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   The 8th chapter of the Book of Proverbs, from which our first lesson is taken (verses 1-17), is one of the classic passages of wisdom literature in the Old Testament. Wisdom, personified as a woman, raises her voice on the heights and summons the children of men to pay attention to what she has to say.

Her message, on one level, is the ethical teaching of the Old Testament, the way of righteouness and the paths of justice (v. 20). “Fear of the Lord is hatred of evil” (v. 13).

But there is a deeper level to her teaching, because wisdom is as eternal as God. She is the plan according to which creation proceeds (v. 22) and to which God himself is bound. Wisdom is the connecting principle between the deity and creation. Therefore she is the repository of mysteries hidden since the foundation of the world.

In the New Testament Jesus takes on the mantle of heavenly wisdom. In the verse just preceding today’s second reading (Matthew 11:20-30), he declares in an evident self-reference, “Wisdom is justified by her deeds” (v. 19).

Modern theologians often emphasize Jesus’ “secularity.” The Jesus Seminar even referred to him irreverently as “a party animal.” More seriously, Jesus is presented as the man for others, the one who condemns the unrepentant Galilean cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida (Matthew 11:21) and proclaims God’s preferential option for the poor. It is surely no accident that the South American revolutionary Che Guevara, whose picture is one of the most familiar icons of our day, is an eery likeness of conventional representations of Jesus.

I have no problem with emphasizing Jesus’ secularity, a so-called “Christology from below,” but it is not the whole story. Towards the end of our second reading we have a saying which is so different from the way Jesus usually speaks in the synoptic gospels and so similar to the Fourth Gospel that it has been called “the Johannine meteorite.”

All things have been delivered to me by my Father,
and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
Matthew 11:27

Here Jesus declares his role as the mediator of heavenly wisdom. He reminds us that, over and above our ethical obligations and social responsibilities, we are called to knowledge, a knowledge which comes not from the observation of the external world but from within, a knowledge which is mediated by the inner Christ, who dwells in each one of us.

Like heavenly wisdom, Christ the Savior invites us to come and find rest in him (v. 28). His yoke is not the burdensome imposition of some additional external law; it is easy and light (v. 30), and in the learning which comes from the gentle and lowly Jesus we shall find rest for our souls (v. 29).

September 25, 2005

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