Sapientia Dei, cum sit una, omnia potest

Ecclus 24:1-4;12-16; Eph 1:3-6; 15-18; Jn 1:1-18

I find it interesting – not to say exciting – to find the Son of God spoken of in the feminine gender. We are used to applying texts about Wisdom to Mary, and that is certainly generally appropriate. But there can be no real doubt that in the case of our first reading today we are hearing Sirach, unknown to himself, speaking about Jesus Christ. There may have been a slight temptation among those who put together the readings for today to fight shy of retaining the feminine pronoun found in the original text – after all, wisdom is a neuter noun in English – but one must be grateful that they did decide to do so. Unfortunately, the response to the Psalm which we are offered is not so bold, arguably even producing a mistranslation in its trepidation. For Verbum caro factum est the English has “”The Word of God became man”. Well, yes, the Word did become man, but that is not what St John is saying; the Word became man simply because the Word, in becoming flesh, had to become a man or a woman if the assumed humanity was to be a true one.

While I am not exactly a feminist theologian (I am neither a feminist nor a theologian), I think it is important to realise that when we speak of the Word of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity (and note, both “person” and “Trinity” are feminine nouns in most languages) gender-words are irrelevant; and if we speak of the “Son” of God, and “he” for convenience, as we do of the “Father”, we are not in fact speaking accurately and we are certainly not giving any information as to the nature of those Persons. We’re a little more cautious about the Holy Spirit, who is referred to by whatever gender of pronoun agrees with “Spirit” in the relevant language; in English “It” is quite often heard, and increasingly “she”. I use “she” myself, but I should say that I am only doing it to redress the balance; while it does say something very fundamental about the Spirit, it would also become misleading if overstressed.

I would even be inclined to say that even when we are speaking about the Incarnate Word, gender-words are only used for convenience. Jesus was indeed a man; as Ezra Pound rightly said, “No capon priest was the Goodly Fere, but a man o’ men was he”, but I would venture to say that all the same his gender on earth does not tell us anything fundamental about him. Had he been a woman – impossible at that time and in that culture – he (or rather she) would have been a woman o’ women – the perfection of woman, as he was in fact the perfection of man. St John makes this pretty clear in today’s Gospel. Verbum caro factum est contrasts with the description of John the Baptist: Fuit homo missus a Deo. Homo isn’t the specifically masculine vir, which we find later, but it does have a masculine slant which is not at all present in caro. John is just saying “The Word of God became one of us”.

I accept that it would be difficult for most of us – yes, myself included – to cope with a new version of the bible in which for God the Father we would read “Mother”; for “God the Son” (not, obviously, referring to the Incarnate Son) “Daughter” and so on. I am certainly not advocating that, because that would simply be making the same mistake in the opposite direction. What I do say is that we should become more aware of those occasions when the unexpected feminine is found; and at the same time – paradoxically – of the inadequacy of both masculine and feminine in speaking of God. Both must be used, and used naturally, to give the complete picture. As we know, although Jesus did call the disciples “children”, he does not seem to have thought of himself as a father; as he laments over Jerusalem he depicts himself not as the father but as the mother of his people Israel.

Actually, this “feminist” point is not the point I want to make, though I is part of that point. If it seems shocking to think of God as feminine – or even as neither masculine or feminine, which is the truth, but a truth which can’t, I think, be grasped unless the balance is, so to speak, over-redressed – that’s excellent. Because sometimes only shock can awake; as Haydn knew! Excellent – yes; but also very sad. Because this is part of our blindness as regards God. We cannot see God, that is true; that isn’t the problem: the problem is that we don’t realise it. It w accepted we are blind we would not have sin; but now we think we see, our sin remains. We were, as I say in season and out of season, created in the image and likeness of God, but that phrase can also mislead and mesmerise. We don’t listen. We have our own idea of God, and we don’t listen. This first reading could do as an antidote to that. I wonder whether that is intentional, on this second Sunday after Christmas when our attention is so much focused on the Child who is so like us. It’s even more effective if one includes the verses that the lectionary omits, as I intend to do.

As we look at that Child, let us not form God in the image and likeness of what we can see. Just for once, let’s look from the opposite angle, as St John does when he presents his view of the origins of the Child: the angle which all three readings offer us today. let’s try to throw off our inadequate conceptions of God, not by trying to create new ones ourselves, since they would probably be as crude an attempt as replacing “God the Father” with “God the Mother”, but by listening to what God tells us about himself through the mouth of the inspired writers.

This Child – what is so important about him? Listen to him speaking of himself in the person of Wisdom, in the verses the lectionary omits: “I came out of the mouth of the Most High, the firstborn before all creatures; I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth, and as a cloud I covered all the earth. I dwelt in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud. I alone have compassed the circuit of heaven, and have penetrated into the bottom of the deep, and have walked the waves of the sea. And have stood in all the earth, and in every people, and in every nation I have had the chief rule.” His dwelling was in Jacob, his inheritance in Israel, but he could not be circumscribed by them, nor by his human condition. From the beginning and before the world was he begotten, and until the world to come he will not cease to be. What you see is the dwelling place of the Word. Truly human, but transcending the human.

And it is not above us to transcend the human in this way; for if he was before the world was made, so, truly, were we: before the world was made God chose us, chose us in Christ, to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence. If we believe in him, we too, while remaining fully human, are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Perhaps if we could free ourselves from the shackles of habit, and see God as God would have us see him, then we could see ourselves and each other in that image, as chosen in Christ before the world was made. It might require a few shocks, and it might give us a few surprises. but that way we may attain to the purity of heart which will allow us to see God, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has graced us in the Beloved.

May he enlighten the eyes of our mind, that we may know what the hope is of our calling, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.