Lection and Liturgy

The wisdom of Jesus ben Sira 1 comes down to us in a Greek edition translated by his grandson, who revered his grandfather’s wisdom as a guide to life. It is another of those books whose authority and inspiration is disputed among Christians. It is often known as Ecclesiasticus (not to be confused with the undisputedly canonical book of Ecclesiastes ), a word which essentially means “the church’s book”. It’s a fairly clear indication that its popularity among the early Christians was significantly greater than its use in the Jewish community it came from. He writes a couple of decades before the ongoing pace of Hellenisation forced the Maccabean crisis. 2 The book falls into two main sections. The first, and longest, presents the wisdom ben Sira has accumulated and meditated on over the years, loosely organised by themes. It stands in the tradition of practical wisdom for the art of living. The majority of readings in the lectionary come from this section. The se...

The Book of Wisdom, or the Wisdom of Solomon, is another of those books whose place in the bible is disputed. Like several of the uncontroversially canonical wisdom books, it links itself with the proverbially wise king, Solomon. Unlike them it was written very late, probably a few decades before the time of Jesus. This means that it also offers evidence of the sorts of beliefs that were important to some groups of Jews at the turn of the eras. One of its most famous sections is most likely to be encountered at funerals. It also occurs as one of the readings for All Souls’ Day. 1 In its original context it may well be extolling martyrs, and reflecting on how God will give justice in the afterlife to those who didn’t receive it in this one. 2 It helps fill out the ways in which belief in life after death was being thought about by Jews close to the time of Jesus. Another reading about death, and more specifically about God destining humans for eternity, comes as ...

And so we come to the most depressing book of the bible. If Marvin the paranoid android were a biblical author, Ecclesiastes is the sort of book he’d write.    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s depressed robot, and his catchphrase. Ecclesiastes presents itself in a title verse as written by Solomon, a king whose name was synonymous with wisdom and great wealth. It seems a canny choice by the anonymous author, and not only because of the tradition linking Solomon with wisdom. It is the combination of riches and wisdom he wants to use to frame his meditation. Solomon, with his several hundred wives and concubines, and a palace to match the grandeur of the temple complex is a king of conspicuous and excessive wealth. Yet he is also portrayed as the wise philosopher king of Israel’s past. Because of his reputation for wisdom, the exceedingly well-off king is the perfect character to teach the author’s message: “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Long after the...

All cultures have proverbs. They often contradict each other, like the two I’ve jumbled up in the title of this post. Too many cooks spoil the broth; many hands make light work. Part of the wisdom of using proverbs is working out what the appropriate saying for any particular situation is. The biblical book of Proverbs contain a number that fall into the same category as our English proverbs. However, it also contains some more extended reflections on the nature of wisdom, which work rather better as readings. While the continuous alternative lectionary provides a few readings from Proverbs, the main related provision offers only two for Sundays. These passages come from one of those extended reflections. This one concerns the personified figure of wisdom, and it provides a key text for the development of Christian thinking about God as Trinity. 1   Wisdom is portrayed as an instrument of creation – Image courtesy of Nasa There are two themes about wisdom which a...

Five readings from Job crop up in the Revised Common Lectionary’s continuous set of Sunday readings; 1 one of these also occurs in the shared set of related readings. Most people will therefore only hear the one reading, part of God’s speech towards the end of the book. Either way it is not a lot of exposure to a long and provocative book, which wrestles with the perennial question of why there is evil in the world. The Patient Job, by Gerard Seghers (17th century) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons As it stands, after various editors have finished with it, the book consists of three long poetic sections, topped and tailed by a prose narrative. The prose sections both set up the story behind the scenes in the heavenly court, and tie the story up in a neat package at the end. Most readers end up feeling the opening and closing sections offer an explanation of Job’s sufferings which is far tidier and more simplistic than the poetry sections they sandwich. It’s all a test, and...

The third main section of Old Testament and apocryphal books is something of a grab bag, whether we focus solely on the undisputed books, or include the deuterocanonical ones as well. For some people, poetry is the dominant characteristic, although much of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are prose. For others, wisdom is the primary emphasis, although it is not the most obvious category for many psalms, nor for the love poetry of the Song of Songs. The Hebrew books are all classified by Jewish tradition under the miscellaneous third category of Writings. They are the books that are not Law or Prophet. Christians might add to that classification, saying they are the books that are not Law, Prophet or History. Nonetheless, poetry is the predominant form, and wisdom a frequent emphasis. It has become the custom to print poetic passages as lines of verse, unlike the older tradition of the Authorised Version. Perhaps this is most obvious in Bibles which are printed like oth...