In the Western tradition, today, the Sunday after Pentecost, is known as Trinity Sunday. It’s one of the few Church holy days that commemorates a concept rather than an event in the life of Christ or great saint of history. The doctrine of the Trinity as we know it was formalized in the fourth century after heated debates, decades of deliberation, and with great care in its use of language. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. Not only are there strong suggestions of some kind of Trinitarian belief throughout the New Testament, but even in the Old Testament there are passages which the Church Fathers saw hints. Today’s Old Testament reading, from the book of Proverbs, offers one such hint, and so it’s worth considering more fully.
The passage, taken from Proverbs 8, is a praise of wisdom, speaking of it in terms that are both divine yet also distinct from the person of the LORD. It reads:
Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: “To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth—when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race. (Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31)
So, here we see the figure of divine wisdom as existing with God prior to the creation of the world — before even the primordial chaotic waters that are present at the start of the Genesis 1 creation story. As much as many people today see in these words glimpses of a divine feminine (grounded in ‘wisdom’ being grammatically feminine in Hebrew), the early Christians (from as early as Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:17–2:13) saw this as echoing their belief in the pre-incarnate Logos, or Word of God, which pre-existed with the Father before all creation. As John famously described the Logos:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. ****All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1.1-5)
John, of course, identifies this eternal Logos of God with Jesus of Nazareth. So great was this association between Wisdom = Word = Jesus that the great cathedral in Constantinople, Hagia Sofia, ‘Holy Wisdom,’ was understood to be dedicated to Jesus (in the same way Anglican Churches known as ‘Christ Church’ are). And indeed, it is in Jesus that Christians believe we find not only the fullest manifestation of God here on earth, but also the fullest manifestation of true humanity, and even the ‘deep structure’ of the whole universe. The words of the Psalmist, “How manifold are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you have made them all” (Psalm 104.24), take on a special added meaning through these ‘Christ-coloured’ glasses.
If all this seems strange and esoteric, that’s fine. But I’d encourage you to think about it in a slightly different way, because I do think some of the implications of this doctrine are both beautiful and helpful for us. For it means that following Christ — really and truly following him, his teaching, his ways, his orientation towards the world and its power structures — is not just ‘doing the right thing’, but a participation in the very re-creation and restoration of the world as God intended it to be. I don’t know about you, but I find that very inspiring and empowering.
I’ll leave you today with the words of an ancient prayer, sung to this day at the Eucharist in Eastern Orthodox Churches:
O Christ, our great and most holy Passover,
O Wisdom, Word and Power of God:
Grant that we may more perfectly partake of You
in the never-ending day of Your Kingdom. Amen.
Matthew Root 