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Sunday, July 19, 2020

She is the Book of God's Wisdom--the feminine generosity of God's love


“She is the book of God’s commandments…”
--Baruch 4:1


She is.  In Hebrew literature, wisdom is depicted as feminine, referred to as “she.” And the first question I always stumble over is: why? Why would a patriarchal society depict this essential quality as feminine? There are those who argue that it is simply a figure of speech, like calling a car or a ship “she.” But, throughout much of the wisdom literature she is not only referred to with a feminine pronoun, but also with feminine traits, feminine attributes. As far as I can tell from my brief research, there isn’t an answer, but only speculation. But, for me the question itself seems so much more important:  Why? What did this patriarchal society see in the feminie that conformed to their archetype of wisdom?  Was it simply that they had seen too many men behave like fools? Too many men, kings, judges, priests, rabbis, merchants and even shepherds had made it utterly clear that wisdom wasn’t something that came easily to men?

I don’t know. But, in my own foolishness, I like to think about it.

And speaking of foolishness, here is a brief reflection on this passage.  First, Baruch is one of the Deuterocanonical books in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but not a part of the canon in Protestant or Jewish scripture. It is a prophetic work attributed to Jeremiah’s secretary, Baruch (app. 580 BC), though some scholars think it was actually written by an anonymous author in the first century. 

Now, back to that She who is the book of God’s commandments. This phrase comes near the end of a lengthy passage on the foolishness of Israel.  In ironic and sometimes bitter terms, the author dwells on Israel’s rejection of wisdom, in fact her almost complete ignorance of her ways.  “Nothing has been heard of her in Canaan, nothing has been seen of her in Teman…” (3:22) and no one seems to know her path.  The prophet tells the people, look around! You want to know why you were conquered and dragged off to Babylon?  Because you have “forsaken the fountain of wisdom!” And what is that fountain? The book of God’s commandments! The Word of God. The Law!  Israel is suffering in exile because she rejected the Law.  And –as we see time and again in the books of the prophets—to reject the Law of God is to choose exile; it is the path of foolishness.  God’s law is love, mercy, justice; to reject it is to dwell in anxiety and fear and isolation. A permanent state of pandemic, if you will!

So, how do we return from exile?  How do we find Wisdom? Open the book! She is the book of God’s commandments.  For us, today, we look at our Bibles and we might wonder, who can read all that? And where do you start?  For me, it was page 1; Genesis 1. But, for some, it might be easier to start with a psalm (open your Bible right at the middle and you will probably find yourself in the Psalms).  Or maybe you want to read one of the Gospels first. Mark is the shortest.  But, no matter what—open your Bible; just open the book. She is there; in fact, she is the book. She dwells there in the revelation of God’s loving presence; a wisdom beyond any you could imagine.

Lost in my Covid anxieties and distracted by movie making, I missed a few book of the Bible as I was reading my way through the prophets. I want to go back and pick up a few of these as I go. This is the first of one of those looks back.

I think one of the things God’s word teaches us, is to stop being so distracted. Be attentive, be present to the moment.  As Christ reminds us in Matthew, don’t worry about tomorrow. There is enough of life today, if only you will live it. 

This morning, a man and his wife were walking past as I sat on the porch. I waved, and they waved back. And then I noticed them pausing, and overheard him telling her,
“He’s that guy! The one who walks and reads at the same time.”

So, I got up and walked over to say hello.  As I came up, the man asked me,

“What do you have there?”

And I looked down to see I was still holding a couple of pages of poetry from a friend. I had been lingering over them as I sipped my coffee. As I started to tell them what it was, I heard his wife exclaim:

“Oh Lord, he loves poetry! You should see the shelves of books he’s got!”

And suddenly, on a Sunday morning, here I was standing at the curb talking with an almost stranger about something we both hold so very dear.  And I wondered: Does this happen to anyone else? I love this life. I love the way the squirrels leap about my lawn. I love the way the sunlight looks on the green of the leaves. I love the sudden comforting breeze on a July afternoon. And I love the way strangers become friends. 

Less than an hour later, this couple drove up in front of our house and the man got out of his can and handed me a book from his shelf, some poetry he loves and wanted to share. 

And that seemed to me a revelation of its own.  We don’t hoard or hide the things we truly love. We share them. Maybe that is how God feels about His law. In fact, maybe that is the heart of His law: the golden rule, so to speak.  Be generous. Is that what it means to be wise? That beautiful generosity of self-giving? Kind of like a mother's love?  In my foolishness, that’s another one of those things that I wonder about.

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