by Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz
Sunday’s first reading comes from the Book of Proverbs.
When we think of proverbs, we usually mean what MerriamWebster.com defines as “a brief popular epigram or maxim,” practical advice about real life.
For instance, Proverbs 15:17 tells us, “Better a dish of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it,” and 17:12 warns, “Face a bear robbed of her cubs, but never fools in their folly!”
Folksy sayings like these show us how wisdom is put into practice, not just in high-altitude abstraction but in the nitty-gritty of everyday life. No such epigrams or maxims appear in this Sunday’s reading from Proverbs! Instead, we find the wisdom of God speaking in the first person singular: “The Lord possessed me, the beginning of his ways, the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago; from of old I was poured forth, at the first, before the earth.”
Elsewhere in Proverbs, wisdom is extolled in personal terms, not as an abstract notion: “Her ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace; she is a tree of life to those who grasp her, and those who hold her fast are happy” (3:17-18).
In Sunday’s reading, wisdom speaks of her privileged role in God’s work of creation: “When the Lord established the heavens I was there … then was I beside him as his craftsman.”
Declaring that the divine work of creation was hardly drudgery, wisdom boasts how she was God’s “delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing on the surface of his earth; and I found delight in the human race.”
In effect, these verses from Proverbs 8 are a reflection on the creation story found at the beginning of Genesis. There God spoke creation into being. “Let there be light,” God said, “and there was light.” Not intended as a play-by-play of how creation took place, the first chapters of Genesis offer instead a powerful affirmation of God’s sovereign responsibility.
Therefore, Proverbs 8 teaches that the work of creation was God’s will, not a matter of random happenstance. Busy even before creation got underway, divine wisdom was “the beginning of God’s ways, the forerunner of God’s prodigies of long ago.”
Readers of John’s Gospel will find wisdom’s words in Proverbs remarkably familiar. That is because this Gospel begins not with Jesus’ conception and birth (as do Matthew and Luke), and not with the baptism of the adult Jesus (as does Mark), but at the beginning of everything: “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 to be through him, and without him nothing came to be” (John 1:1-3).
The term used for “Word” is “logos,” a term with deep resonances in ancient Greek philosophy that John’s Gospel employs to underscore the awe-inspiring order with which God invested creation and the intimate link between God’s work in creation with the plan of salvation by which, in Christ, God makes us heirs to divine life. This is no surprise to the many scientists who are religious believers who marvel at the magnificence of the natural phenomena that they study.
They cannot help but exclaim with the psalmist, “O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the
earth!” May this prayer become our own as we praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!
Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, is a professor of theology at St. John’s University.