WISDOM-FOOD

           Sermon delivered on the Tenth Sunday After Trinity the 16^th August 2009 by Fr Nicholas J.G. Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban’s Church of England, George Town, Cayman Islands.

 Scriptures: Proverbs 9: 1-6                   Ephes 5:15-21              John 6: 51-58

 John 6: 57  “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.”

 THE CALL TO WISDOM

Today’s Gospel forms part of a series of meditations on Jesus’ great claim in St. John’s Gospel to be the Bread from heaven, a series that will shortly be completed, while in the following Sundays we are directed to return to this year’s regular sequence of readings from St. Mark’s Gospel that was interrupted four weeks ago. Last week we considered that mental and spiritual transformation in the light of the optimistic core of the Christian world-view, which prevails in every discouragement. Today we consider the call to wisdom or insight as part of the transforming nourishment of the Bread from heaven.

 THEISM NOT DEISM

The constant thought in St. John’s Gospel here is that when Christ Jesus feeds us with Himself, the nourishment lasts to eternity. The way to this nourishment is a constant dependence upon Him, not something that can be taken up at one time and then put down the next. The Newtonian world-view about the cosmos that continues to influence our thinking about it today, is that God set it all up so that it could continue to run itself without further divine intervention. This way of thinking is called deism. Neither Newton’s Theory of Gravitation nor Darwin’s Theory of Evolution are facts: they are theories or models of the way things work, which in some areas approach the truth, and in others do not. Newton’s Theory, being the older one, demonstrates a deistic outlook, and Darwin’s Theory, less than 200 years old, is an attempt to explain things without recourse to God at all. I have recently set myself the task of reading through an accurate translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, and it is proving to be a huge challenge, and seems to prove to me that if our brains have changed in the last 300 years they must have shrivelled rather than expanded. We are deists too, as with the likely inference from Newton’s Theory, but in a personal sense, if we consider that God set us up in some way in the past, either by our birth into the world, or by our baptism, or by a conversion experience, or by joining a church, and then after that we can run our own affairs without His intervention. But this is contrary to God’s Word. By God’s Word a Christian is bound to the long view about the galaxies and the stars and the planets, for instance, not that they run themselves without God, but rather that God continuously, and by the means that astrophysics or biology well or badly describes, holds every last speck and atom in existence, and causes the motion of every one. He is not just the Prime Mover, but the Eternal Mover, and not only of the cosmos or of the geological ages, but of our own lives as well.

 JESUS’ WORKS AND WILL ARE THE FATHER’S

In the Gospel Jesus Himself testifies: “As the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father.” He does not say “As the living Father sent me, and after that I live by my own power.” The Lord Jesus constantly emphasises His dependence on the Father. He says that what He does He sees the Father doing, and what He wills is the Father’s will. Such thinking flies in the face of the standard attitudes of the world, which value the independence and the quality of leadership of a person that used to be described some years ago as a “self-starter”. But Jesus was neither a “self-starter” nor a self-continuer. Yet the record shows that the quality of Jesus’ leadership, speaking in human terms, could not be denied. He repeatedly astounded His friends and confounded His detractors, always way ahead of the game, so to speak.

 

TRANSFORMATION TO WISDOM RESULTS FROM ASSIMILATION TO JESUS

One of my commentaries says that “Wisdom is not intellectual achievement but an attitude to life which begins with a knowledge of God and an avoidance of all that displeases Him.” This is referring, of course, to the divinely approved wisdom or insight that the Bible describes, and not to what might be referred to as the wisdom of this age. Jesus’ attitude to life, we can see, exemplifies the former sort of wisdom to the highest degree. But Jesus goes on to say that we are supposed to relate to Him in a similar sort of way that He relates to the Father. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” This expression sounds outrageous on first hearing, but it does make it very evident that our relationship with Jesus does not rest only on something that happened in the past, but also on a nourishment and assimilation that must continue in the present. There seems to be little doubt that Jesus’ words in the whole section allude, at least partly, to receiving Him in Holy Communion, an action that is carried out repeatedly. Jesus says that we will live because of Him. Our continual dependence upon Him will increase us in wisdom, just as His continual dependence on the Father increased Him during His earthly life in wisdom. That wisdom will transform our minds and our lives, as indeed it has already begun to do.

 

NOURISHED BY JESUS, CALLED TO REDEEM THE TIME

In our Old Testament passage from Proverbs 9, the personified Wisdom issues to all who are in need of it an invitation to come and eat of her bread and drink of her wine. We can see how this invitation is fulfilled in the New Covenant, and this confirms that being continually nourished by Him is the way in which any of us who admit to being lacking in wisdom will receive it and increase in it. St. Paul in the lesson from Ephesians counsels Christians also to walk not as unwise men but as wise. They are to “redeem the time”, making the passage of time in an otherwise bad age into something that is good, rescuing the moments, so to speak. Because of being nourished in wisdom, we may have and are called to have a transforming effect upon our evil time.

 

THE TIME IS REDEEMABLE

It should be a great source of comfort to us that no matter how evil we consider the time to be, and no matter what the circumstances of our lives may have become, the very time in which we pass our days is described by St. Paul as redeemable. However pessimistic we may be over such a time as one like ours, we may not lose hope, because as Proverbs 9 prophesies to us, while the guests of wanton folly are in the company of death, those who are nourished by Christ are not only made wise, but will live because of Him, and will hear and obey His call to redeem for Him the time that is allotted to them.