“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.
They are an interesting and intriguing collection. At issue is how they are read and understood. “How readest thou?” as Jesus in Luke’s Gospel reminds us. This is the point of the article. After naming the Old Testament books, it goes on to say, “And the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” (BCP, p. 700). The appeal here is to the Patristic period which worked out both the essential doctrines of the Christian Faith ultimately creedally expressed and the canonical texts of the Bible. The reference to Hierome means Jerome, the outstanding translator of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into the Latin Vulgate which was the defining text for 1500 years and more for the cultures of the West.
The Psalms in the Prayer Book bear quiet but eloquent testimony to the influence of Jerome’s translation. Latin titles derived from the first words of each psalm remain part of the Prayer Book Psalter and have since Coverdale’s 1535 translation; Laudate Dominum in the case of this morning’s psalm, Psalm 147, “O Praise the Lord”. They remind us of the greater legacy and lineage of scriptural doctrine and introduce an important qualifier about the reformation claim, sola scriptura, ‘scripture alone’. Yes, but in and through a tradition of translation and reception. In this case, the reformed elements of classical Anglicanism defer knowingly to the received understanding of the Fathers, referencing here Jerome, the Prince of Translators, and specifically to his understanding about the nature of these “other books.”
It is all a kind of wisdom. Our first lesson is from The Book of Wisdom, probably written in Alexandria during the latter part of the first century BC. It presents itself as being from the pen of Solomon and our lesson as the prayer of King Solomon, a figure from a far, far earlier period. It is really a fiction that is part of the larger discourse on wisdom belonging to a category of literature known as Wisdom Literature. Though not exactly historical, at least in our modern sense, it is reflective and theological. It complements, I think, our second lesson from Luke which bids us watch and wait and to read the times carefully. It is a kind of wake-up call to being thoughtful or wise, always looking to God and his truth active in our lives and our world. It entails an awareness of judgment and a sense of always living in the end-times where wisdom is precisely the only and essential thing.
But what is wisdom? Our age is profoundly conflicted and confused about wisdom. The age of information, the digital age, is not an age of wisdom. There is no real knowledge and no knower in the world of digital technology, let alone wisdom. What limited knowledge and possible wisdom might be found therein lies in us; we make the tools but do they unmake us, especially when we try to create machines that ‘know’, all the while forgetting our very selves, unwittingly unknowing our own knowing? All forms of technology are really about us.
The current fascination with AI leads to revealing and extravagant claims such as being able to solve very shortly all the diseases and problems of the world, even aging and death; an ultra techno-utopian vision which I think is delusional. It forgets at least two things: consciousness and creativity. It is a beguiling thought that we could create a machine that then has no need of its creator. Think about that for a moment and you see the whole pageant of creation and the fall. It is about thinking that we could exist without the God who created us, that we could determine the ultimate principles of our own existence. As if we were God. As if thought and being were simultaneous in us; a privilege and a truth that belongs and can only belong to God.
And mercifully so. In a way, the distresses and disorders of our world and day stem from collapsing everything into the practical, reducing everything to technique, to what Plato called techné. To be sure, there is an important relation between thinking and doing. The lessons of the Scriptures, especially the Wisdom literature, emphasize the priority and the importance of thinking in the face of the vagaries, the miseries and the persecutions of everyday life. In a way, the lessons come down to the salutary advice to think before you act, to be more thoughtful; rather necessary advice for such a thoughtless age, one might think. To be more thoughtful is to seek the wisdom that belongs to God, the gathering together of what is divided and incomplete into unity, order, and wholeness.
The technologies that fascinate and possess our imaginations are only tools, means to ends, but what ends? That is a perennial question, as Socrates shows that there is no knowledge, no wisdom, in techné, that techné is at best a knowing-how kind of activity yet without knowing-what and for what. Yet even the skill of crafts, techné and technique, all come from God. The task is to bring everything into the wisdom of God.
However much the prayer for wisdom has a practical application and rightly so, there remains a necessary and inescapable gap between our thinking and our doing that can only be resolved in God. Wisdom is with God, first and foremost. Wisdom here is the created wisdom that goes forth from God in the ordering and preserving of the created order. The word in Greek is sophia, from which we get philosophy, the love of wisdom.
Solomon’s prayer in Wisdom, along with Luke’s warnings, recalls us to the realities of the human condition; to our sufferings and uncertainties, our stresses and our anxieties, but, and the but is crucial, in the awareness of the need for wisdom which is with God and concerns how we are with God. It means a remarkable and necessary outlook, a certain approach and attitude of soul, much like we see in the “certain nobleman” in John’s Gospel. It is about looking to God and to what is in God rather than trying to control and manipulate things and ourselves and one another, even turning ourselves into machines. That word and wisdom of God goes forth sweetly and strongly, suaviter et fortiter, as a famous passage in Wisdom puts it. Wisdom is not constrained to things physical and material, not limited to place nor to us as created beings. The nobleman’s son was healed from afar in the going forth of that divine Word. Jesus does not have to come down to Capernaum. His word goes forth, in this case, to heal. Our stresses and anxieties are really about nothing more than our forgetting that wisdom belongs to God and not to us except as we look to him and are found in him.
I take that to be the great good news. It is not and cannot be about us; it is about God and what is with God and through him with us. Wisdom belongs to God, and ultimately comes only from God.
“With thee is wisdom”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 21, 2024 Morning Prayer