The Holy Trinity
Devotional
Water From the Rock
Lectionary Devotional for Cycle C
Object:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.
-- Proverbs 8:22
On Trinity Sunday, when the church acknowledges the three-in-one aspect of the Godhead, the lectionary reaches back into the wisdom literature for its reading from the Hebrew scriptures. One can hear the word that will be echoed in the beginning of the gospel of John. To paraphrase John 1 only slightly, "In the beginning was wisdom and wisdom was with God and she was God." Later in John 16:13, this third part of the Trinity will be referred to as the Spirit of truth. Proverbs suggests that this wisdom precedes all other aspects of creation. "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:1-2). God began to set limits on the chaos through wisdom as expressed in God's speaking a word. The fact that wisdom is seen as feminine in Proverbs (8:1) and uses a feminine tense in Hebrew enlarges our understanding of the feminine side of God. God will be experienced as masculine through the images of the Father and the Son, but God as wisdom or the Spirit of truth is experienced as feminine.
For the Hebrews to recognize that the feminine side of God existed from the very beginning was to crack open the rigidity of the patriarchal faith and allow our understanding of God to evolve. While the Eastern church has had more experience in understanding God as Sophia, it is not absent from our traditions as well. While the Wisdom literature is often a neglected part of the Bible, it is probably the most natural expression of faith in our age. It approaches faith from the perspective of common sense. For Presbyterians, the ancient saying that we cannot reason our way to faith, but our faith should be reasonable is an expression of the importance that we place on the gift of reason. As we celebrate the Trinity, it is important to call to mind this feminine aspect of God that helped set divine boundaries to the chaos that continually threatens to engulf us.
-- Proverbs 8:22
On Trinity Sunday, when the church acknowledges the three-in-one aspect of the Godhead, the lectionary reaches back into the wisdom literature for its reading from the Hebrew scriptures. One can hear the word that will be echoed in the beginning of the gospel of John. To paraphrase John 1 only slightly, "In the beginning was wisdom and wisdom was with God and she was God." Later in John 16:13, this third part of the Trinity will be referred to as the Spirit of truth. Proverbs suggests that this wisdom precedes all other aspects of creation. "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:1-2). God began to set limits on the chaos through wisdom as expressed in God's speaking a word. The fact that wisdom is seen as feminine in Proverbs (8:1) and uses a feminine tense in Hebrew enlarges our understanding of the feminine side of God. God will be experienced as masculine through the images of the Father and the Son, but God as wisdom or the Spirit of truth is experienced as feminine.
For the Hebrews to recognize that the feminine side of God existed from the very beginning was to crack open the rigidity of the patriarchal faith and allow our understanding of God to evolve. While the Eastern church has had more experience in understanding God as Sophia, it is not absent from our traditions as well. While the Wisdom literature is often a neglected part of the Bible, it is probably the most natural expression of faith in our age. It approaches faith from the perspective of common sense. For Presbyterians, the ancient saying that we cannot reason our way to faith, but our faith should be reasonable is an expression of the importance that we place on the gift of reason. As we celebrate the Trinity, it is important to call to mind this feminine aspect of God that helped set divine boundaries to the chaos that continually threatens to engulf us.
