The Joy of Proverbs

When Proverbs comes up in our Episcopal lectionary, I don't expect to smile. A lot of the book is a hard slog through warnings about bad consequences for bad behavior. But chapter 8 is about the joy of creation and the love of humanity.

Wisdom, personified as a woman, sets up seven pillars and sits in her throne at the city gate.  [Photo: Wisdom of God, 16th century icon, Russian]  She invites fools to dinner, that they may learn. And she relates her origin story:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.... When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth...

I already enjoy this ancient world view, where all the lands of the world were one big disc "drawn" on a world - wide ocean under a solid sky, waters kept at bay like a horde of barbarians. Then Wisdom develops the idea of the Lord's marking out the foundations:

I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

This is a sweet passage, pretty obviously resonant with the awe - inspiring openings to Genesis ("...and the Spirit moved over the face of the deep...") and to the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word." Our Church Fathers drew a distinct line between Wisdom, here "created at the beginning," and the Word identified with Christ in the Gospel. Our Nicene Creed underscores that line: "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ ... begotten, not made."

Even so, the apparent connection has been a sore spot ever since. At the web site Bible Researcher we can survey numerous modern scholars drawing distinctions between the figure of Wisdom and the "Logos" (translated as "Word"). They draw on 2000 years of commentary.

In the readings at Bible Researcher, I particularly enjoyed the observation that a word is not just the expression of an idea; words are the medium of an idea's conception. We also learn there that heretics who saw all created matter as evil tried to make "Wisdom" an intermediary between Creator and His material creation. Some of the passages seem to be treating Platonic ideas in some usages of "logos" as a kind of pollution of pure doctrine.

For myself, thinking not as a fashioner of doctrine, but as a writer trying to connect to my readers on the levels of thought and emotion, the passage in John clearly shows that the gospel writer was drawing on images already acceptable to his readers to express the early church's understanding of Jesus. He alludes not only to Genesis, Proverbs (and similar writings later set apart in the Apocrypha); and Plato's philosophy familiar to all educated people along the Mediterranean. I wonder if parsing John as lawyers would pick apart a statute isn't a case of missing the forest for the trees? Genesis, John, and this portion of Proverbs communicate to our hearts the awesome power and joy of the Creator.