What is wisdom? Does it have something to do with whether or not you put tomatoes in a fruit salad?
Wisdom is a key Biblical concept, undervalued in the modern day. I rarely hear preaching about wisdom, for all it’s at the root of the problem of Eden and therefore we might assume also involved in the atonement. We are waking up again to the importance of spiritual formation, and maturity, which is the same thing in essence. At the core of maturing is growing wise.
The famous quip that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad isn’t entirely off. Wisdom is understanding, rather than knowledge. Wisdom is ‘know-how,’ earned typically through experience and habit. The Bible tells us that the experience most apt for the teaching of wisdom is suffering (Romans 5). It is not pastorally wise to tell certain young men whose pride is all over their faces, but unknown to them, that what they really need to do to grow in Christ is be broken like bread; there is some truth to it, nonetheless.
Please don’t ask me how I know.
There’s a connection here, between pride and wisdom. They might not immediately seem like opposites; strictly they aren’t. However, if the sin of the garden is pride but involves eating from the tree of wisdom we should expect there to be a connection. The eating of the fruit of wisdom’s tree was an act of grasping, taking what should have been waited for. Wisdom comes to us but cannot be grasped.
But what is it? There are a number of ways to answer this with reference to certain branches of philosophy (we might speak of tacit knowledge, for example), but perhaps it’s better to take a step back and speak in broader brush strokes.
Wisdom is a glimpse of reality and the sense of how to live in the grain of it. Wisdom is living in accordance with what is real.
That’s difficult. Sin clouds our eyes. Modern obfuscation confuses us until we have little idea which way is up. The Bible can seem utterly strange to us because we’re surrounded by unreality to the degree that we struggle to embrace or accept what is real. The Bible shows us what’s real. My delight in pointing out the Bible’s ‘weirdness’ stems from a sense that we domesticate the scriptures God has given us and shave off the wilder corners; I think we all do that by default, I suspect I do in some way, because our tendency is to align everything in our lives with our sense of what reality is.
Instead, the Bible is given to us to renarrate reality and renarrate ourselves. In other words, God gives us a book so we can see and inhabit what reality actually is. We then, slowly, inch by inch, learn to live in accordance with the grain of that revelation. We cannot discern it for ourselves, not in its entirety—though some deceptions can be seen through without the Bible’s revelation, using the creation as it has been gifted to us—we need this to be revealed to us.
The places the Bible seems stranger, or most old-fashioned, are the places that our cultural moment is least in tune with reality, I suspect. We need to learn what’s real and then bend our lives towards it in order to flourish.
Wisdom is understanding, but understanding the world as it really is and then slowly learning how to act as though that were true. Wisdom is a way of being in the world, yes, but it’s not a ‘vibe,’ it’s a concerted delight in the law of the Lord and in bending to be subject to his will. Wisdom is the skill to discern difficult prudential decisions and to weave through complex pastoral challenges, but that skill comes from seeing what’s real and then carefully sifting the world as we find it in the search for truth. Of course, our wisdom is incomplete, we are being formed towards Christlikeness and Jesus is the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1). We do not understand fully, but we aim to grow.
Get wisdom (Proverbs 4)! That’s the cry of Solomon as he attempts to teach his son how to be a good man and a good king. We don’t just sit and wait for suffering to come to our door to make us wise like some sort of macabre Zen monk. We act, we intend, we fathom through the complexities in front of us. We make mistakes, we are formed, we find fragments of wisdom grubbing among the dust and prize them as the beginnings of something beautiful.
One day we’ll live undimmed and able to perceive all that is, including the Lord who is and spoke what is into being. One day we’ll be wise. One day we’ll freely eat from wisdom’s tree because we’ll be fitted to do so. For now, the Son who is God’s wisdom has won the fruit and gifts it to us to partake of unearned as a free gift.
That’s what’s in the communion cup.
Photo by Cliff Johnson on Unsplash
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