Sermon: Wisdom

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 30th January 2011
Venue:: Peterhouse College, Cambridge
Service:: Evensong
Readings:: Proverbs 11:1-17

‘A hypocrite with his mouth destroyeth his neighbour: but through knowledge shall the just be delivered.

He that is void of wisdom despiseth his neighbour: but a man of understanding holdeth his peace. Where no counsel is the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.

Where pride cometh, there cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom’.

This love of wisdom in our tradition reaches its greatest maturity and refinement with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. But the Greek philosophers knew that the love of wisdom was not bounded by culture, nation or race. Wisdom was the concern of the human person, Greek or Jew, Babylonian or Egyptian, male or female, king or slave, a quest for every human being. So, in and out of the Book of Proverbs flows wisdom from beyond the Chosen People, from the Babylon of The Righteous Sufferer and the Egypt of The dispute with his soul of one who is tired of life. Some of this surfaces in our Book of Proverbs, whose authorship is unknown, though in legend attributed to Solomon.

So there are in this biblical book wise sayings from outside the Covenant. Chapter 22, 17-24 for example, resembles the Instruction of Amenophis, an Egyptian school text . We’re in a broad church, there is a poise, a discretion, a balance, a wisdom common to many. And this is the problem for some religious people, but it’s a problem within the Bible itself. Are you an Ezra/Nehemiah person, concerned with definition and law-keeping, or are you a Ruth or a Jonah person, someone from the margins of a different race, who nevertheless finds a place in the tradition?

Pope Benedict, who could without prejudice be said to embody a traditional form of Roman Catholicism, is trying to repair the breach between the followers of Archbishop of Lefebvre, that hero of the French religious and political Right, and the rest of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope has initiated high level conversations between the society of St Pius X, whose followers believe Pius X was the last truly Orthodox Pope, the denouncer of Modernism and scourge of biblical scholarship, and the rest. But only the other day Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Society of Pius X, said of Pope Benedict’s invitation to world religious leaders to gather once again at Assisi in October this year, ‘We are deeply indignant, we vehemently protest against this repetition of the devils of Assisi. Everything that Archbishop Lefebvre said at the time, we repeat in our own name. It is evident that such a thing demands reparation. The inter-faith gathering made (I quote) a mockery of God’, and he quoted the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible, Psalm 96, ‘all gods of the gentiles are devils’ and went on, ‘They are devils, and Assisi will be full of devils’.

This confident intransigence is matched by some in Evangelical Protestantism, the equivalent of Bernard Fellay and the Lefebvrists, to be found in that marvellous old war horse, Dr Ian Paisley, whose hell-fire sermons attracted a loyal congregation at his church in Ulster. Particularly two old ladies who went every week, they enjoyed it so much, until the momentous day when Dr Paisley at the peroration of his sermon thundered, ‘In hell there will be the weeping and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth’, and one of the old ladies cried out in distress, ‘I haven’t got no teeth’, to which the Revd Dr replied quick as a flash, ‘Teeth will be provided’.

The Book of Proverbs speaks with a more urbane voice, a philosophy of human experience. Human experience is shared experience, but many religious people want purity, and purity is not human experience, or not for long for many. How absolutely right it was that the late Bishop Brian Masters of Edmonton, a doughty champion of Anglo-Catholicism, argued in General Synod that women ordained under the Colonial Clergy Act abroad should not be permitted to celebrate the Holy Communion when they visited England, because he knew that once people saw women priests, opposition would in part evaporate. It’s exactly like the appearance in public life of homosexual and lesbian people. Who would have thought that a leader in the Daily Telegraph, in the run up to Christmas when conversation was happening about who might be the new Bishop of Southwark, would champion the cause of the Dean of St Albans, Jeffery John. The Telegraph, mark you, not the Guardian!

The urbane voice of the Wisdom literature, the 11^th chapter of the Book of Proverbs, is aften drowned out by a voice more strident, more eye-catching and headline-grabbing from the Lefebvrists with their opposition to the Second Vatican Council and their yearly pilgrimage to the grave of Pétain, to the Jihadist, self-destructing and killing on the London Underground.

But let’s glance for another moment at Holy Scripture, because its witness is not uniform, despite those 19^th century attempts to reconcile the Gospels with each other. The Bible won’t fit together, for alongside the Ezra/Nehemiah/Leviticus, you must tell the story of Jonah, and the story of Ruth, and the place of Rahab the harlot, that Rahab the harlot who appears in the genealogy of Christ, with which St Matthew’s Gospel opens. In that genealogy Ruth appears, not even a Jew, but a woman outside the Law from Moab. These religious attitudes struggle with each other but are inseparably intertwined in the Bible; particular and distinctive, the general, the ecumenical and the humane.

Perhaps the Book of Wisdom may help us face the fact that the Bible speaks with many voices, as every religion speaks with many voices. Consider the many voices of Islam, where, so used are we to denouncing Islamic extremism, as we call it, that we give very little public notice to the remarkable story since Christmas, this very year, where in Egypt thousands of Muslims have demonstrated their neighbourly solidarity with Coptic Christians, protecting their Coptic neighbours, putting themselves alongside them at the Coptic Christmas Mass.

Being alongside may be an insight that Christianity has to offer. The humanity and sheer common sense in the Wisdom literature and our 11^th chapter of the Book of Proverbs is part of the Biblical preparation for the life of a young rabbi from Nazareth, who Christians have come to believe is revelatory of what God is. For the Christian story, supported on foundations of common sense and human experience, is that humanity is at the heart of what true religion must mean. If Jesus, the man from Nazareth shows us God, God is shown to us in a human person, a young man whose standing alongside others brought him condemnation and death. Perhaps if the Book of Proverbs helps us to know that we have friends in unexpected places, and that being human means understanding other people, not eyeballing them in religious confrontation, but standing beside them, shoulder to shoulder, we will have learned an abiding truth. ‘When pride cometh, then cometh shame, but with the lowly is wisdom … He that is void of wisdom despiseth his neighbour, but a man of understanding holdeth his peace’.

In the ancient world, in our tradition, Wisdom reached its greatest maturity and refinement with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but these Greek philosophers knew that the love of wisdom was not bound by human culture, nation or race. How splendid and deeply encouraging it is that a book in the Hebrew Bible should contain within it a section of an Egyptian school text from a different faith. Or is it so different? There’s a question with which religious studies must contend. The Book of Proverbs is wisely reticent about God. That’s because it may know the truth of the theologian, Herbert McCabe, echoing his Dominican predecessor Aquinas, who suggested that God may be the question.

‘Where pride cometh, there cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom’

An article in the Latin Mass Society magazine the other day poured scorn on the Evening Prayer at Westminster Abbey attended by Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury, because, it said, people had tried to see significance in the Pope shaking hands with a woman priest and then exchanging the Peace with the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘Not to have done so would have been bad manners’, said the writer. It seemed to many that gesture can surpass words. A handshake, an embrace, can reach across the divide made by many condemnations, and perhaps for those of us who rightly value the world of the university, there’s a wisdom to be learned that keeps pride at bay.