Day: October 20, 2024

“With thee is wisdom”

Wisdom belongs to God. It is a strong statement which speaks to what belongs to the Scriptures and philosophy, a strong reminder of what comes from God as the principle of our being and knowing. Ultimately, it is the underlying principle that belongs to the healing and restoration of our humanity, too, as the eucharistic Gospel from John today shows us about the nobleman who comes to Jesus seeking the healing of his son “sick at Capernaum”.

“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”, Jesus says. “Come down, ere my child die,” the nobleman tehn says, to which Jesus replies, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” “The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken and he went his way” only to learn from his servants that his son “liveth” and “began to amend at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth.” As John tells us, it was “the second sign that Jesus did”; A sign which points to the real truth and meaning of what is signified, namely, the power and wisdom of God. “Both we are and our words are in his hand”, Wisdom tells us, “as are all understanding and skill in crafts” (Wisdom 7. 16,17).

This point is captured in the prayer for Universities, Colleges, and Schools: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding” (BCP, p. 45). We have, I think, forgotten this which is perhaps why it is good to hear Solomon’s prayer for wisdom this morning from The Book of Wisdom. There is a sense in which the long and profoundly reflective Trinity season runs out in the themes of wisdom and mercy. We begin today in the Sunday Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer to read from the Apocrypha, books which stand between the periods of the Old Testament and the New Testament. They have a special status, expressed in the sixth article of our Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. The Articles belong themselves, I think, to the essential catholicism of the Anglican understanding, and so too with respect to the place of these books within that larger understanding.

The sixth article does not actually give a generic term for these books, such as ‘Apocrypha’, ‘Intertestamental’, or ‘Deuterocanonical’. It simply refers to them as “other books” before actually naming them individually; it doesn’t even clearly state that they are or are not canonical. The term ‘apocrypha’ means that which is hidden away; yet becomes revealed or known. They contribute, I think, to a deeper understanding of the relation between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures, on the one hand, and to the profound relation between philosophy and religion, on the other hand, in terms of language and ideas.

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“Go thy way, thy Son liveth”

The demand in the Gospel, it seems, is that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective. “Come down ere my child die”, the nobleman asks Jesus, having already “besought him that we would come down and heal his son; for he was at the point of death”. Something divine is at once recognised and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our desires and demands, then the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word, on the other hand, means that our understanding is made captive to the Word of God, not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.

The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. For where our understanding is captive to the Word, there the Word is allowed to shape our desires. In contrast to the all-absorbing tyranny of the self, they are shaped “according to thy word”. It is “thy will be done” and my will only as it is found in God’s will. Our wills find their place in God’s will through the resonance of that Word in us, that Word taking shape in us according to its sovereign freedom. That means more than “signs and wonders”, namely, what they properly signify: the very nature and wisdom of God himself. “Go thy way, thy son liveth”, Jesus tells him in response to his request. What then? Here is the express interest of John’s Gospel: “The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way.” What is that except his acting upon what he has heard? He gives his understanding over to the Word and places his desire under its power and truth.

“Thy son liveth” stands upon the condition of God having his way with us and not the other way around. The phrase is repeated in the Gospel when the nobleman learns that his son was alive and “began to amend” exactly “at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth”. God has his way with us through our wills finding their place in God’s will. It happens through the play of his Word upon our understanding. The desire for his son’s healing is simply placed with God.

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