Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 14, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I think we would all agree that wisdom is a virtue, something good, something to be desired. We might not all agree on what wisdom is, but I think we’d all agree that it is a good thing. Wisdom, in various forms, is also a prominent theme in Jewish and Christian Scripture. Some of you know, but others of you may not, that there is in Scripture and in the apocryphal books a type of literature called the wisdom literature. In Scripture it includes particularly the book of Proverbs, from which our Hebrew Scripture reading came this morning. In that literature, wisdom is often personified, and indeed personified as a woman. We see this personification in the Proverbs passage we just heard a moment ago: "Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice." And so on. In the wisdom literature, this figure, whom scholars often call "the Wisdom woman" or "Sophia," which is both a feminine name and the Greek word for wisdom, very nearly becomes a feminine manifestation of the divine, of God. She is therefore a big favorite of many feminist theologians; but she is a lot more than that.

As an historical matter, Sophia, the wisdom woman of Hebrew scripture, is nothing less than a model for how early Christians came to think about Jesus Christ. Compare these two passages. At Proverbs 8:22 Sophia says: "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work....Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth." John 1:1 says: "in the beginning was the Word." Hebrew Scripture’s "in the beginning was Sophia" has become Christian Scripture’s "in the beginning was the Word." Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is in fact the incarnation of Sophia, the Wisdom of God.

Well, OK; but what does wisdom, or Word, mean exactly? In a technical theological sense they refer to the principles and order by and through which God structures the universe. Not much help, huh? Surely there must be some way to understand what it means to say that Jesus is the Wisdom of God that makes more sense than that. And, praise the Lord, there is. In a very real sense all of Christian scripture is about what it means to say that Jesus Christ is the Wisdom or Word of God. And throughout that scripture there runs a theme of two competing types of wisdom-the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God. One of the places where we see that dichotomy most directly and dramatically is in this morning’s Gospel lesson.

Peter’s declaration that Jesus is the Christ is of course the central declaration of the Christian faith. In the Gospel of Mark it acts as the central turning point in the entire Gospel. From this point on Jesus is headed irreversibly toward Jerusalem and the confrontation with the world’s authorities that would bring about his death. To me the most interesting thing about the story as Mark presents it is the fact that although Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, he doesn’t have a clue what that means. The reason he doesn’t get it is that he can’t get beyond worldly wisdom. Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

For reasons that are not at all clear, Jesus has asked the disciples who people say that he is. Didn’t he know? Maybe not. Maybe he was looking for confirmation of his own suspicions about his identity. Or maybe it was just a case of the leader being the last to know anything in any organization because nobody tells him or her anything. Not that I remotely consider myself Jesus, and you’re his disciples not mine, but I have had more than one occasion around here to protest that nobody ever tells me anything so that most of the time I’m the last to know what’s going on. So maybe that’s why Jesus had to ask what people were saying about him. He was the leader, and no one ever told him anything. In any event, the disciples filled him in on the buzz about him. But then he asked them point blank who they thought he was. It’s a profound question for all Christians. It is one well worth spending a good deal of time with. Who do you say that he is? Peter, in any event, was apparently quick with an answer: "You are the Messiah, the Christ," he said. Jesus didn’t argue with him. As he always does in Mark he just told Peter and the others not to tell anyone. Maybe he was just getting back at some of his followers for not telling him anything by not letting them tell anyone else either, although I’ve never actually heard that offered as an explanation for why Mark’s Jesus tries to keep his identity a secret.

So far so good; but then it quickly becomes apparent that although Peter said the right words he does not have a proper understanding of what they mean. Mark tells us that as soon as his Messianic identity was on the table, Jesus began to "teach them that [he] must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again." This was not what Peter wanted to hear. You see, the world thought it wasn’t supposed to be that way with the Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to be a triumphant figure, not a suffering and dying one. He was supposed to win in the world, not lose; and that meant win the way the world understands winning. That’s where Peter was stuck, in the conventional wisdom of the world.

Jesus, the Wisdom of God, had something very different in mind. He had divine wisdom, not worldly wisdom, in mind, and he told Peter so point blank: "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." Mark 8:33 Clearly, then, for Jesus divine wisdom and human wisdom are not the same thing, and the difference matters-a lot. "Get thee behind me, Satan!" Strong language indeed. Following worldly rather than divine wisdom makes you Satan, that is, makes you like one who has rebelled against God and gone over to the dark side of the Force, as it were. To be a disciple of Christ you must embrace divine wisdom.

And that’s not an easy thing to do. Divine wisdom isn’t just worldly wisdom only somehow wiser, deeper. Rather, it is something radically different. It actually turns worldly wisdom completely on its head. It always ends in paradox. It says God’s Christ, God’s Anointed One, doesn’t triumph over the world but gets Himself killed by it. Only in that suffering and death would there be triumph. Divine wisdom, divine paradox. That’s what it meant for Jesus. He then apparently felt the need to expand beyond his lesson about what the divine wisdom meant for him and to talk to people about what it meant for them; and he said in effect that it means exactly the same thing.

He told them: If you want to be a disciple of mine, that is, if you want to follow divine wisdom, "take up your cross and follow me." Mark 8:34 He said: If you want to save your life you’ll lose it, and by losing it for his sake and the sake of the Gospel you’ll save it. Mark 8:35 Only in suffering is there victory. Only is death is there life. Only in losing is there saving. That’s divine wisdom, divine paradox.

OK, but just what exactly does all this mean for us? Do we literally have to get ourselves crucified, to lose our lives, to become martyrs in order to be disciples of Christ, in order to follow divine wisdom? You may be relieved to hear that my answer to that is no. Mark was writing to a community of early Christians under persecution, a community in which literal martyrdom was a real possibility. That is not the case in our community; you I think there are still a couple of valuable lessons here for us.

The first is simply: Don’t buy into the wisdom, that is, the values, beliefs, and prejudices, of the world quickly and uncritically. We are continually surrounded by a culture that keeps pushing its wisdom on us, "wisdom" about politics, religion, ethics, values, the meaning and purpose of life. Not all of those values, not all of the wisdom, is entirely bad. The point is rather that we must recognize this wisdom for what it is-the wisdom of the world. And we must always ask whether perhaps God has a different wisdom that God wants us to learn and to follow. The answer to that question is usually yes. When it is, we must as Christians do all we can to follow God’s alternative wisdom and not the wisdom of the world.

That alternative, divine wisdom is usually something that at first blush sounds like nonsense, as Jesus’ words this morning probably did to you. It is usually something that sounds like a contradiction in terms. In other words, it is something that sounds like a paradox. A true paradox, however, is something that sounds like a contradiction but which when we truly understand it turns out not to be. Jesus’ words about saving your life by losing it is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon in all of scripture. Those words sound like nonsense. To the world it is nonsense, but God knows better. God knows that the way to wholeness for us humans is the way of self-giving. The Wisdom of God knows that we become whole (which means the same thing as we are saved) by living out of ourselves for others. To the world that makes no sense. To the world living for others is living for others and has nothing to do with saving ourselves. Or if it does, the world sees it as simply another selfish act morally indistinguishable from any other selfish act. God has better wisdom. As we live into the paradox of self-actualization through self-giving, we live into the wisdom of God. By following divine wisdom and not worldly wisdom we become whole. We become the people God intends us to be.

As I say so often here, it isn’t easy. The good news, however, is that as we try to do it, God will be with us. God will strengthen us and give us courage. God will rejoice in our successes and forgive our failures. To the world it makes no sense. To us, it is the Wisdom of God.