by CCW | 9 November 2009 07:49
In the somber grey of November, in the season of scattered leaves and the culture of scattered souls, God’s Word gathers us and challenges us about the nature of our Christian lives. Should we somehow think that it is enough simply to hear God’s word, then we are rightly and roundly reminded not “to be hearers only” but to be “doers of the word” as well. Likewise, if we should be so foolish and brain-dead as to think that worship and public prayer and all the things belonging to religion are peripheral and really nothing worth, then we are rightly reminded to “receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls”.
The point is ever so clear. It is almost a commonplace. We are called to be what we believe and that means both hearing and doing; in short, it means both faith and works. Such is the strength of the message of James. It is a kind of sermon, and, indeed, one which complements beautifully The Sermon on the Mount, the gospel which has been read for more than a thousand years on All Saints’ Day.
To suppose that we can absent ourselves from where the Word of God is proclaimed and celebrated is as absurd as to suppose that we can hear and receive that Word without acting upon it. That is the strong message from The Epistle of St. James. He is calling us to scriptural wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God”. For “of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”. We live from that word of truth.
If anything is lacking from our contemporary world, I fear, it is wisdom. We immerse ourselves in action. We busy ourselves endlessly in the doing of this and that. We are literally afraid to stop and think, to read, let alone to pray. We easily fall prey to the greatest of follies and superstitions. Ours, too, is a most gullible age.
George Steiner, in his Massey Lectures of 1974, examined the consequences of the contemporary world where the Christian Faith was no longer respected and considered. A literary scholar, he observed how various forms of false religion immediately rushed in to fill the void left vacant by the cavalier dismissal of Christian Faith and Doctrine. He examined Marxism, Freudianism and the social-anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. For him these ideologies represent a perversion of the basic Judeo-Christian story; they actually depend upon that which they reject and deny.
But his lectures also touched upon another feature of contemporary culture – its ignorance and gullibility. His fourth lecture was entitled “Little Green Men”. And it dealt with the remarkable and extensive phenomenon of folly and superstition and the utter gullibility of so many in our contemporary culture – from astrology to UFO’s, as he puts it. He points to a loss of wisdom through ideological dogmatisms.
The traditions of wisdom belonging to our history and culture connect us with traditions of reflection in other cultures and religions. We have been reading in the Sunday Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from a collection of books which are found between The Old Testament and The New Testament and which are called by some Protestant denominations, The Apocrypha, which literally means “things hidden away” or by Roman Catholics as The Deuterononical texts, meaning texts added to the Canon of Scriptures. Things hidden away have been brought to light. Only if we attend to them can we hope to be enlightened.
A number of these books belong to a form of literature known as Wisdom Literature. Books such as Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament also are a form of Wisdom Literature. There is a profoundly reflective and meditative quality to these books, whether they impart an understanding of human or divine nature or provide sage advice for human lives individually or collectively by way of pithy sayings, by way of a dramatic dialogue of the soul or by way of a series of reflections about “the vanity of this world”, about “a striving after wind”, that opens us out to something more. “There is nothing new under the sun”, that most philosophical “preacher” of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, remarks, and it is a point of view which finds its complement in every other wisdom book of the Scriptures including the apocryphal books of wisdom like The Wisdom of Solomon.
The point is to make us look beyond appearances to discern the underlying principles of truth and reality; to learn wisdom is about not remaining trapped in the cave of shadows and sensuality, our contemporary world of ‘virtual reality’, we might say, as distinct from reality itself. It means to seek what is beyond the realm of changing appearances and to let wisdom rule our souls and the community of souls, as Plato would put it.
James gives a wonderful kind of summary of the viewpoint of that ancient wisdom literature when he observes that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning”. From the realm of the changing and variable nature of appearances, the realm of shadows mistaken for reality, as it were, we are called to attend to the wisdom of God, eternal and unchanging. God is, as the title of a recent book by a Canadian writer, David Adams Richards, puts it.
The Wisdom of Solomon, written long after Solomon was king, alludes to the idea that the good king is the wise king, an idea articulated by Plato that either philosophers must become politicians or that politicians must become philosophers in order for the community of souls, the state, to be well-ordered. In the biblical view, however, we are allowed a deeper look at evil as something which is more than mere ignorance. It concerns our willful rejection of what is good and right and true.
The biblical view calls us to attend to wisdom even in the face of this deeper understanding of evil. Why? Because we are allowed to see that our humanity has an end with God. And while from Plato’s Socrates, the great exemplar of ancient wisdom, we can learn that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, we learn from the wisdom of the Scriptures, too, that the wise and righteous man is “pleasing to the Lord” and “therefore he took him quickly from the midst of wickedness” since “God’s grace and mercy are with his elect”. Grace and mercy of course, defines the Communion of Saints.
In the New Testament, of course, as James indicates, “God’s grace and mercy” are also with us in the midst of the wickedness of the world so that we can withstand the temptations of our hearts and, instead, “be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures”. That means acting upon what we have heard and received.
It means not succumbing to the temptation of what The Wisdom of Solomon calls “the fascination of wickedness” which “obscures what is good”, already anticipating that profounder view of evil in the New Testament. James puts it in the language of looking into a mirror and then forgetting what we are like. But should we be “look[ing] into the perfect law of liberty and persever[ing], being no hearer that forgets but a doer that acts”, then, he says, we “shall be blessed”.
Such are the lessons of wisdom, the wisdom that comes from God, but it is the wisdom that we seek from God, looking beyond the world of the changing and asking from “the Father of lights” for the wisdom that will sustain us in the midst of the follies and the confusions, the sins and the wickednesses, of our world and day. It is the wisdom we badly need, then, now and always.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Trinity XXII, ‘09
(Morning Prayer)
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