into the world?

Well, the first thing you need is the thought itself: the idea, the purpose, the reason that you intend to express anything it all. The Greek for this is λόγος, from which we derive terms such as logic or logo. In English we call it the Word. But the Word alone is not sufficient if you intend to send it out. For that you need to give it life, to give it breath, to give it power: to voice it out into the cosmos, so that your thoughts become physical, become external realities. And the Greek term for this, for life and for breath, is πνεῦμα—which we translate as Spirit.

God, then, creates through His Word and His Spirit. There is an idea of God in the mind of God. This is His Word, His Son, the Image of the Father. God then sends forth His Word by imparting to Him His breath, His life, the power of His very Being. This is the Holy Spirit, who is the breath and life of God. Now tell me: Are your thoughts, your words, separate from you, or are they you? Is your life, your breath, you power to create, separate from you or is it you? Am I not, at least in part, what I say and what I do? What else, after all, do you have to go by?

So then both the Word of God and the Spirit of God are themselves God, yet are also from God—which is exactly how the Scriptures speak of holy woman Wisdom. If God is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; and Wisdom is life in accordance with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; then Wisdom is God’s own self-expression; both between the persons of the Trinity—Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit—and also between the Creator and His Creation.

Indeed, sometimes Christians speak of Jesus Christ, the Word and Son of God, as holy Wisdom, αγία σοφία. Sometimes Christians speak of the Holy Spirit, who is the power and breath of God, as His Wisdom, imparting life to all and every world. And sometimes Christians speak of Wisdom as something somewhat different: Wisdom not as a Person of the Trinity, but as the self-disclosure, the relationship of Goodness and Truth and Beauty, both within God and from God. Same story, different versions, all of them are true.

See, I find this sort of thing fascinating, because it really drives home how the reality of God, the depthlessness of His self-giving love—His eternal outpouring in Wisdom of His Word and His Spirit into our world, into us—is a wonder and a glory and a miracle infinitely beyond all words. Or at least beyond our words! We can only glimpse the reality of who and what God is in Jesus Christ our Lord, the one true Word of God; manifested throughout the length and breadth of His Creation, yet born to us of Mary, in the flesh, at Bethlehem of Judea. For:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came into being through Him … And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son … It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made Him known.

To live, O Christian, in the Spirit of Christ, in the Body and Blood of Christ—this truly is Wisdom.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.