evil is understanding.” (Job 28).
Or, if after that you can stand my rough crude language—there is no wisdom formula to deal with your situation. You must reverence God and let him have his way, and you had better be good. Well, of course; if wisdom does not work, does not bring to you the goal you sought, then it does not work and that is that. But there is another question: what happens when wisdom succeeds?
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WISDOM SUCCEEDS?
You have worked hard and come out of the examination with a starred first. You are enjoying life at the top of the tree. What you say goes. Everyone applauds. You are Archbishop and Prime Minister rolled into one. Leader of the Church and State. We meet this in the Bible too. The book begins by naming its author (it doesn’t matter that the name may be a pseudonym).
The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. . . All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun . . .
I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind (Ecclesiastes 1 and 2).
Ecclesiastes is the supreme book of disillusionment. Here is the man who had everything. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Yes, but he knew what to do with silver spoons. He had supreme power, he had every kind of pleasure a man could desire. And unlike Job, he lost nothing, except the pleasure of having everything. “The sun goes round the earth, or the earth goes round the sun. What does it matter? Life is just one thing after another. I have had it all, and the end of the thing is vanity of vanities. All is vanity and a striving after wind.”
This is where I pause for a moment. I’ve been using the Old Testament books, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes. I hope no one is under the illusion that I am talking about the ancient world, only the ancient world. This is life as it has gone on from the distant past up to this morning. Men, and of course women, that is fairly new, have wanted to get on in the world, and some of them have succeeded and some have maintained their success. And most of them, who had no other aim, have found that failure was a bitter pill, but success only a sugar-coated one. The bitterness the emptiness of life revealed itself sooner or later. Is there any good news for the disillusioned. This is at last where we turn to the text and Paul’s discovery of the wisdom of the cross.
THE WISDOM OF THE CROSS
But wait just a moment, Paul didn’t think much of wisdom did he? Did he not recall that when he first preached at Corinth he turned his back on wisdom, and would know nothing and preach nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified? Quite true: and I have preached here on these very words. And what he meant was that the faith of his Corinthians was to depend on nothing but Christ; no rhetorical tricks, no philosophical arguments. He certainly did not mean that Christians would never find themselves puzzling out the meaning of life, asking all the questions about the joys and sorrows of life, its pains and pleasures, the problems and simplicities it evokes.
You find him at this business in letter after letter. But this is (as he says in the text) the business of mature Christians. It is not where you start. It is not the way into faith. And it is an odd kind of wisdom that Paul and other mature Christians practice—something like the old wisdom standing on its head. It is what, in this same letter, in one of his dazzling paradoxes, he calls the foolishness of God, which turns out to be wiser than humans just as his weakness turns out to be stronger than their strength.
The old wisdom tries to answer the question—How can I get and keep what I want? That is the wisdom of this world, and in this world it will always have a place. So if you are a student, stick to your books, write your essays, work your mathematical examples, if you are a businessman understand your trade and your market and your work. If you are a housewife let the home be clean and orderly and the cooking healthy.
But there is a wisdom not of this world. God’s wisdom, God’s foolishness if you like. And what that is Paul will tell you in the story of one who had everything, even the being of God, didn’t lose it, but threw it all away, took the form and the life and the death of a slave, even the death of the Cross. And did all this not for his own good, but for the good of those who killed him. No wonder none of the rulers of this world knew this as wisdom. He did it for love—which no one who is out for all he can get can understand.
But it is Good News, Gospel for us. It may be I was wrong to give you such staggering examples. Job who had everything and lost it all, even the she-asses. The wise King who had everything, but got tired of it, even the luxury and the dancing girls. We don’t operate on that size. I’ve never had one she-ass and wouldn’t know what to do with it, with her, if I were given one. But who does not know how empty, pointless, directionless, meaningless life can seem, whether because we have too little or too much? Who doesn’t know what it is to do reasonably well in study and business and household management, yet to feel inwardly that we have failed, that we are not the man or woman we were meant to be? Who does not know what it is to lose those who are dearer than life itself? When all the philosophers from Socrates to Swinburne have failed, you, everyone one of you, can say, “he loved me, and gave himself for me,” and by that you can live.
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“ALL THINGS ARE YOURS”—1 Corinthians 3.21–23
[Preached twice, once on 10/1/67 at St. Oswalds in Durham and once 10/14/80 at York University]
I hope I do not over-dramatize the situation, or over-glamorize Durham, but I suggest some of you may be feeling like that today. Indeed, I hope you are; I should be sorry if you were not. You can afford not to be blase today. All things are ours. It may have been a secret, but I have put up the necessary A levels; we have done it, we are in, we are away from the manners of home, the restriction and discipline of school. We are embarking on a life we are looking forward to, in a privileged society, in the world of men and women, a world in which we are, more or less, our own masters and can do what we please. The world is my oyster and I mean to find the pearls.
This is a legitimate attitude, it is a proper attitude. Perhaps you feel it just in relationship to personal freedom and in the field of personal relationships. You can do, within wide limits, what you like. No society can afford to dispense altogether with regulations, but they are tightly drawn. You do not even have to do much work, and there are plenty of opportunities for the irresponsible to waste their own time, and the money that others have contributed to support them here. Among 3,000 of your contemporaries you are bound to find congenial companions; whatever your tastes you will have opportunity to indulge and develop them. And no don worth his salt comes to be regarded as a schoolmaster, and there is older society as well as younger.
Some of you may look further ahead and see the university as the gateway to the professions, to careers of every sort. This too is true. It becomes harder, year by year, to enter fields of worthwhile activity if you do not have a degree as a passport. The passport is not exactly handed to you, in the Fresher’s Conference, but it is within your reach. Some of you at least will look at this in the way that the setting and nature of the university truly suggests. In the world of scholarship, all things are yours, that is the whole world lies open at your feet, and it is yours to explain and make
