Wisdom
Commentary
Object:
Ibn Saud was the first modern king of Saudi Arabia. He lived during the early half of this century, and people in the East still talk about his wisdom.
One day a widow came to him. It seems that her husband had been walking under a palm tree. Another fellow was up in the tree gathering dates. His foot slipped and he fell right onto the woman's husband. Later her husband died from internal injuries as a result of that incident.
Ibn Saud checked the matter out. It was true! Things had happened just that way! So he said to the widow, "What compensation will you take?" He thought that she'd want a pension in order to care for her family. But the laws of Saudi Arabia did allow the death penalty, and that's what she demanded. She wanted the man from up in the tree to die.
Ibn Saud knew that her family needed support, not revenge. So he tried calmly to talk her out of it. But she was adamant. Her husband was dead and that man would have to die too.
When he saw that his coaxing was useless, Ibn Saud tried one more thing. He agreed to the death penalty, but he also decreed that it would be carried out in a very specific way. The man who had killed her husband would be bound, he said, and set under a palm tree. Then the widow would climb the tree and throw herself down on the man, killing him.
Only then did the widow realize that revenge kills everybody. She took the money instead.
We are not all so wise. In fact, the lure of money can be as strong as that of revenge and it can make us foolish. Solomon somehow skirted that quagmire at the beginning of his career as king, opting instead for true wisdom divinely delivered. Paul, in our lectionary passage from Ephesians, pleads for all of us to follow suit and seek wisdom from above. In the cryptic words of Jesus today are found the essence of true wisdom -- becoming one with heaven through the mystery of the holy sacrament. May we all be wiser today because of our time spent with God and with each other!
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Solomon chose the critical ingredient to true political leadership: wisdom. There is no question but that it is in short supply in our world. At the time of the French Revolution a group of university students observed the French Assembly in its attempt to create a new code of law for the unfolding age of the Republic. They were appalled at the long-winded speeches and pompous debates that seemed more geared to personal pride than to the public good.
When they voiced their harsh opinions to the honorable Gabriel Mirabeau, champion of the Revolution, he gave them some interesting advice. "Laws," he said, "are like sausages. You should never watch them being made."
Mirabeau was a man of other insights as well. When he first heard a passionate public speech by fellow Revolutionary statesman Robespierre, he said, "This man will go far; he believes what he says!"
That truth wasn't lost on the crowds. They used to say of Robespierre that he was an "incorruptible" man. He was the same man on the street as he was in the privacy of drawing rooms where the devious games of politics were played. Whether Robespierre had the best view of society for the good of the people in France's changing times will always be debated. But his heart was never questioned.
To believe what you say and to say what you believe is the soul of sincerity. The Bible calls it purity of heart, where motives are unmixed. What you see is what you get. Religiously, there is great value in sincerity. "Blessed are the pure in heart," said Jesus, "for they will see God."
Purity of heart coupled with patience is a strong virtue. When Groen van Prinsterer waged his lonely battle in the Dutch House of Commons for a biblically shaped world of justice, it was his sincerity of faith that carried him along. In fact, when Abraham Kuyper met van Prinsterer on the evening of May 18, 1869, in one of the rooms of the great church in Utrecht, the strength of van Prinsterer's convictions coupled with his patient plodding toward the utopia of the vision of God's great kingdom so inspired Kuyper that it became the driving force of his own political career.
More than 25 years later Kuyper said that when he met van Prinsterer that night, he became a "spiritual son" to the man. No one who held to his convictions with such patience, said Kuyper, could be far from the truth.
Passion is a slippery thing. If it rises without inner substance it can destroy others with violence or else carry them along in the hollowness of mere entertainment. An American once complained to marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander of the French military at the start of World War I, that the politeness of French conversations seemed insincere. "There is nothing in it," he said, "but wind."
Foch replied, "There is nothing but wind in a tire, but it makes riding in a car very smooth and pleasant."
Maybe so. But there are times in life when we need more than wind, more than T.S. Eliot's "hollow men" who are distracted by distractions. Passion that flows from purity of heart in a life given to patient plodding toward the kingdom of God has great power.
This Solomon knew and so he sought the best political grace. Because of it, all Israel followed him and that is a lesson that bears re-learning: Follow the person with that kind of wisdom!
Ephesians 5:15-20
Learn how to live, Paul writes. Live wisely, as children of heaven's wisdom. At least in part, it seems from today's passage, this wisdom involves social graces. Why?
Maybe it has to do with the fact that a considerate person takes thought of others. Will Durant, the famous philosopher and historian, was asked for advice by one of his grandchildren. He summarized all his wisdom in "ten commandments." At the heart of them is this advice: "Do not speak while another is speaking. Discuss, do not dispute. Absorb and acknowledge whatever truth you can find in opinions different from your own. Be courteous and considerate to all, especially to those who oppose you."
We would all like to have friends like that. Certainly we expect God to treat us that way.
But maybe "considerateness" is more than just thoughtfulness. Stan Wiersma, writing under his pen name "SietzeBuning," explored the religious roots of being considerate in his collection of folk poetry titled Style and Class (Middleburg Press, 1982). Much of what we display in life, said SietzeBuning, has to do with "style" -- we watch how others dress or act, and then we try to imitate those we admire. But "class" is living out of the nobility of your inner character, said Sietze.
He tells this little story to illustrate what he means:
Queen Wilhelmina was entertaining the
Frisian Cattle Breeders' Association at dinner.
The Frisian farmers didn't know what to make of their finger bowls.
They drank them down.
The stylish courtiers from the Hague nudged each other,
and pointed, and laughed at such lack of style.
Until the queen herself, without a smile, raised her finger bowl and drained it, obliging all the courtiers to follow suit, without a smile. (p. 17)
Sietze Buning ends with this note of judgment:
The courtiers had style, but Queen Wilhelmina had class.
While that makes for good storytelling, SietzeBuning takes it one surprising step further. He links style to the wisdom of the world and class to the wisdom of heaven. The former tries to get us to fit in with the right crowd, looking the right way and eating the right foods, while driving the right vehicles. That's style.
But class -- real class -- happens to us when we realize that we are children of God. If God is king, we are nobility -- princesses and princes in the realm of the great ruler!
Children of the king do not need to prove themselves, nor do they need to flaunt their status. If they have learned well at home the true worth of their lives, they can treat others with courtesy and respect. They can be considerate.
It is a religious thing. It is also the best kind of wisdom.
John 6:51-58
I sat with a man recently whose mother is one of the most impartial people on earth. That does not make her a saint, however. The man wept as he told how his mother had treated each of her children in an equally rotten manner. One after another she had driven them away. They moved to other places just to escape her tirades at their tragic worthlessness. Even now, every time their sense of duty forces them to return to celebrate her birthday or some other holiday, the mother only adds to their guilt by caustically reminding each about how they have all abandoned her.
I admire the man. On the basis of his Christian faith he has chosen to remain closest to his mother and to care for her because she is his mother and because there is no one else left that she has not sadistically prodded away with goads of lacerating venom. The man, in his partiality, is more a saint than his mother, in her impartiality.
In reality that is the key to the wisdom of Jesus in this passage. The wisdom of heaven, impartial as it is, is based upon the premise that each person is special, each person is unique, each person is worthy of "partial" love.
C.S. Lewis described it well when he said that there are two ways to be impartial in our relationships with others. The first was by reducing each one we meet to the lowest common denominator and disdaining them all equally. In prison, for example, each inmate is the same and thus each is treated "impartially": names are replaced with numbers, clothing for all is identical, living quarters are reduced to exactly the same size for each person, even the schedule of the day is harmonized until none is given special privileges over another. Impartiality rules.
The second way of impartiality, said Lewis, was that of individualized esteem. Here the goal is not to treat each person equally but to treat each person uniquely with a focus on caring. In illustrating his point, Lewis said that he was upset with the way that some of his friends invited their children to call them, as parents, by their first names. While he understood their motives, he feared the outcome.
Their goal in this democratizing of the family was to insure the equality of each person. "If we all call each other by our first names," they said, "we will all be equals." The parents were attempting to teach their children, from early on, that no person truly holds a higher value in society than does anyone else.
Yet, said Lewis, the result of such social conditioning is far worse than its benefit. The beauty of family life is found precisely in the inequalities present. In a family we learn that persons are not to be loved "equally," but "uniquely." A wife does not love her husband because he is just one of the crowd that hangs about. Nor does a father treat one child completely the same as any other child. True love discriminates. Any parent who tries to love all the children in exactly the same way becomes frustrated to the point of incompetence. It is in the family that we learn to esteem each person greatly not because each is another cloned pea in a pod, but because each is unique and different.
In this lies the secret of impartial wisdom. A person who cares with an impartial love does not look at all persons the same. Rather, a person who cares impartially begins with the assumption that each person is different, and each person is worthy of individual love.
When my grandmother died, testimonies poured in from everywhere: "She was a great woman!" "We always respected her!" "She never played favorites!" "She always cared about me!" My grandmother was a wise woman. She didn't treat every person in exactly the same way. She treated each person in a special way. It was the grace of her "partial" attitude toward each that made her exceptionally impartial.
This is the secret found in Jesus and shared by those who "eat" of him. They ingest, through the holy sacrament, the reality of God's impartial love that treats each of us partially, in the manner of individually loved children. Those who look for other parents, as the crowd surrounding Jesus tried to do in pride of pedigree, find themselves reduced to numbers in genealogical tables. They are not very wise.
Application
In Ernest Gordon's book To End All Wars (Zondervan, 2002) a story that breathes with this divine wisdom is told. It is the true tale of what took place in the Japanese prison-of-war camp made famous by the movie The Bridge over the River Kwai. The camp stood at the end of the Bataan death march that brought Allied soldiers deep into the jungles of Asia. Few would survive, and everyone knew it. In order to make the best of a terrible situation they teamed up in pairs, each watching out for a buddy.
One prisoner was a strapping six-foot-three fellow built like a tower of iron. If any could come out of this alive, all felt he would. That was before his buddy got malaria. The smaller fellow was much weaker and very likely to die. Their captors did not want to deal with sickness, so anyone who was unable to work was confined in a "hot house" until he succumbed to heat exhaustion, dehydration, and the collapse of his bodily systems.
The sick man was locked into a hothouse and left to die. Surprisingly he did not die, because every mealtime his strong buddy went out to him, under curses and threats from the guards, and shared his meager rations. Every night his strong buddy sneaked from the prison barracks, braved the watchful eyes above that held guns of death, and brought his own slim blanket to cover the fevered convulsions of the sick man.
At the end of two weeks the sick man astounded the guards by recovering well enough to be able to return to work. He even survived the entire camp experience and lived to tell about it. His buddy, however -- the strong man all thought invincible -- died very shortly of malaria, exposure, and dysentery. He had given his life to save his friend.
The story does not end there. When Allied troops liberated that camp at the close of the war in the Pacific virtually every prisoner was a Christian. There was a symphony orchestra in camp, with instruments made of the crudest materials. There were worship services every Sunday, and the death toll was far lower than any expected. All this because of the silent testimony made by a strong man toward his buddy facing death.
There is much that pretends to be wise in our world, but nothing can match the profound wisdom and strength of true mercy. I wonder how wise I will be today.
Alternative Application
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14. Solomon chose a remarkable path in his early days as king. Submission is a crucial dimension of spiritual wisdom that has few advocates in a society strong on personal assertion. John Maxwell, in his book Developing the Leader within You (Nelson, 1993), noted that there are five different levels of authority that a person can attain in life, but each is based on an increasing willingness to submit to outside forces or influences.
The first is "position," where people are challenged to respect you for your rank in society. Second, there is the authority of "permission" that happens when you enter a relationship of significance with someone else and that person allows you to have a say in his affairs. Third comes the authority of "production" in which you are honored for the results you can get. Fourth, there is the authority of "people development" that recognizes the empowerment you have given others. Finally comes the quality of "personhood" where the very character of your life demands respect.
We can all name people who gather one or another of these forms of authority to themselves: a judge, for instance, fits the first; a dating partner the second; my neighbor across the street did such a good job of bringing up the production in his factory in our town that he was transferred to tackle the development of an even larger plant in another state -- that is an example of number three; my uncle who retired as a high school guidance counselor received the accolades of the fourth; and we only have to say names like "Billy Graham" and "Mother Teresa" to explore the last.
Interestingly, the source of all five of these forms of authority exists in our relationship with our parents. A mother has position over us when we are young children. She can abuse that position, as some have, or she can also use it to give us a wholesome sense of ourselves, as many others have.
A father has our permission, early in life, to direct and guide us. We go looking for support and advice from him. A mother holds over us the authority of production. Before we can tie our shoes or dress ourselves, she is doing things for us we could not begin to handle on our own. So it is with level four -- a good parent is able to serve in developing our characters. When we sat around at my grandmother's funeral, some years ago, my dad and all his siblings said the same thing: "Mom always believed in us. She always prayed for us. We wouldn't be the people we are without her care."
In fact, when all these forms of authority are rolled up in a single package it is that fifth form, the one that is particularly hard to earn, which epitomizes the best of what great parenting is about. There is no higher tribute that can be paid a person than to say that he was a father to me, or she was like my own mother. In our brief years of life, as we meander through strange and familiar paths, both untried and yet as ancient as time itself, no one can help us find our truest selves better than a wise and loving parent.
This is the mystery of submission. The best of ourselves rarely comes when we fight it out on our own. Instead, it is brought to life when someone who loves me takes my hand and helps me to reach higher than I thought I could.
The ancients always compared our wills to horses. It is a fitting comparison, I think. There is a stallion inside each of us, snorting and restless and nervously pacing. That energy and strength of character can be thrown about with the destructive power of a mad horse that will not be mastered, or it can be harnessed by a rider and a bit and channeled into speed, purpose, and direction.
Your will is strong. You need it to survive. You also need it to be brought under submission to a higher power if you would be fully human. Maybe it begins in our relationship with our parents. But it finds its fullness, as Solomon knew, when we get wise in faith and submit to one who is wisdom itself.
One day a widow came to him. It seems that her husband had been walking under a palm tree. Another fellow was up in the tree gathering dates. His foot slipped and he fell right onto the woman's husband. Later her husband died from internal injuries as a result of that incident.
Ibn Saud checked the matter out. It was true! Things had happened just that way! So he said to the widow, "What compensation will you take?" He thought that she'd want a pension in order to care for her family. But the laws of Saudi Arabia did allow the death penalty, and that's what she demanded. She wanted the man from up in the tree to die.
Ibn Saud knew that her family needed support, not revenge. So he tried calmly to talk her out of it. But she was adamant. Her husband was dead and that man would have to die too.
When he saw that his coaxing was useless, Ibn Saud tried one more thing. He agreed to the death penalty, but he also decreed that it would be carried out in a very specific way. The man who had killed her husband would be bound, he said, and set under a palm tree. Then the widow would climb the tree and throw herself down on the man, killing him.
Only then did the widow realize that revenge kills everybody. She took the money instead.
We are not all so wise. In fact, the lure of money can be as strong as that of revenge and it can make us foolish. Solomon somehow skirted that quagmire at the beginning of his career as king, opting instead for true wisdom divinely delivered. Paul, in our lectionary passage from Ephesians, pleads for all of us to follow suit and seek wisdom from above. In the cryptic words of Jesus today are found the essence of true wisdom -- becoming one with heaven through the mystery of the holy sacrament. May we all be wiser today because of our time spent with God and with each other!
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Solomon chose the critical ingredient to true political leadership: wisdom. There is no question but that it is in short supply in our world. At the time of the French Revolution a group of university students observed the French Assembly in its attempt to create a new code of law for the unfolding age of the Republic. They were appalled at the long-winded speeches and pompous debates that seemed more geared to personal pride than to the public good.
When they voiced their harsh opinions to the honorable Gabriel Mirabeau, champion of the Revolution, he gave them some interesting advice. "Laws," he said, "are like sausages. You should never watch them being made."
Mirabeau was a man of other insights as well. When he first heard a passionate public speech by fellow Revolutionary statesman Robespierre, he said, "This man will go far; he believes what he says!"
That truth wasn't lost on the crowds. They used to say of Robespierre that he was an "incorruptible" man. He was the same man on the street as he was in the privacy of drawing rooms where the devious games of politics were played. Whether Robespierre had the best view of society for the good of the people in France's changing times will always be debated. But his heart was never questioned.
To believe what you say and to say what you believe is the soul of sincerity. The Bible calls it purity of heart, where motives are unmixed. What you see is what you get. Religiously, there is great value in sincerity. "Blessed are the pure in heart," said Jesus, "for they will see God."
Purity of heart coupled with patience is a strong virtue. When Groen van Prinsterer waged his lonely battle in the Dutch House of Commons for a biblically shaped world of justice, it was his sincerity of faith that carried him along. In fact, when Abraham Kuyper met van Prinsterer on the evening of May 18, 1869, in one of the rooms of the great church in Utrecht, the strength of van Prinsterer's convictions coupled with his patient plodding toward the utopia of the vision of God's great kingdom so inspired Kuyper that it became the driving force of his own political career.
More than 25 years later Kuyper said that when he met van Prinsterer that night, he became a "spiritual son" to the man. No one who held to his convictions with such patience, said Kuyper, could be far from the truth.
Passion is a slippery thing. If it rises without inner substance it can destroy others with violence or else carry them along in the hollowness of mere entertainment. An American once complained to marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander of the French military at the start of World War I, that the politeness of French conversations seemed insincere. "There is nothing in it," he said, "but wind."
Foch replied, "There is nothing but wind in a tire, but it makes riding in a car very smooth and pleasant."
Maybe so. But there are times in life when we need more than wind, more than T.S. Eliot's "hollow men" who are distracted by distractions. Passion that flows from purity of heart in a life given to patient plodding toward the kingdom of God has great power.
This Solomon knew and so he sought the best political grace. Because of it, all Israel followed him and that is a lesson that bears re-learning: Follow the person with that kind of wisdom!
Ephesians 5:15-20
Learn how to live, Paul writes. Live wisely, as children of heaven's wisdom. At least in part, it seems from today's passage, this wisdom involves social graces. Why?
Maybe it has to do with the fact that a considerate person takes thought of others. Will Durant, the famous philosopher and historian, was asked for advice by one of his grandchildren. He summarized all his wisdom in "ten commandments." At the heart of them is this advice: "Do not speak while another is speaking. Discuss, do not dispute. Absorb and acknowledge whatever truth you can find in opinions different from your own. Be courteous and considerate to all, especially to those who oppose you."
We would all like to have friends like that. Certainly we expect God to treat us that way.
But maybe "considerateness" is more than just thoughtfulness. Stan Wiersma, writing under his pen name "SietzeBuning," explored the religious roots of being considerate in his collection of folk poetry titled Style and Class (Middleburg Press, 1982). Much of what we display in life, said SietzeBuning, has to do with "style" -- we watch how others dress or act, and then we try to imitate those we admire. But "class" is living out of the nobility of your inner character, said Sietze.
He tells this little story to illustrate what he means:
Queen Wilhelmina was entertaining the
Frisian Cattle Breeders' Association at dinner.
The Frisian farmers didn't know what to make of their finger bowls.
They drank them down.
The stylish courtiers from the Hague nudged each other,
and pointed, and laughed at such lack of style.
Until the queen herself, without a smile, raised her finger bowl and drained it, obliging all the courtiers to follow suit, without a smile. (p. 17)
Sietze Buning ends with this note of judgment:
The courtiers had style, but Queen Wilhelmina had class.
While that makes for good storytelling, SietzeBuning takes it one surprising step further. He links style to the wisdom of the world and class to the wisdom of heaven. The former tries to get us to fit in with the right crowd, looking the right way and eating the right foods, while driving the right vehicles. That's style.
But class -- real class -- happens to us when we realize that we are children of God. If God is king, we are nobility -- princesses and princes in the realm of the great ruler!
Children of the king do not need to prove themselves, nor do they need to flaunt their status. If they have learned well at home the true worth of their lives, they can treat others with courtesy and respect. They can be considerate.
It is a religious thing. It is also the best kind of wisdom.
John 6:51-58
I sat with a man recently whose mother is one of the most impartial people on earth. That does not make her a saint, however. The man wept as he told how his mother had treated each of her children in an equally rotten manner. One after another she had driven them away. They moved to other places just to escape her tirades at their tragic worthlessness. Even now, every time their sense of duty forces them to return to celebrate her birthday or some other holiday, the mother only adds to their guilt by caustically reminding each about how they have all abandoned her.
I admire the man. On the basis of his Christian faith he has chosen to remain closest to his mother and to care for her because she is his mother and because there is no one else left that she has not sadistically prodded away with goads of lacerating venom. The man, in his partiality, is more a saint than his mother, in her impartiality.
In reality that is the key to the wisdom of Jesus in this passage. The wisdom of heaven, impartial as it is, is based upon the premise that each person is special, each person is unique, each person is worthy of "partial" love.
C.S. Lewis described it well when he said that there are two ways to be impartial in our relationships with others. The first was by reducing each one we meet to the lowest common denominator and disdaining them all equally. In prison, for example, each inmate is the same and thus each is treated "impartially": names are replaced with numbers, clothing for all is identical, living quarters are reduced to exactly the same size for each person, even the schedule of the day is harmonized until none is given special privileges over another. Impartiality rules.
The second way of impartiality, said Lewis, was that of individualized esteem. Here the goal is not to treat each person equally but to treat each person uniquely with a focus on caring. In illustrating his point, Lewis said that he was upset with the way that some of his friends invited their children to call them, as parents, by their first names. While he understood their motives, he feared the outcome.
Their goal in this democratizing of the family was to insure the equality of each person. "If we all call each other by our first names," they said, "we will all be equals." The parents were attempting to teach their children, from early on, that no person truly holds a higher value in society than does anyone else.
Yet, said Lewis, the result of such social conditioning is far worse than its benefit. The beauty of family life is found precisely in the inequalities present. In a family we learn that persons are not to be loved "equally," but "uniquely." A wife does not love her husband because he is just one of the crowd that hangs about. Nor does a father treat one child completely the same as any other child. True love discriminates. Any parent who tries to love all the children in exactly the same way becomes frustrated to the point of incompetence. It is in the family that we learn to esteem each person greatly not because each is another cloned pea in a pod, but because each is unique and different.
In this lies the secret of impartial wisdom. A person who cares with an impartial love does not look at all persons the same. Rather, a person who cares impartially begins with the assumption that each person is different, and each person is worthy of individual love.
When my grandmother died, testimonies poured in from everywhere: "She was a great woman!" "We always respected her!" "She never played favorites!" "She always cared about me!" My grandmother was a wise woman. She didn't treat every person in exactly the same way. She treated each person in a special way. It was the grace of her "partial" attitude toward each that made her exceptionally impartial.
This is the secret found in Jesus and shared by those who "eat" of him. They ingest, through the holy sacrament, the reality of God's impartial love that treats each of us partially, in the manner of individually loved children. Those who look for other parents, as the crowd surrounding Jesus tried to do in pride of pedigree, find themselves reduced to numbers in genealogical tables. They are not very wise.
Application
In Ernest Gordon's book To End All Wars (Zondervan, 2002) a story that breathes with this divine wisdom is told. It is the true tale of what took place in the Japanese prison-of-war camp made famous by the movie The Bridge over the River Kwai. The camp stood at the end of the Bataan death march that brought Allied soldiers deep into the jungles of Asia. Few would survive, and everyone knew it. In order to make the best of a terrible situation they teamed up in pairs, each watching out for a buddy.
One prisoner was a strapping six-foot-three fellow built like a tower of iron. If any could come out of this alive, all felt he would. That was before his buddy got malaria. The smaller fellow was much weaker and very likely to die. Their captors did not want to deal with sickness, so anyone who was unable to work was confined in a "hot house" until he succumbed to heat exhaustion, dehydration, and the collapse of his bodily systems.
The sick man was locked into a hothouse and left to die. Surprisingly he did not die, because every mealtime his strong buddy went out to him, under curses and threats from the guards, and shared his meager rations. Every night his strong buddy sneaked from the prison barracks, braved the watchful eyes above that held guns of death, and brought his own slim blanket to cover the fevered convulsions of the sick man.
At the end of two weeks the sick man astounded the guards by recovering well enough to be able to return to work. He even survived the entire camp experience and lived to tell about it. His buddy, however -- the strong man all thought invincible -- died very shortly of malaria, exposure, and dysentery. He had given his life to save his friend.
The story does not end there. When Allied troops liberated that camp at the close of the war in the Pacific virtually every prisoner was a Christian. There was a symphony orchestra in camp, with instruments made of the crudest materials. There were worship services every Sunday, and the death toll was far lower than any expected. All this because of the silent testimony made by a strong man toward his buddy facing death.
There is much that pretends to be wise in our world, but nothing can match the profound wisdom and strength of true mercy. I wonder how wise I will be today.
Alternative Application
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14. Solomon chose a remarkable path in his early days as king. Submission is a crucial dimension of spiritual wisdom that has few advocates in a society strong on personal assertion. John Maxwell, in his book Developing the Leader within You (Nelson, 1993), noted that there are five different levels of authority that a person can attain in life, but each is based on an increasing willingness to submit to outside forces or influences.
The first is "position," where people are challenged to respect you for your rank in society. Second, there is the authority of "permission" that happens when you enter a relationship of significance with someone else and that person allows you to have a say in his affairs. Third comes the authority of "production" in which you are honored for the results you can get. Fourth, there is the authority of "people development" that recognizes the empowerment you have given others. Finally comes the quality of "personhood" where the very character of your life demands respect.
We can all name people who gather one or another of these forms of authority to themselves: a judge, for instance, fits the first; a dating partner the second; my neighbor across the street did such a good job of bringing up the production in his factory in our town that he was transferred to tackle the development of an even larger plant in another state -- that is an example of number three; my uncle who retired as a high school guidance counselor received the accolades of the fourth; and we only have to say names like "Billy Graham" and "Mother Teresa" to explore the last.
Interestingly, the source of all five of these forms of authority exists in our relationship with our parents. A mother has position over us when we are young children. She can abuse that position, as some have, or she can also use it to give us a wholesome sense of ourselves, as many others have.
A father has our permission, early in life, to direct and guide us. We go looking for support and advice from him. A mother holds over us the authority of production. Before we can tie our shoes or dress ourselves, she is doing things for us we could not begin to handle on our own. So it is with level four -- a good parent is able to serve in developing our characters. When we sat around at my grandmother's funeral, some years ago, my dad and all his siblings said the same thing: "Mom always believed in us. She always prayed for us. We wouldn't be the people we are without her care."
In fact, when all these forms of authority are rolled up in a single package it is that fifth form, the one that is particularly hard to earn, which epitomizes the best of what great parenting is about. There is no higher tribute that can be paid a person than to say that he was a father to me, or she was like my own mother. In our brief years of life, as we meander through strange and familiar paths, both untried and yet as ancient as time itself, no one can help us find our truest selves better than a wise and loving parent.
This is the mystery of submission. The best of ourselves rarely comes when we fight it out on our own. Instead, it is brought to life when someone who loves me takes my hand and helps me to reach higher than I thought I could.
The ancients always compared our wills to horses. It is a fitting comparison, I think. There is a stallion inside each of us, snorting and restless and nervously pacing. That energy and strength of character can be thrown about with the destructive power of a mad horse that will not be mastered, or it can be harnessed by a rider and a bit and channeled into speed, purpose, and direction.
Your will is strong. You need it to survive. You also need it to be brought under submission to a higher power if you would be fully human. Maybe it begins in our relationship with our parents. But it finds its fullness, as Solomon knew, when we get wise in faith and submit to one who is wisdom itself.
