Do you consider yourself to be a wise person? Stupid question. I hope you answer yes!
Wisdom is not the same as intelligence. I’m sure you can name any number of people who are quite smart yet not very wise. Similarly there are lots of very wise people out there who were never any good at academics. Webster’s Dictionary defines wisdom as, “quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action”. Said differently, wisdom is applying knowledge with good judgment.
Wisdom was a big part of ancient Greek culture. It’s no surprise that as Paul writes to the people in Corinth, which of course is a city in Greece, that the idea of wisdom is big. Paul wants to point out that not all wisdom is the same. Human wisdom is different than God’s wisdom. As he does this, however, he knows he has a fine line to walk. People cannot live totally ignorant of applying knowledge with good judgment.
Wisdom tells us that we should invest in those things which will be productive – those things which show potential. Also withdraw resources from those things which don’t.
Automobiles are a good example. I’ve heard many people that drive their cars until the doors fall off. There’s some wisdom to that. Automobiles are expense, yet they depreciate rapidly. They wear out, rust out, and they deteriorate from sunlight too. It is wise to get the most of them as possible. And yet there is the time when the doors are falling off and wisdom says it’s time stop investing.
When people say they drive their cars until the doors fall off they are using that figuratively not literally. But it does remind me of the first minivan I owned were the one door would literally fall off! The tracks that held on the sliding side door were rusted and bent. You could push the door back part of the way, but if you went too far you’d get to the bent track and the first set of rollers would fall off. Many times I had pulled off the body panels, put the rollers back on, tried to bend the track into the right shape, and then get going again. There was one time however, and I don’t remember the whole story, but someone pushed the door so far and so fast that not only did one roller come off the whole door flew off the side of the van! Getting it back on was hard. I never knew the door was that heavy!
Despite the door falling off I kept driving it. Finally though, we did get to the time when it needed a lot of work. It would have cost thousands to repair it and keep it safe. When I bought another one the dealer offered $50 for it, not even it’s value in scrap metal! Would it have been wise to continue to invest in a $50 vehicle. Of course not! That would have been stupid.
Paul does not want to totally undermine applying knowledge to just judgement in action. However, he does want point out that God’s idea of wisdom runs totally counter to that.
For the ancient Greeks wisdom was a path to fulfillment and happiness. Through observation of the natural world one would discover orderliness, harmony. Humans should then observe the nature world and imitate such movements. In so doing their lives would be in alignment with the universe as created by the gods. Such alignment was wisdom and it would lead to happiness and wholeness. Plato’s work Timaeus is probably the most enduring of all of Greek wisdom. Here are some excerpts from 47a-c: “This much let me say however. God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence, which are akin to them, the unanxious to the anxious, and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.”
For the Greeks observation, science, math, and philosophy all coordinated to bring about happiness and harmony. That is the background Paul is writing to. He, however, wants to counter that. In his words to the Corinthians a few verses before our reading we have his famous lines, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (1:22-23)
Indeed he is right, especially about the foolishness of Christianity. We do well as Christians to realize that our core beliefs are complete and total nonsense, especially in light of Greek philosophy. They make no sense. They are not wise in any way shape or form. Numerous place in the New Testament you find the authors taking jabs at Greek wisdom, especially Plato.
Contrast Christianity with Greek wisdom. We believe that Jesus of Nazareth, charismatic leader and miracle worker, in the prime of his life surrounded himself with a bunch of societal nobodies, and some of them societal rejects. He didn’t make overtures to the rich and powerful. He did not try to gain access to them or court their favor. He did not seek great schools of thought or admission to the world’s greatest teachers. And then one year, about a third of the way into the 1st Century, he came to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover holidays. He challenged the established leadership openly and got into a lot of trouble for it. One of his own followers betrays him to the authorities. Jesus is captured and arrested. He is given opportunities to defend himself and chooses not to. With no resistance whatsoever he allows himself to be executed in the most shameful and painful method the Romans had devised.
And that’s it. Told in that way that’s a pretty absurd center to a belief system. There’s no wisdom to that. Wisdom says use your abilities to the best of what they can be. If you have qualities that you can employ to make your life easier or more comfortable, or if you can rise above others into leadership, you should do so.
Yet Paul writes, “I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (2:1-2)
Salvation flies in the face of human wisdom – Greek wisdom at least. And yet, while keeping our critical thinking caps on – in other words, not becoming complete idiots – Paul invites us into God’s own wisdom. For from God’s perspective the humanly foolish story of Jesus is actually a story of wisdom and power. It is a path to wholeness.
Paul says in verse 6, “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.”
The wisdom of Christ is this: contrary to what the world teaches, you become your fullest self by emptying yourself. Ironically Jesus embraces the fullness of what it is to be human – he embraces the fullness of what it is to be alive – by dying. That does not mean, however, that we are to go out and die at the earliest opportunity that presents itself! Jesus didn’t even do that. It does mean that self-emptying is the path to fulfillment. Sociologists actually tell us that the happiest people in the world are those who are the most generous.
It is important to note here that coinciding with the rise of Christianity was also a movement now called Gnosticism. If you were a fan of Dan Brown’s book The Davinci Code you may be familiar with it; except Dan Brown’s book reverses what the gnostics actually believed. While Brown suggests the gnostics were in favor of empowering women, it was actually the earliest Christians who were in favor of that – although the story is admittedly very mixed. The gnostics, by contrast considered the universe to be an “abortion” of the female deity Sophia. And it follows from that that women are fundamentally inferior beings to men and the root of all evil. But hey, Dan Brown reversed that message and sold a lot of books, so who’s actually the wise one?
Anyway, the church library has a number of reliable resources about Gnosticism and I can point them out to you if you’d like.
Let me end by applying the idea of wisdom as Paul writes about it to our current culture. Racial tensions in America are very high right now – higher than they’ve been in decades.
There’s a certain wisdom that could be taught to white people: You are in power. Keep it. Protect it. Make use of it for your own benefit. Makes sure it is kept safe from those who do not know how to use it. Raise yourself as high as your abilities will allow you to rise.
And yet, realize how much effort is going into preservation and fear.
Christian teaching is that we are all equally in need of God’s grace, yet we are all safe, secure, and whole in God. Nothing can take that from us whether we are educated or ignorant, wise or foolish. Christian wisdom says that that we will be stronger as a people, stronger as a nation, when every person has the support, the opportunity, and the drive to develop everything that they are into their fullest potential.
When Paul writes what we had as our final verse from 1 Corinthians today, “Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to know one else’s scrutiny, ‘For who has know the mind of the Lord as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ,” we realize those are not words of arrogance, but in light of the cross, words of humility.
May you have the wisdom of God, which is the wisdom of the cross, the wisdom that realizes fulness of life comes by giving of life rather than taking, and may you feel whole by living in that wisdom.
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