Christ as Living Bread and Wisdom of God and All in All

12 Pentecost proper 15  August 19, 2012

Proverbs 9:1-6  Psalm 34:9-14

Ephesians 5:15-20  John 6:51-58

Lectionary Link

  Which do you prefer as a name?  Chokmowth?  Sapientia?  Or Sophia?  These are the words for Wisdom in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.  I suspect that many of us prefer Sophia; it sounds more romantic to our ears and many of us grew up watching a popular Italian actress with that name.  Chokmowth? For us, the guttural sounds that we associate with clearing phlegm from our throats do not sound very romantic, though in other languages they can incite poetic trance.

  From our Hebrew Scripture lesson we have read about Chokmowth or Sophia, we have read about Wisdom.  Wisdom in both Hebrew and Greek are feminine.  And this is interesting since more masculine and patriarchal notions of the divine seem to be more prominent in the Judeo-Christian traditions.  The Hebrew Scripture at times seem to present parallel battles in heaven as on earth.  As Israel asserted a covenant with the Sky God El and the unpronounceable and unspeakable Yahweh became the preferred name of God, Israel was also encountering the Canaanite peoples who had a pantheon of gods and goddesses.  The earth and fertility goddesses were seen as competitors with the one God El, Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai.   So as a radical monotheism came to the people Israel, it would seem that what also came was a notion of a sky or transcendent God who was addressed using masculine pronouns.  Was there to be no place for the use feminine metaphor in referring to God in the Hebrew religion? 

  Chokmowth or Sophia or Wisdom came to be articulated as a fitting metaphor for God.  If God is purely transcendent or above all or completely different from human experience, then God could not be even known in such inferior human experience.  So the only way we can even confess a transcendent God is to also admit that God is an Immanent Being or a God who is accessible in some way to human experience.  And this is where the notion of Sophia or Wisdom comes in.  God’s omnipresence in the world was called Sophia or Wisdom.   The Hebrew Scriptures have an entire genre of literature called Wisdom Literature.  Books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and the Book of Job are examples of Wisdom Literature.  And there are more developed examples of Wisdom literature in the books of the Apocrypha. 

  There is something of God in every bit of the world and that something is someone, even the friendly Sophia.  In fact, Sophia, is so friendly one might say, she is downright seductive.  The metaphor from the book of Proverbs states that God is to be known as a seductive real personal force in everyone and everything.  This wisdom or seductive immanent Sophia is particularly successful in drawing the people who are perpetually curious.  Curiosity can be seen as the native quest for wisdom in one’s future.  Curiosity is living perpetually with one’s mouth open and saying “Wow,” what’s next?

  The ancient Greeks gave an invitation for everyone to be in love with Sophia.  They called this love relationship, philo-sophia or as we call it philosophy….the art of being in love with wisdom.

  I believe that this ancient name for God, Wisdom, expresses our belief that the world can be experienced as created and not as chaotic.  Yes, our world can be experienced as a void and as seemingly chaotic, but since there is a word for chaos, that would suggest that even chaos has the order of some definition. Word gives boundary and limitation to chaos and so word is evidence of superior creativity.

  To know God as wisdom is to know that creation is the process that we are forever a part of.  To know Wisdom is to know a continually ordering and structuring of our world for our understanding and for the use of the benefits of what we discover in the world.

  Wisdom as a dominant metaphor for God incarnate invites us to many types of discourses to creatively order our worlds.  Some other metaphors for the divine might be Justice, Law, Reason, Word, Spirit, Hope, Faith and  Love; on and on we can fill this world with various discourses or forms of language usage.

  With the metaphor of Wisdom the ancient writer tried to establish a natural theology; they attempted to show that God can be known in and through what is in the world without the aid of what we have come to call revelation.

  It is unfortunate that we have often been limited to the notion of a masculine sky God who intervenes from outside of the human sphere.  This is often how the presentation of revelation is perceived; God as an alien who packages the divinely different self in human form so that humans can be drawn to seek this transcendent alien.

  The writer of the Gospel of John took the notion of God as wisdom and explicated it using another common Greek word, namely, Logos, or the word for Word.  We know this Greek word in every science:  Theology is Words about God, zoology is words about animal life, biology is words about living organisms…

  In John’s Gospel, the Christ is the eternal Logos who is the creating process of life itself.  And the Gospel of John said this creating process of life itself attained a personality in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ; and though Word became flesh in Jesus, Word was not limited to physical body of Jesus in the 33 or so years that he lived.  The Word like Wisdom continues to be a creating presence that can be experienced as a Personal Being who is interested in us in our lives and who can seduce us to be curious forever about discovery and the integration of our discoveries for the benefit of our lives.

  For the church of John’s Gospel, Jesus as Word could be expansively known everywhere; Jesus could be known as living bread from heaven.  No, Jesus was not a literal loaf of bread dropped out of the sky.  To be drawn to Jesus was to take in Word and Wisdom and have Word and Wisdom become us in the subsequent words and deeds of our life.  And this is not some carnal literal cannibalism that offended those literalists who rejected the teachings of the community of John; the living bread of heaven was the Word of God as personal presence that cannot be trapped within or exhausted by any one human experience.  Living Bread from heaven is not about the literal sky;  it is about the elevated values of life into which we are initiated through our encounter with the Risen Christ as the Word of God who can also be Eucharistic Bread and Eucharistic Wine.

  If Christ can be known in the church gathered as the Eucharistic Bread and Eucharistic Wine, Christ can also be known in life experience itself as the Wisdom who beckons us to further curiosity with the occasions of the sublime presence of God.

  In the writings that have come to be associated with the churches of the Apostle Paul, Christ is called the Wisdom of God and Christ is called All and in All.  Can you and I admit that most of the New Testament literature is waxing poetic about Christ as encounters with the Sublime and it is not stodgy historical reporting about days in the life of Jesus?

  If we understand the writer of John’s Gospel we see that there is a rebuke to those who want to make the Eucharistic words into a literal cannibalism.  If we understand the Risen Christ to be in continuity with the Wisdom tradition, we understand that God arises within our world to encounter us in very personal ways.  We are not here to establish precise details of historical events in the life of Jesus in first century Palestine; we are here to encounter Christ as the living Word of God, the Wisdom of God and the one who is All and in All, and so it is quite appropriate for me to administer communion to you today with these words," The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven. " Amen.