Who is wise and understanding among you?
The letter of James poses that question rhetorically, because the author already has an answer ready for us: “wisdom… is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” If that’s what you’re like, you are indeed wise. But since I asked the question here and you remained silent, perhaps that means you’ve been arguing among yourselves about who is the wisest?
That was a laugh line. We disciples of Jesus are distinguished by our arguing, then and now!
Of course you know who I am alluding to, and its not actually you. My heart goes out to those awkward disciples we were introduced to in the Gospel today. First we meet them misunderstanding Jesus once again—that’s a particular theme for Mark—and then they’re unable or unwilling to respond to their teacher’s simple question about what they’d been doing. They look pretty foolish, even before they are upstaged by a child.
Because all of today’s lessons, which—in one way or another—contrast wisdom and folly—this week I have found myself thinking about the wise people I am acquainted with. As you may know, I work for our bishop overseeing diocesan ministries with young people. One of the people on my working team is a young man who is here to do a year of service with the Episcopal Service Corps, which is a national program designed to give young people—mostly just out of college—an opportunity to live in Christian community while serving in a local nonprofit or church setting.
Brian the newest member of my team and—as anyone would do with a new colleague—I am trying to figure out his skill set. He’s contemplative and rather quiet; not the obvious person to lead icebreaker games at a youth event. But as we were meeting last week to debrief NightSong, a monthly young adult worship and fellowship event (ask me about that later) Brian offered a profound and important insight into the social and spiritual dynamics of the gathering. Which he had actually never even attended before last week. But such are his powers of observation that he saw things the rest of us who’ve been involved in this ministry for a long time had missed. And it suddenly struck me that what Brian—the youngest member of our team—brings to our working group is… wisdom.
The Letter of James has often been described as the New Testament’s book of wisdom, which is no doubt why we’re hearing it read alongside the lesson from Proverbs, one of the principle repositories of wisdom literature in the Old Testament. Some New Testament scholars argue that the Letter of James is in the Biblical canon in part as antidote to Paul’s letters. To the extent that James insists that faith manifest in good works, it complements Paul’s theology of grace. I would argue, however, that wisdom in the Biblical sense is not merely about grace nor works—what we might also call things given by God and things done by us—but rather encompasses and indeed transforms our understanding of both. To be wise is to share in the perspective of God, which is at once an unearned gift—that would be grace—and a practice we can cultivate. That would be works.
And works there are in our lesson from Proverbs, no? The capable wife has often been held up to Christian women as that unattainable ideal of multitasking mom who does it all… and makes her husband look great in the process. But this valiant woman—which Anna Horen points out is a better translation of her title—is not so much the perfect woman we can never be as she is a symbol for something of God. We know this because the text in Hebrew is an acrostic: the initial letters of each verse form the complete Hebrew alphabet. Which means that the Proverbs 31 woman was intended to be a kind of “word icon” of universality; an alpha to omega summary of what can only be wisdom itself. Notice her attributes: she is generous, discerning, creative and has a gracious way with words. “To you, O people, I call,” speaks the personified voice of wisdom in Proverbs 8, “I have insight, I have strength… My fruit is better than gold, even fine gold, and my yield than choice silver. I walk in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice,… endowing with wealth those who love me, and filling their treasuries.”
So our lessons teach us that a socially marginal person—a woman—can be an image of God’s own Wisdom. Meanwhile Jesus, a wisdom teacher, offers a child as a model of discipleship. These unlikely archetypes suggest to me that we really need to pay attention to the wisdom that appears where and with whom we may least expect it. God gives wisdom where God will. That is how grace works. That’s good news.
The other good news is that wisdom can also be learned, which means that there’s hope for we old fools. Peacefulness, gentleness and mercy are things we can practice every day. And we can listen to and learn from the wise, as was my experience this week. The lesson I learned from Brian brought to mind also the Rule of St. Benedict, a discipline for attaining wisdom if ever there were. Did you know that it actually codifies the importance of listening to the young? The rules for monks meeting in council say that “God often reveals what is better to the younger.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls his disciples—which of course include us as well—to break the patterns of our conditioned thinking about who is first and who is mature. But he is hardly alone in doing so; rather he stands in the long Biblical tradition of God upending social conventions and categories, including conventions about whom we might consider to be wise. It is costly to acknowledge the authority of the last, the youngest, or the person from the wrong social group. Which might be a child, or a woman, or a person of color, or a movement like Black Lives Matter, or an immigrant or refugee speaking a language you don’t understand. Or a fourteen-year-old Muslim boy who builds a clock and brings it to school. When God calls us to learn from the person we’d otherwise overlook, I can almost guarantee that it will feel very awkward, if not downright scary.
But then, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” as Proverbs has assured us. And while changing our assumptions can indeed be scary, the fear that the Bible speaks of here is actually something more akin to awe. It’s the kind of fear that does not so much cause us to run away as draws us closer, albeit trembling. In a way, cultivating the discipline of awe requires that we assume something of the trust, wonder, and openness of a child within ourselves. But then, he told us it would be like that: “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” said Jesus, “and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
Valiant woman, I love you, thanks for always making me look good!