Jesus, Wisdom and you
Readings : Proverbs 1:20-33, PSALM 19, James 3:1-12, Mark 8:27-38
The Gospel call of Jesus to take up your cross and follow him has never been easy to understand, even more, to live out. The 1966 book ‘The Comfortable Pew’, reflected the way the heyday of the United Church of Canada was more a folk movement than Christian renewal. I was not here, but the words of Jesus seem to have been remembered because they were challenging, not comfortable. For churches over the 23 years of my Canadian experience, I see the tendency to be selfish as communities, to practice an independence between congregations that was always a contradiction to being a movement for human salvation. If we are not willing to help other congregations, we are hardly ready to carry a cross.
And larger than that, the widespread use of the cross has tamed it, made it banal. Today is the 100th anniversary of the illumination of the cross on Mont Royal. There is an interesting article today in the Montreal Gazette. The history demonstrates how the cross became nationalistic, owned but not for good reasons.
Enough complaining: I meant to wake us up with an acceptance of failure, because this is admitted in the gospel. Failure then, failure now. Challenge. Self-denial.
When I ask Jesus what carrying my cross means, it gets more difficult. We might wish that we had met Jesus face to face, although who of us wants to live in times of slavery, Roman occupation and violent control. First, he stood for resistance: take up the cross because Jewish resistance meant crucifixion, and with Jesus his resistance is to far more, against any religious oppression that went along with Roman armies. He confronts the inner life as much as the outer. The stories of him only make sense this way.
It is our tendency to separate material and spiritual realities that is strange and makes understanding the gospel more difficult. Some of the fake comfort seeking of church culture has been to make Jesus far too understandable. We have avoided physical sacrifices but even more, the inner life of our worship assumed he had blue eyes and spoke English. In the wish to bring Jesus close we have made his teaching too clear.
An ecological perspective helps to reclaim these things. In ecology, life and death are faced squarely, and the inner workings of a forest, a tree, a leaf, such complex things you cannot help but wonder, layer upon layer. Where things begin and end are unclear; a holistic view is truer, the fact that everything is part-whole, holonic, makes more sense.
In a pre-scientific world, the world of the Bible, things are inevitably part-whole, and often described in terms of wisdom, the key perspective to our first reading. I honestly wrote all that I have just shared with you, before I turned back to our Proverbs reading, to find that there too, there is a criticism of being simple. So, there is more to this than appears; it is not just a phenomenon of our time to resist complexity.
Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
21 At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
22 “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
The terrifying stupidity of false claims in the US elections arises from some deep realities, even deeper than this simmering civil war over race and slavery, this is about basic human nature and community life.
My trust is that Jesus knew this better than I do. He lived it out in his time and died and was raised because of it. Wisdom is about critique and then some more. Did you hear how it continued in Proverbs today?
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when panic strikes you,
27 when panic strikes you like a storm
and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
when distress and anguish come upon you.
28 Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer;
they will seek me diligently but will not find me.
For waywardness kills the simple,
and the complacency of fools destroys them;
33 but those who listen to me will be secure
and will live at ease without dread of disaster.”
Wait a minute. There is nonsense here. How is security and no fear of disaster possible if you take up your cross? Jesus knew this passage, and there are others with the promise of this security in God. I find the clues to Jesus’ gospel, across time and cultures, is in his parables how they insist on the inner and outer reality of things, to be embraced not denied. The security of God is different to never having bad things happen to you. Wisdom meant sharing in life’s meaning. And that is key.
The Jewish appreciation of Wisdom is traced back to the creation of everything, as an aspect of Godself. It is expressed in Christian scriptures too.
Wisdom of Solomon 9:9 With you is wisdom who knows your works and was present when you made the world. (Cf John 1;1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.)
Also 1 Enoch 42.2 Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men and found no dwelling place, (cf Johnn 1:11 He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.)
Also later in Proverbs Ch 3: 19 The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens…
So Jesus was recognised as a messenger of Wisdom, the disciples as sons and daughters of God, through their trust of this message of wisdom, that unites the inner and outer life, and speaks today of the way to save the planet, to resist simplistic popularism, embrace the beauty of complexity and interdependence; the true wealth that can be found in the beatitudes.
Jesus, Wisdom and you, is a description of your conversion. The call to carry our cross and follow comes from the deepest creative energy of God, for our re-creation, beyond our mortality. The question of what happens next, at death, becomes secondary to the question of our participation, as I said last week, our Yes to God, which is not about having all the answers. That is not wise.
Instead, the enigma of Jesus’ wisdom was always meant to be disturbing, to ask for a decision, a recognition, some reaction that linked inner and outer realities, in your life, in mine. The warnings about the tongue from James reflect how inner work has the burden of discernment, it is not anything goes because you are a Christian. Self-restraint is part of the recreative work of wisdom. Then there is a time for recognition and declaration. Peter declares Jesus is the Messiah, only his understanding is too safe, his understanding keeps Jesus safe; a Messiah could not suffer surely. But this is simplistic. Hasn’t Peter realised the Messiah is in a line of prophets who all suffered. Hasn’t Peter recognised the frustration of God with the Hebrew people who have been out of line from the start.
Jesus’ Bible is full of human failure and God’s endurance, God’s steadfast love, despite us.
We are alive at a time when the rest of the living world can regret human success. Such selfishness and destruction of our origins, out of control of the creative wisdom of God. But the planet keeps on giving. It is not simple. Wisdom tells me not to despair but to speak the truth in love, not from my reserves but God’s. It is like a love affair, when you have been won over, sometimes despite yourself.
‘Some enchanted evening’ was written as a love song between a French expat in the Pacific and a naïve US army nurse in the middle of the horrors of war. It recognised the particularity of meeting between two people, across culture, nationality, age and experience, that had huge challenges.
But suppose this can also be about each of us. Jesus, Wisdom and you. The only way in which I can take up my cross is because I have fallen in love; I have found, no I have been found, by a love that will not let me go, that knows me better than I know myself and seeks my wellbeing beyond death.
I want to declare the wisdom of creation goes further than all the romances of the world. God’s love makes all loves possible. Wins your heart without imprisoning it. God’s love never lets us go, but shares. Paradox is everywhere and joy is abundant.
In the musical, the older man urges his true love to recognise what was going on between them: on some enchanted evening a romance can hit you, ‘across a crowded room’, without reason. True wisdom is not to try to explain it, but to act upon it.
Have you felt Jesus and wisdom? Make her your own. Never let her go.
Amen.
(the song ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ in the film/musical is easily available on Youtube)