Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: ‘To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. O simple ones, learn prudence… (Proverbs 8:1-5 NRSV)

The book of Proverbs depicts Wisdom as a street-seller crying out at the crossroads, hawking her wares. It’s all there, it’s all on display, and you can have some if you really want it.

People live! People learn! People be who you were called to be! People have wisdom; receive understanding; learn to live and be free.

But we don’t! We don’t see God’s good creation when it’s right in front of our faces. We don’t hear God’s good news when it’s being shouted in our ears. We don’t smell the aroma of God’s presence when surely God is in all and above all and around all and beyond all we know and have and experience.

Yet still, we persist in our own cries out to God, out to the world, inwardly to ourselves: “Where shall wisdom be found? Where can we get wisdom? Where is the place of understanding? O God, make us wise!”

One of the classic Australian novels, The Getting of Wisdom, by Henry Handel Richardson explores the pursuit of wisdom in the life of a young woman who has dreams apparently beyond her station. In her pursuit of wisdom, Miss Laura Tweedle Rambotham does some very silly things—pretending that she is someone she is not and that she has the attention of someone who has barely noticed her. And yet, at the end of the story, despite its title, there is no great enlightenment. At the moment when Laura leaves school after facing up to the futility of her exploits and suffering humiliation for them, there is no sudden realisation of the meaning of life, merely the next step, the next episode in her life. There is simply life ongoing: learning, making mistakes, relating in community again and again and again, within the ordinary constraints and freedoms of a human life. Where is wisdom in all that? Where shall wisdom be found?

Paul has some thoughts about that. And the book of Romans has been identified as the place where those thoughts are most focussed. Where shall wisdom be found? Only in the unique relationship we have with God through Jesus Christ; and it is unique.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5 NRSV)

Wisdom personified in the Hebrew scriptures informs the early church’s understanding of Jesus and his relationship to God. Wisdom is right in our faces; right in our midst; right before our eyes. And wisdom is all about life, real life, human life, mortal life, created life.

The great preacher and theologian William Willimon puts it this way:

Wisdom is practical… Wisdom is about how you make your way in the world, something that you do in the home, a way of everyday life. Here is a faith that is not content to be relegated to Sunday glimpses of eternity (Kierkegaard’s phrase). It’s a faith that comes out to where we live and affects how we live.

True wisdom is about how we make our way in the world.

And that’s where Jesus and Wisdom collide. For in Jesus, Christian people acknowledge that we have a God who has made our way in the world—a God who has got dirty in the midst of creation; and ensured that we might participate in that practical wisdom of Christ.

We don’t make our own way in the world very well. We get side-tracked. We think we have to pretend to be something other than we are. We pretend to have the attention of others who barely notice us. We want to be important. But wisdom is about making our way in the world; and in order to do this, we have been given the gift of a God who makes our way for us—a God who has journeyed in God’s own creation as one of us.
In this God, our very existence is justified, our very striving is validated, our very creaturely existence is blessed. Through this God, we may know peace—peace, not because we do not need to continue to make our way; but because even as we do we know we are accompanied by one who knows what it is to make that way in a very mortal world—a God who has got dirty in God’s own creation.

And it precisely out of this understanding of a transcendent God, who has made a way in our world, that we also receive the understanding of the Trinity—of a God who is completely at home in relationship, of a God whose very nature is relational.
This is Wisdom--a God who loves us because that is God’s nature; a God who makes our way in the world; and a God who continues to journey with us as we seek to honour this precious, practical gift we have been given—the very justification of our own existence by a God who rejoices in the inhabited world and delights in us, the human race.