Bible notes
Proverbs 8.1-4,22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5.1-5; John 16.12-15
Proverbs 8.1-4,22-31
In the Bible’s wisdom poetry, God’s wisdom is often personified as a woman, and this offers us a fuller picture of God’s ways of engaging with and ordering the world.
In the first part of this poem, wisdom meets people in the ‘now’ of everyday life (vv.2-3), and invites them to accept her knowledge rather than the ways of evil. Her promise could hardly be more appealing: ‘My fruit is better than gold’ (v.19).
The poem’s second part is another of the Bible’s creation stories. Wisdom is a heavenly being, the divine consort who rejoices and delights in the goodness of the inhabited world – even the human race with its capacity for carelessness
and destruction.
Israel’s wisdom poetry (see also
Wisdom 7 and Ecclesiasticus 24) has influenced several New Testament writers, and in particular the Gospel of John, and has been an important building block in the construction of the Christian understanding of God as ‘Holy Trinity’.
Psalm 8
This psalm compresses a whole spirituality into a few lines. God’s majesty and honour are defended and his enemies are silenced by the praises of the youngest. Mention of them may suggest that, against the backdrop of the heavens, the earth’s inhabitants are small and insignificant. Yet every human being is invested with the royal dignity and responsibility of God-like care for his handiwork. This grand vision of human worth is framed in the opening and closing verses by one even grander:
to nourish the humility that sounds God’s praise.
Romans 5.1-5
Paul wrote to a racially mixed church at the heart of the empire, to set out his conviction that the gospel of Jesus Christ reveals God’s power to repair a damaged world. In Rome’s house churches, cultural and racial differences had become a source of division, as Jews and Gentiles vied over supremacy and privilege. These verses celebrate the fruits of God’s grace in the coming of his Son Jesus Christ and the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit. ‘We have peace with God’ (v.1), because in Christ the power of sin that divides us from God and each other has been defeated. ‘We boast in our hope’ (v.2), because God’s heavenly glory is a blessing for all creation (see Romans 8.18ff). God’s love for sinners is a present reality, because it has been revealed in Christ (see Romans 5.8), and is now available through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Paul shows how, from the very beginning, Christian experience of the creative, redeeming and sustaining love of God has been expressed in what we now call trinitarian language.
John 16.12-15
In John’s Gospel, Jesus starts to talk about ‘going away’ as early as 7.33. By the time we reach his farewell words to the disciples in chapters 13 to 17, it’s clear what he means. His impending execution will take him from the disciples without leaving them desolate (14.1ff). He promises to be with them in a new way through the coming of the Holy Spirit.
This week’s short reading contains the last in the series of the ‘Paraclete’ (often translated as ‘advocate’) sayings (14.15-17; 14.25-27; 15.26-27; 16.7-11; 16.13-15). ‘The Spirit of truth’, which occurs in other contemporary Jewish writings, underlines the link with Jesus as the truth (1.17; 8.32, 45; 14.6; 18.38). Like him, the Spirit is sent by God to teach God’s truth (14.26). This can only be a gradual, one day at a time process. ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now’ (v.12), such is the disciples’ understandable anxiety over Jesus’ departure.
The Spirit as teacher and guide will enable Jesus’ disciples to understand what he means when he calls them to ‘love one another as I have loved you’ (13.34; 15.12). Those to whom the evangelist writes, interpret Jesus’ call as being in the ‘now’ of the hostile opposition they experience, many years later, from local synagogues determined to exclude them from the family of faith (15.18-16.3). Linking each new generation of Jesus’ followers is the Holy Spirit, the continuing presence of Jesus in the church’s everyday experience, and the assurance of his enduring love, joy, peace and hope (15.9-11; 16.20-22; 16.33).
The Gospel of John provides further evidence of Christians using the language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit to tell their story, with its power to speak of God’s sacrificial, healing love in a world so often fed by hostility and violence.
See also: In conversation: Fit for the kingdom