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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
My father is a wise guy. No, I don’t mean that he’s part of an organized crime family. Nor is he one of those constant smart-alecks we all find annoying, although he’s always been rather witty and quick with a quip to suit the occasion. What I mean is that he has a well-developed degree of wisdom, much of which I am only now beginning to appreciate.
It seems we all need to figuratively “touch the hot stove” a few times before we appreciate the wisdom that our elders attempt to pass along to us.
One of my Dad’s favorite quotations even reflects on the fact that often it takes some rough lessons in life before we start to understand the world around us well enough to function somewhat competently in it. I don’t think it originated with him, but he’s fond of saying, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you wanted.” I repeat that one rather often, not only to my own children or to people I meet who are struggling with things of the world, but frequently to myself as well. It’s a good reminder that our plans and goals in life will often fail, yet even so, we may take away valuable practical lessons from having striven for them.
More importantly, though, this quotation also can remind us that what we want and what we need are often two very different things, and only our loving heavenly Father truly has the wisdom to discern between them. Realizing that, we not only develop greater wisdom and understanding, but a greater humility toward God as well.
Yet true wisdom, understanding, and humility come not from anyone’s pithy human words, but from grasping the truth the Lord has supplied us from His own wisdom, from the message of His inerrant Word.
Looking at that Word today, we are confronted by a question asked by St. James of his readers; words which are at the start of our epistle lesson: “Who is wise and understanding among you?” It’s a challenging question, a godly question. It’s the sort of question the Lord frequently asks of you throughout Scripture; sometimes quite plainly, and other times simply by confronting you with your limitations and your ignorance. It’s a question that provokes a variety of responses.
To those of us blindly chasing after the things of this world, our minds and our energy focused on the next thing that we want to obtain or achieve or buy, that question is often set aside. We think we know what we want and how to get it. Where we currently lack the resources to obtain those goals, we seek to address those shortcomings with great gusto, seeking the wisdom, understanding, and skills necessary to get where we want to be. If we answer that question, “Who is wise and understanding among you?” at all, our response might be, “I’m still working on it. Just give me the opportunity, and I’ll do the rest.” In essence, we’re saying: “I know wisdom is out there; I’ll hunt it down and make use of it when and where I find it.”
Another segment of the population, no less envious of all the world has to offer and no less ambitious in seeking what they choose to obtain from it, scoff at the wisdom of God. They grasp as knowledge and understanding only what they can see and feel and measure. Then, they apply their discoveries to manipulate the world and the people around them to conform to their wishes and to fulfill their desires. Their answer about who is wise and understanding sounds something like this: “I’m the only one who ‘gets it.’ Wisdom is what I choose it to be, and it exists for my benefit. If it doesn’t serve my wants, it can’t be important.”
In both these cases, wisdom and understanding have selfish purposes: To place the individual in a better position to satisfy his or her ambitions. To obtain a bigger and better slice of life’s finite pie at the expense of others. We argue vehemently that this is not our purpose, of course. We claim we have an understanding that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. If we don’t look out for ourselves, who will? We’re only trying to get ahead.
Yet the Holy Spirit has a warning about this for us. St. James writes, “if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.” Our seeking of knowledge for the purpose of getting ourselves ahead isn’t something to be proud of, really. Nor is pretending that this isn’t our motive, our end-game objective. The first is a sin of deed; the latter a sin of though and word. For has there ever been a more apt and accurate description of our contemporary world, at home and abroad, than James 3:16?
James writes: “where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.”
Indeed, has there ever been a more apt and accurate description of me and you as individuals, either? Lord, have mercy on me, for that is my foolish wisdom; my twisted understanding, all too often. I have used my wisdom to serve myself, my understanding to seek the satisfaction of my own needs.
The trouble with all that, of course, is that it is our own wisdom we’re depending upon. It’s our own understanding that we’re attempting to apply. And whenever and wherever we come to rely on ourselves for any good at all, we’re really exercising complete and utter foolishness. Doesn’t Scripture tell us that God has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise? The weak things to shame the strong? The lowly, despised, and unseen things to nullify the visible?
What’s more, He promised through the prophet Isaiah that He will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent. Count yourself among the blessed, then, if you are sometimes foolish, ignorant, and lack understanding of the things of this world. Ignorance is not bliss, certainly, and we are instructed by Christ to be as shrewd as snakes in dealing with this world. But human knowledge that puffs us up, and human wisdom that drives us forward with arrogance and ambition, is—as James writes—“earthly, unspiritual, of the devil.” That sort of wisdom and understanding is not only inadequate; it is deadly to our faith, and therefore dangerous to our immortal souls.
We are called to first seek Christ and His kingdom, and all other things needful will be given to us. That’s quite a challenge for us , of course, because apart from having been given faith in Christ and living under the Spirit’s power, we not only don’t seek Christ, we actively resist Him with every fiber of our sinful nature. We have no ability or inclination to turn from our sin, love God, and be saved. Even once He has reached out to us and the Holy Spirit has convicted us of our sins and drawn us to faith in Christ through Word and Sacrament, we remain in the duality of sinner and saint. We continue to constantly struggle with the envies and ambitions to which we are led by our human wisdom and understanding. These things will not let us go, for Satan refuses to accept the new reality of our lives in Christ, whose peace not only surpasses all our human understanding, but the understanding of even the angels, fallen or otherwise.
To read the opening verses of James, chapter four, we might begin to lose all hope as the author gives us point after point of all our failings: Fights and quarrels. Desires that battle within us. Our selfishness, and all the horrible things we do in our feeble and impossible desires to satisfy it. Our frequent neglect of asking God to address our needs, and our unfaithful intentions and improper motives when we finally do get around to asking. Then James lays it on the line: You can be a friend of the world, or a friend of God. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t accept things the world accepts when those things differ from what God deems acceptable. You can’t try to force a compromise between human wisdom and understanding and God’s given wisdom, foolish as it might appear sometimes. To do so is to become God’s enemy, for you have chosen to be a friend to the world.
God’s envy for you is a righteous one, a jealousy rooted in love. A perfect love that would allow nothing—nothing at all—to come between you and Him. Isn’t that the sort of love you wish others had for you, too? One that was so intent and intense that any threat to that love was met with all the strength and power that could be brought to bear?
That’s the sort of love that sent true wisdom and understanding down from heaven to overcome the self-generated wisdom of mankind. Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God, St. Paul called Him. Look at all those things James wrote at the end of the epistle lesson today, in verses seven through ten: Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Wash you hands. Purify your hearts. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up.
All these things James wrote as exhortations to those in the Church, those who had been called to faith in Christ Jesus but who were frequently forgetting what it meant to put aside the things of this world and remained conformed to the will of God. But those are all things that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had already done for them, and for us.
Eternal and divine, He submitted Himself to God to be that wisdom come down from above; perfect knowledge—the eternal Logos—made flesh. He resisted the temptations of the devil, who indeed fled from Him and left Him alone, but remained crouching in wait for an opportune time. Sinless and single-minded, He became sin so that in His washing, our double-minded hearts might become purified. He came down to our sad and hopeless planet and became one of us, leaving the joy and laughter of heaven to dwell in our mournful gloom.
And then, according to His own wisdom and understanding—aligned with that of the Father—He humbled Himself before the Lord and was lifted up. First lifted upon the bloody cross to suffer and die. Then, lifted from the cold, hard tomb to life made new. Finally, once again uplifted to the glories of heaven where He dwells in power and majesty until He comes again to bring us also from death to life, from sorrow to joy, and from our own foolish wisdom to complete wisdom and understanding.
If you are asked, then, who is wise and understanding among you, be prepared with an answer. It is not those who trumpet their learning to draw acclaim to themselves or use it for fleeting gain. It is not those who chase after it and think that their intellects will bring safety, prosperity, and comfort to themselves or even to others.
Rather, the One who is wise and understanding among you is He who showed it by His good life, by doing powerful deeds in a humility that came from His perfect wisdom.
Jesus Christ is the wisdom that comes from heaven: Pure, peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. He is your Peacemaker with God, and having sowed that peace, He now awaits a harvest of righteousness in you, His people. His Holy Spirit works within you to turn envy into mercy; ambition into dedication; the wisdom of this world into the saving foolishness of Christ crucified. As you humble yourself in repentance, prayer, worship, and service, He will grant you grace upon grace: The wisdom and understanding that you, too, will be lifted up to your God in suffering, death, and resurrection.
May that peace of God, which does indeed surpass all our human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord, now and forever. Amen.
