Canter Bridge

When the New Testament describes the ‘word’ of the Lord as ‘living’, ‘active’, and ‘potent’, it is by no means staking claim to a new truth. Rather, it aligns itself with the Hebrew Bible’s insistence that YHWH reveals his own heart and mind by speaking.

The biblical tradition privileges speaking and hearing as the principal means—though not the exclusive way—by which the Creator discloses himself to his creatures. Frequently, we are told that those who would hear face the daunting task of developing, disciplining, and refining their powers of audition. God speaks, one might say, but not everyone hears.

Proverbial wisdom places rather less emphasis upon the speaking Creator and relatively more on the capacity of the observant learner to trace his ways in creation. So it is a little surprising to find, near the end of the biblical anthology of Proverbs, this nearly prophetic assurance and warning:

Every word of God is flawless;
he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.

Arguably, this counsel comes into our hands as legacy of the non-Israelite ‘Agur’. It may be significant in this light that the word translated as ‘God’ is not the ordinary Hebrew expression (Elohim) but rather than less common Eloah. Perhaps a ‘pagan’ sage addresses Israel with a truth that familiarity may have obscured.

Every word spoken by God is without defect. His word—or, better, the speaking God—becomes for the attentive listener a secure hiding place in a world where both words and deeds too often prove hostile and even lethal.

The speech of this conversational Creator is so valuable, so sure—elsewhere we are told that it is also sweet like honey—that modification of it should not be risked. We blabber-mouthed humans too quickly add to it our accretions, bend it into our shape, make it sound like we sound when we talk.

Agur the outsider knows how dangerous such verbosity becomes when the most important thing is to listen, to hear, to be taught, in the midst of the luxury that it is to live before a God who speaks.

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Sometimes one’s own naivete—or, more precisely, the turtle-like pace of one’s learning—are enough to make teeth ache.

I remember as though it were yesterday the moment in the late 1980s when I realized for the first time the calamitous cost to a society that is incurred when justice is for sale.

My illumination came via a throw-away comment on the part of Dr. John Kessler, a Netherlands-born colleague in Costa Rica, who no doubt did not fully anticipate the ignorance of his conversation partner.

‘When bribes come into play’, John said without a hint of mirth or enjoyment, ‘then only those who can pay get justice. Those who cannot pay are ruled out ahead of time’.

A light came on. On this late afternoon, a hemisphere removed, the Proverb blows oxygen upon the lamp’s feeble flame:

The wicked accept a concealed bribe
to pervert the ways of justice.

Biblical prescription employs an uncanny knack for anticipating dysfunction.

It as though the Tradition’s accumulated voice articulates for all who will listen: ‘You do not yet understand this, but trust me: this leads to that‘.

Wisdom glimpses before time the inexorable path of destruction upon which certain behaviors fix a community. Biblical wisdom does not flinch in calling out the inevitable result.

A bribe is such a small thing. For those who can pay, its convenience is entirely persuasive.

Therein lies the tragedy: For those who can pay …

YHWH, we are told on repeated occasions, hears the groans of those who cannot pay. It is not a good thing to encounter YHWH, bribes paid up, in a dark alley when his little ones have been crushed.

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Lived carelessly, life can persuade us that it consists of what we own. Our adornments, our possessions, our accompanying burden of stuff designs to meld itself to our soul-ish identity and become us.

Living carelessly is a dangerous feat. Few survive its calamitous statistics.

When what we have told ourselves that we possess is taken away, we stumble upon the rare opportunity to live carefully. We rediscover that we are not what we own. We are much less than that, and much more. We are much lighter. Yet we also bear the weight of greater solidity.

How much better to get wisdom than gold!
To get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver.

Proverbial wisdom tells us that the most portable property is wisdom and understanding. It can go wherever we do. It cannot be stripped away, is rarely lost, usually increases its value as a normal part of its accompanying grace.

Wisdom becomes us in a way that a house or a car never can. The pockets do not bulge with it, for it resides within. Banks, the needy and the estranged, professional opportunists, these can lay no claim to it. One pays no taxes on wisdom.

Though it is not free, understanding does not drag the one who possesses it into financial slavery.

The wise woman, though a deeply serious human being, walks with a lilt in her step. The sagacious man knows he is rich beyond measure, vulnerable to no unwelcome assault.

Such people manage one of life’s uncommon achievements. They are wealthy yet they are free.

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A man’s amusements speak loudly of his soul. The activities to which a woman gravitates in her leisure—when she is most free to choose her options—indicates what she would do most of the time if she were able.

We are, in a manner of speaking, most similar to the thing that makes us smile.

As mischief is sport for the dullard,
So is wisdom for the man of understanding.

The proverb’s potency lies in its ability to place wisdom in the context of sport, of fun, of diversion. We are asked to imagine the good man or woman who is capable of breaking into a spontaneous and broad grin before some spectacle of prudent speech or discerning action.

There is nothing wrong with the grin, only its employment upon prurient, tawdry, or worthless objects.

Wisdom, we learn, is not unlike a well-turned double-play, a birdie on the 18th hole, a hat trick, a photo finish.

The good person breaks into cheers, applauds, jumps up and down, or settles back in quiet admiration of this thing of beauty.

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It can be a violent swing to lurch from, say, Jesus’ apocalyptic words to the this-worldly cadence of the biblical Proverbs. ‘Whoever is not with me is against me … Do not think that I have come to bring peace, but a sword!’

These are the kairos-inflected call to decision that come from Jesus lips, though hardly the only tone that he struck.

Yet living in accordance with biblical tonalities requires also that one know how to bring grace and harmony to this earth, not only to decide viscerally to ally one’s self with Jesus’ incoming kingdom.

The proverbs wish one to learn to be a good neighbor:

(more…)

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It is not difficult to understand why the biblical compendium of sayings that we call The Proverbs has been considered a most secular book among its overtly religious compeers.

The collection’s logic pivots upon the human capacity to be sensible. It presumes that people will make proper calculations about behaviors and their presumed outcomes in the interest of both self and community. It displays, in the language of conventional theology, a ‘high view of man’. (more…)

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On a week of beginnings, it is easy to imagine that the requisite strength and intelligence for forging a differing kind of year lie within. They do not.

To hear the proverbial summons to turn outside oneself in search of these qualities is not for a moment to demean the accrued courage and discernment that over time become inseparable from the wise person’s persona. It is rather to recognize that it is futile to begin there. (more…)

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The proverbs teach, more often than not, by laying beside each other parallel realities that normally pass unnoticed. Practical wisdom resides in the similar patterns that link what we customarily consider independent realms of life, nature, and the like.

Take pressing, for example, as Proverbs 30.33 does. The New Revised Standard Version is to be commended for consistently translating the three-times-present Hebrew word מיץ (miyts) as pressing. Other translators have felt the need to overcome the potential monotony of the thing and so have risked obscuring the neat parallel upon which the proverb depends.

For as pressing milk produces curds,
and pressing the nose produces blood,
so pressing anger produces strife.

Pressing a thing that might otherwise be left alone consistently produces a result that, by most angles of vision, is not inherent in the thing itself. Pressing is thus transformative, whether for good or for ill. (more…)

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The biblical proverbs do not deal in sentimentalities. Concrete practicalities are the order of the day in this compendium of well-processed counsel.

So pragmatic is the tone of the discourse and so few the references to God and the liturgy he is assumed to require that some scholars have reached for the adjective ‘secular’ to describe the kind of wisdom that in these pages makes its offer.

Still, that turning back to which the more familiar word ‘repentance’ refers is hardly absent, as life lived by this counsel is life worked out in YHWH’s very presence:

If you have been foolish, exalting yourself,
or if you have been devising evil,
put your hand on your mouth.

To exalt oneself is the cardinal sin of the wisdom or ‘sapiential’ literature. It is arguably the spring from which poisoned waters make their long, liquid journey downstream. To devise evil is more generic. It too suffers by its association with arrogance, becoming almost its synonym. Devising evil is the implementation, one might say, of the arrogant heart’s self-exalted posture. (more…)

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