From the Crossroads to the Cross
Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31
Happy Trinity Sunday! I have to say that I was disappointed not to receive any Trinity Sunday greeting cards from you all. Come to think of it, the streets of the Village are hardly adorned with Trinity Sunday decorations. And as wary as I am of our culture’s rampant commercialism, I haven’t seen a single Trinity Sunday store display or come across even one Trinity Sunday sales spectacular. It’s like there’s no acknowledgment at all of this special day in the life of the church!
Of course, I’m joking—not about Trinity Sunday being a thing…indeed, it is—but about there being any acknowledgment or even awareness of it outside the church. Even inside the church, some of us may be asking ourselves: “Trinity Sunday? That's a thing? A doctrine of the church gets its own day?” There’s no Incarnation Sunday, no Atonement Sunday, no Predestination Sunday (now that would be interesting!). So why does the Trinity get special treatment?
It’s true that most of the special days in the liturgical calendar, like Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost, which was just last week, commemorate an event. Christmas is a joyful celebration of the birth of Jesus; Good Friday is a solemn remembrance of his crucifixion; Easter celebrates his resurrection, and Pentecost the giving of the Holy Spirit. Trinity Sunday, however, isn’t about an event but rather a doctrine. And not just any doctrine, but a doctrine that is foundational to our understanding of who God is. As such, while few outside the church have ever heard of Trinity Sunday, it’s been around for more than a thousand years, not quite as long as the Trinity itself.
That the Lectionary makes this passage from Proverbs an option for Trinity Sunday is something of a head scratcher. After all, there’s no mention of any of the three persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, or Holy Spirit—as we would find in the other Scripture readings for today. What’s more, not only is there no mention of Father, Son, or Spirit, but the passage focuses on this concept of wisdom, which interestingly, is personified as a woman.
How exactly does a female conception of wisdom square with a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? We will get to that in a moment, I assure you. And here you thought a sermon on doctrine and a reading from Proverbs was going to be boring!
The subject of the book of Proverbs is wisdom. Wisdom not as in the knowledge of facts and figures that would allow someone to win on Jeopardy, but a kind of practical and moral wisdom that leads a person to know what is righteous. The prologue of the book states the book’s purpose in this way:
For learning about wisdom and instruction,
For understanding words of insight,
for gaining instruction in wise dealing,
righteousness, justice, and equity (Prov. 1:2-3).
That sense of understanding what is right, just, and equitable is grounded in the knowledge of God. It doesn’t come from within. It comes from God. That’s why the very first proverb reads:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction (Prov. 1:7).
We see here already what will become a familiar pattern throughout the book: wisdom is contrasted with foolishness. The wise person does what God commands, while the foolish person follows their own path and suffers the consequences. In part, it’s because of this moral absolutism, this way of seeing the world in black and white, that I’ve never been much of a fan of Proverbs. I much prefer the many shades of gray of a book like Job.
But this passage is different. The message here is not, “Do this, and don’t do that.” Here in chapter 8 wisdom is not portrayed as something that human beings possess and act upon; rather, wisdom has a being of its own. Wisdom has a voice. Wisdom calls. Wisdom stands at the crossroads and cries out like a street preacher, wanting to be heard, wanting to be known.
And notably, wisdom is personified as a woman. Hebrew is a gendered language, like Spanish, in that it has masculine and feminine nouns. The word for wisdom is feminine.
What are we to make of this? Is this Lady Wisdom figure trying to join the band and turn the Trinity into a quartet? Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Lady Wisdom? In a word, no. Verse 22 reads:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts long ago.
Wisdom is not a co-equal branch of the Trinitarian tree. She was, in her words, created by God.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth (Prov. 8:23).
What follows is a poetic monologue in which wisdom outlines how she was both present with God before creation and beside God “like a master worker” who in some way joined in the act of creation. Let’s note that we’re dealing in highly metaphorical language here. This whole passage is written in poetic verse. It’s a poem, not a science textbook. And the message here is not geological or biological but rather theological.
Wisdom is being used here as a way to describe the mind of God, which is to say that there is a rationality, an order, a joy even, in the way that God thinks, acts, and creates. Mind you, creation was a choice. There was a time when there was nothing and things could have remained that way. Yet God creates because for some reason God wants to be in relationship with human beings. Thus the wisdom of God is relational, passionate, and joyful. It reaches out to connect with us. It rejoices in the inhabited world and delights in the human race.
There’s a trope you sometimes see in comic strips of a guru, a wizened old sage, sitting atop a mountain, legs folded, waiting to dispense wisdom to any traveler intrepid enough to make it to the peak. No matter the strip, the punchline is almost never funny. But that’s beside the point. The point is that the wisdom of God is not like that. It’s not dispassionate and aloof. It calls. It seeks. It delights. It rejoices.
At the crossroads…that is one place where the wisdom of God appears to us. Another would be on the cross. As much as the wisdom of God cries out from the crossroads, so too does the wisdom of God cry out from the cross.
That wisdom stands at the crossroads and raises her voice is another way of saying that God desires to be known.
To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live (Prov. 8:4).
At the crossroads…that is one place where the wisdom of God appears to us. Another would be on the cross. As much as the wisdom of God cries out from the crossroads, so too does the wisdom of God cry out from the cross.
On the surface, a Roman cross is an unlikely—or more accurately—an outrageous, an incomprehensible location for God’s wisdom to show itself. “Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom,” the apostle Paul writes, “but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God… and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:22-24).
We proclaim Christ crucified. We proclaim Christ crucified, the wisdom of God. The same wisdom that Proverbs tells us was proclaimed in creation was also, according to the apostle Paul, revealed in Jesus’ crucifixion. This is an extraordinary claim. To the nonbeliever, the crucifixion of Jesus—if it is anything to them—is a tragedy. A good man, a moral man, an innocent man executed by the Empire.
But to the believer, the crucifixion of Jesus—this good man, this moral man, this innocent man, and indeed, the Son of God—is the very wisdom of God! If creation establishes the relationship between God and humans, then the crucifixion restores that relationship which was broken by sin.
There is a direct through line from creation to crucifixion. In Genesis, God creates the world and declares it good. In Proverbs, we’ve just heard that God rejoices in the inhabited world and delights in the human race. Even when we, in our rebelliousness, refuse to trust and obey God and walk in the way of Jesus Christ, God does not reject us but still claims us as God’s own.
From the crossroads, then, the wisdom of God reaches out to humanity, saying, “To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.” And from the cross, that same wisdom declares, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
Indeed, the wisdom of the cross looks like foolishness to a world fixated on shows of power. We have seen example after example after example of that this week. Military parades, indiscriminate immigration raids, lawmakers wrestled to the ground for asking questions at a press conference, political assassinations.
As a preacher, I don’t feel the need to address every news story on the front page of the papers, although there is a school of thought among some pastors that you preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. It’s not that I’m opposed to that, but I’ve always found the gospel relevant enough on its own that I’ve never felt the need to reach for relevance elsewhere. And in some ways I think of the church as a respite from the chaos of the world.
But the events of this past week that I already mentioned—and some that I didn’t—have me concerned that we as a nation are entering uncharted territory, and if we are to make it through we will need a sound moral compass to guide us. Rather than the wisdom of the world, we will need the wisdom of God. A wisdom that does not use violence or the threat of violence to achieve its ends but that suffers the violence of the cross. A wisdom that does not trust in physical shows of strength but that on the cross shows the immeasurable strength of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.