”Source – Word – Wisdom

Scripture readings : Proverbs 8:1-4 & 22-31  / John 3:1-   (June 12)

From the era when God’s Spirit was called the Holy Ghost, there’s a story how some young children once found a little dead mouse. As they were orally pretty well versed in church language, they decided to hold a funeral for it. So they carefully lifted it and wrapped it up, and dug a little hole under a lilac tree. When they got to the end of the funeral ritual, they closed it with the following misquote: In the name of the Father, the Son, and down the hole he goes.”

Well, the Trinity as Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Spirit is a highly developed Christian doctrine.  The Bible makes no explicit reference to it. Yet it has been the source of tragic polemics not only between Christians and Jews, for Jews cannot fathom the idea of God being 3 entities, and  the Xn thinkers of the first centuries did everything they could to keep the idea of One God, alone Lord, alone creator, alone Father. But also between the Eastern and Western churches. the Greek and the Russian Orthodox churches developed within a very different philosophical and cultural framework from the Catholic church of Rome. After centuries of debate, the formal definite split happened in the 11th c over the question “does the Holy Spirit proceed from God alone or also from the Son”. That’s the historically famous “filioque” debate, filioque being Latin for “and the Son”. In the gospel of John, ch 15:26, Jesus promised his disciples that he would send them “the Spirit of truth which proceeds from the Father”. This phrase was incorporated into the creed adopted by the Council of Constantinople, present day Istanbul, in the year 381: “we believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father”. But quite soon, the Latin, Western church added the phrase “and the Son,” for against certain heresies, the west needed to give importance to the place of the Son in the Trinity where all 3 are coequal.  However, The Eastern Orthodox churches never accepted this addition. It may all seem totally irrelevant to modern thinking. And indeed, recognizing that part of the debate might have stemmed from mistranslation of the Greek word for proceed, some 20 th c documents, even Roman Catholic, propose to drop the filioque. Irrelevant, Interesting historically, but also fun. Edinburgh

When Jesus discussed things with Nicodemus, he could hardly have been thinking in such complicated doctrinal terminology. Yet he definitely was thinking on a different level than Nicodemus. About this good and pious man, a renowned teacher in Jerusalem, note that he calls Jesus “Rabbi”, which shows that early on Jesus did command a certain respect on the part of the religious establishment of which Nicodemus was an active member. This same Nicodemus appears again twice in the gospel. He it is who defended Jesus by saying to the chief priests and Pharisees, ch 7, that they should not condemn Jesus before they hear or understand what he has to say. And after the crucifixion, when Joseph of Arimathea took the body of Jesus to bury it in his own tomb, Nicodemus was there also with an expensive mixture of herbs and aloe vera to anoint the body. But in our reading this morning, in happier days, Nicodemus jokes with Jesus “so you want an old man like me to go back into my mother’s womb and be born again?!” Aside, imagine what Nicodemus would have said or how he would have laughed if he were told the Christmas story, how Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit?! But in fact, that’s exactly what Jesus had in mind, not for himself only, but for all of us. We must be born in a spiritual sense. To experience life fully, we must be born spiritually as well as physically.

Take a lesson, understand the Trinity from a bunch of cut tulips. There they are. they ARE. God IS. The most important name God the LORD in the Bible is just the verb TO BE. I am who I am, or I am who I will be, or I will be who I am. We believe in God the essence of Existence but also its Creator, the cause of existence. So there are the tulips in their splendour of red or yellow or pink. But they need water. Jesus said that believing in him means having access to life-giving water. The tulips feed on the water, absorbing it, living out of it. Jesus, the manifestation and perfect description of what God is, of His will and character of self-giving love, forgiveness, healing, is what we need to feed on like tulips having their stems in water.

However, once a tulip is cut off from its bulb, like a baby cut from the umbilical cord of its mother, out in the world, so to speak, a tulip will inevitably start to droop, even when its stem is in water. But there’s a way to keep tulips upright. Do you know how? I’m always amazed by this simple trick of putting a pin or a needle through the stem of the tulip, just a few cms below the flower.  A cut tulip needs air. The tiny hole that lets air into its stem makes it reach up and out and flourish for many days.

Once we are cut off from our mothers, that is to say once we are independently alive, and the whole time we are alive, to really live life to the fullest, we need that hole that the tulip has to let the air in, we need to have the input of God’s Holy Spirit. This is not the same as just breath.  In Gen ch 2, what the Creator gave to Adam by breathing air into Adam’s nostrils was the simpler gift of physical life, the capacity of lungs that made them living souls, like what happens when a doctor gives a little slap to a new born to get it to breathe. No matter what New Age thinkers think, according to Biblical thinking, that does not make it a spiritual being.

Let’s again consider the divine Trinity before applying the idea to ourselves.  Sometimes in the Bible God is called Jahu. Now this can be a form of the verb to be, but it can also mean to fall or to blow. In that case it speaks of everything that comes from Heaven - air, wind, God in the storm, the power of lightening accompanied by the booming of thunder. In fact, the Jahu notion must be the most primitive of Religious attitudes, of cave people in awe, terrifically fearsome awe of everything that comes from the sky.

So about God in the Trinity, Holiness or holy otherness : not even the modern film industry has the special effects necessary to express the fear and the awe of the human mind before what God’s majesty might be. It is the experience of the Hebrews at Mount Sinai when God’s presence is accompanied by the quaking of the mountain, thick clouds and fire, so that no one could go near it without being killed. Or of the young Isaiah when he sees the temple fill up with smoke and feels its foundations shake. He becomes conscious of the awful consequences not just of seeing a sight forbidden to mortals but also of finding himself in that most holiest of circumstances without preparation. Especially he feels that his lips are unworthy to participate in that highest, closest worship of God. Our speech does not raise us above the level of worms in comparison with the Word of God.

How amazing then that the debate lasting 2 or 300 years that led to the doctrine of the Trinity confirmed that the Word of God was made flesh in Jesus, as stated in the gospel of John. As an active force in creation, the Word, Logos, is a pre-Xn idea. For the Greek stoic philosophers, the Logos, which also means reason, logical, was the rational principle immanent in reality, giving form and meaning to it. The Jewish Bible scholar and philosopher Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus and Paul, read the Bible to mean that God actually created the world by His word, Logos, and revealed Himself to the prophets through His Word. And Philo even speaks of the Logos as “first-begotten Son”. However, Philo does not mean this personification to  be taken literally. It remains in the realm of metaphysics. Jesus, word in the flesh, on the contrary, is fully physical.

Now with Nicodemus, that night in the presence of Jesus, we come to ponder the Spirit. Nicodemus  approaches Jesus with a gingerly-put observation: “Rab, teacher, it’s obvious that God is working through you.” In response, Jesus seems to jump right into the topic of the kingdom of God. This is likely because this interview comes early in Jesus’ ministry when, first of all, John the Baptist has been preaching the coming of the kingdom of God, and secondly, people are believing in Jesus because of the miracles he performs, but Jesus is wary - he knows what’s in the hearts of people. So now as he discourses with Nicodemus, the kingdom of God seems to be synonymous with eternal life. It reminds us of the young rich ruler who came to Jesus and asked him, Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life. For us in our time, we might understand that better if we talk about meaningful life. I really think that the kingdom of God and eternal life can be thought of today as meaningful life.

This week my niece said she had to write an essay at school for which she had to interview a person over 30 years old with the question  “what for you is necessary to make life meaningful”? Pentti and I thought for a bit. Pentti remembered his Lutheran catechism which started by asking what is the purpose of life, the answer being to praise God and to know and claim Jesus as our saviour.  I wondered how I could state this in a more accessible or philosophical way so we began to speak about the Way, the search for wisdom, the love of wisdom. Or rather the response to wisdom’s call to us. Wisdom is personified in the text we read this morning in Proverbs, some translations say as an apprentice or a master architect. Others, I’m not sure why, make of it a young child playing around the feet of her father in his workshop of creation. Perhaps because Wisdom is a feminine word. It’s a beautiful illustration that says that Wisdom is an active participant in the creation of the universe. Early Christian theologians preparing the doctrine of the Trinity said God “exercises His creative activity through His Word and His Wisdom, or Spirit.”  And there at city crossroads and from high hills, says Prov 8, Wisdom is calling, pleading with humanity to smarten up, get wise, get wisdom, get the Good and Holy Spirit.

So back to us. In this secret interview between Jesus and Nicodemus, there are many ambiguities. In just the 2 words “born anew”, verb and adverb, there are already 2 ambiguous terms. The verb means beget, begotten if one speaks of the role of the father. It means to bear or be born if one is speaking of the role of the mother. Now Nicodemus is a Greek name. I don’t know if that is why he spontaneously takes Jesus’ phrase in a Greek understanding of the term, related to the role of the mother. And he also understands the adverb to mean anew, literally a second time. Unless he is just being provocatively funny, making puns. However, Jesus is using the same verb in reference to the role of the male; and the adverb ανωθεν anothen not in the Greek but in the Aramaic language’s use to mean from above, so not “born anew”, but begotten from above. Again in an aside, that idea might help us understand what the archangel said to Mary, that her son would be conceived, begotten, by the Holy Spirit.

With Nicodemus, Jesus is not opposing Spirit to flesh, there’s in itself nothing bad or wrong with flesh. It’s just that to be whole, we also need a supernatural birth into the way of or through Wisdom.

In conclusion, Even if the Trinity is not explicitly defined in the Bible, since the first centuries it is the tradition to baptize in the name of 3. That makes us trinitarians. St Augustine drew analogies from divine Trinity to the human soul, reasoning that if the Creator said Let us make humankind in our own image, we are also 3 in one. There are vestiges of the trinity everywhere, where all creatures exist by participating in the ideas of God. The best example being the idea of love. So there is the Lover, the one loved and the love that unites them.

God our Heavenly Father is a way to think of the source of all being, the idea in its essence - God is Love. The historical Jesus, God’s word in flesh, communicated God to humanity; Jesus loved the world and accepted to give his own life for it. And the Spirit, far from being a scary ghost, is the force of Wisdom working in the world to fulfill the purpose of existence, the love that unites us.

So I propose now that we stand and say together that old creed of Nice-Constantinople.

Haapiseva Jane