In the ancient near east, in Palestine and Assyria and Babylon, a species of literature became popular in the centuries before Christ. Called "Wisdom Literature," it centered around . . . wisdom. Now that's a broad term, and it covers a lot of territory, but wisdom literature centered around how to live right, to live in harmony with your community and, importantly, with your god. Greek wisdom literature tended toward the philosophical, with high-minded discussions of the virtues and ideals. Hebrews, being of a practical bent, tended to produce sensible, down-to-earth wisdom literature. And most of the surviving Hebrew wisdom literature is in the Hebrew scriptures, which we Christians call the Old Testament. For the record, they are: Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach and, of course, the book we just read from, Proverbs. Two of these books, Wisdom and Sirach, are part of what we Protestants call the Apocrypha, and some folks include Lamentations and Psalms. The former of which I tend to include myself, but the latter, not so much.
So . . . most of us know Proverbs from the classic proverbial form: Doing W will lead to X, but doing Y will lead to Z. Here’s an example, from the tenth chapter, the fifth verse: “A child who gathers in summer is prudent, but a child who sleeps in harvest brings shame.” This was, of course, appropriate to a time long ago and a place far away, before the advent of child labor laws . . . but you get the picture: it’s practical advice that leads, presumably, to peace, prosperity and rightness with the Lord.
But there are also sections that speak more generally, more theologically, if you will, and our passage this morning is one of them . . . it’s appointed in the lectionary for Trinity Sunday, which is today, and I guess a good question is . . . why? It doesn’t speak of the Holy Spirit, in Hebrew the ruach elohim, the Spirit of God, nor does it speak of the Son of God, who will not be born for centuries yet . . . it speaks of a woman, in less politically correct times called Lady Wisdom.
Now, this isn’t the firsttime Proverbs has spoken of a woman, and to understand Woman Wisdom, we have to look at the chapter just before this, where a very different woman is discussed. The narrator calls herthe “loose woman,” and “the adulteress, with her smooth words.” And the narrator advises that a man call wisdom his sister, to keep from falling into the snares of the loose woman, and it gets downright explicit, describing a hapless male that falls into her clutches: “a young man without sense,” we’re told, just walking along the street near her corner, minding his own business in the twilight, in the evening, at the time of night and darkness. And the loose woman comes toward him, decked out like a prostitute, wily of heart. She is loud and wayward; her feet do not stay at home . . . at every corner she lies in wait. She seizes him and kisses him, and with impudent face she says to him: ‘. . . I have decked my couch with coverings, colored spreads of Egyptian linen; I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until morning . . . For my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey.’” And the young man—whose only crime is to have little sense, while the woman, notice is pure-D evil—the young man follows her, going like an ox to the slaughter, or maybe like a stag to the trap until an arrow pierces his entrails—hey, I’m just quoting scripture, here—and the narrator tells his audience not to let their hearts turn aside to her ways, for ”Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death.”
Contrast that to Woman Wisdom, who is described in our passage as standing in the gates, in a place usually reserved for (very male) judges, the wise men who decided disputes amongst the people, and it’s a place of honor not normally associated with women, and from that position—again from a part we did not read—she gives gentle advice: “learn prudence” she says, unlike the young man of the last passage, and hear her because—unlike the loose woman—she will speak noblethings, and from herlips will come what is right, because wickedness—like that spoken by the adulteress—is abomination to her lips.
And it’s important to see that here in Proverbs, we have a pattern that pervades a lot of literature, especially that written by men: a woman is either really, really good, perfect, really or she is really, really bad: wanton, scheming, with few redeeming values. There’s no in between. In the movies, there’s often the “good girl”—whom the hero, who’s a lot like the naïve man in proverbs when it comes to women—and the “bad girl,” who gets hold of the hero first, and twists him six ways to Sunday. Finally, virtue wins, the bad woman gets hers, and the hero gets the woman who is virtuous, whose mouth utters truth and for whom wickedness is an abomination unto her lips. A particularly clear version of this scheme is the Bond movie, where there is always exactly one “bad girl” and one “good girl,” and although Bond is virtuous, he is hardly naïve.
The thing is, here in Proverbs—as in the Bond flicks—the only one allowed to be human in the triangle is the man. Bond is quite a complex character—no, really!—but the Bond women are types: good and evil. In Proverbs, the man is not bright—he has no sense—but neither is he super-bad, like the loose woman, nor wondrously virtuous, like Lady Wisdom. In fact, though Wisdom clearly speaks in Chapter 8, the first half is written for and is a warning tothe man: don’t be like that putz who was lured into a night of debauchery by the prostitute, listen instead to the one whose words are “better than jewels,” who is more wondrous than anything you can desire; who is, in other words, perfect.
Over the centuries, the Church has played into this dualistic fantasy very nicely, thank you very much: Mary the mother of Jesus is so perfect, according to the Roman Catholic Church, that she remained a virgin throughout her life, and the Gospels must be mistaken, somehow, when they talk about his siblings, or they’re really cousins, or something . . . and because the church already had it’s perfect Woman Wisdom in Mary, it had to create a loose woman to be the epitome of all feminine evil, and so they slandered Mary of Magdala, Mary Magdalene, even though there is not a shred of evidence—within scripture or without—that she was a woman of ill repute.
And over the years, woman have struggled against this impossibly high standard, reinforced by literature, the fashion industry and most insidiously the church, cause if you’re not Mary the mother of Jesus, if you’re not Lady Wisdom in all her perfection, then you must be Mary Madalene or the loose woman of Proverbs, because there ain’t no in between, the patriarchy won’t allow it.
And reading Proverbs, one might be forgiven for thinking that it is just one more example of sexist literature—how come one of the extremes isn’t male, huh, huh?—except for one thing, and it’s found in the second part of our passage: an exquisite example of Hebrew prose in which Wisdom tells us who she is . . . “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.” Hmmm . . . does this sound familiar? She continues: “When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth—when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil.” And now it’s clear: Lady Wisdom is evoking the first chapter of Genesis, when the first thing that was there, beforehe created the heavens and the earth. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” What is around when God creates the heavens and earth? The deep, the waters . . . and Lady Wisdom is present beforethat.
But that’s not all this should remind us of . . . in the beginning, before earth she was there . . . and in the first Chapter of John, someone else was there in the beginning. Remember? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” Let’s see . . . in the beginning was the Word, and we know who that was, and in the beginning was also Lady Wisdom, and, of course, God . . . and it’s getting kinda crowded, isn’t it?
And in fact, this is why this passage is appointed for us to read on Trinity Sunday, isn’t it? Because through all the trappings of Pre-Christian literature, through all the male-dominated language, what shines through is the absolute complexity of God, the fact that God is bigger than anything our finite, gendered minds can think about it. Of course, we’re not to take this literally, we’re not to believe that Wisdom is a Lady—any more than Luck—any more than we are to take the Adam and Eve story literally. And in fact, one of the hottest topics in biblical scholarship today is how to take this . . . is Wisdom intended to be a feminine aspect of God? Does she represent a now-lost feminine, matriarchal view? Is she a biblical remnant of a more fully-realized feminine portrayal of the divine?
One reason this is such a hot topic is that there is a lot of resistance from the more conservative scholarship contingent. It was brought to a head around the turn of the millennium with the Presbyterian-sponsored “Reimagining Conference” which sought to broaden our ways of looking at and conceiving of God so that it is more inclusive, primarily of gender. Now, nobody would argue that God is really an old white man, we all acknowledge—or we say we acknowledge—that God is neither male or female, black or white, etc, etc, etc . . . but maybe you remember the uproar when, rather than pray to father—as many of us were brought up to do—they prayed to mother. But what really got people going is when they addressed their prayers to Sophia. And why did they do that? Well, what is SophiaGreek for? You got it . . . Wisdom.
Sisters and Brothers, I have no idea what the absolute truth of the matter is, I have no idea whether Wisdom is a member of the Trinity, or a co-equal aspect of God . . . whether the “we” in Genesis points to God and Wisdom and Christ, or what. All I know is that the author of Proverb struggled to put into words something that was far greater, far more transcendent, far more inclusivethan any of us can ever imagine. As it says in Genesis, God created humankind, male and female God created them. Lady Wisdom helps us affirm and celebrate that. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment