We Must Be About Our Father's Business: The First Sunday after Epiphany (January 8, 2023) - Fr. Wesley Walker

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

For the history of the Church, it has long been understood that the subject of Proverbs 8, this personification of Wisdom, refers to the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, early on, some heretics like Arius latched on to this passage to say that Jesus was not God, but a creation of God. And indeed, a surface level reading of the passage may cause us to conclude that if Wisdom is Jesus, that he was created. However, this reading is not sustainable for theological and textual reasons.

What’s the first thing we say about God in the Nicene Creed? “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty.” What is necessary for one to be a Father? A child! Before 2018, I had the potential to be a dad, but I wasn’t one until Jude was conceived. If the Father is eternal, which we affirm, then that means he must have a co-eternal Son. As the Church Father Origen once said, “Our Savior is the wisdom of God. But the wisdom is the reflection of everlasting light.” The Word has always been with his Father; there has never been a moment when he did not exist, or else the Father would have ceased to be the Father.

Scripturally, this is present in Proverbs 8. In verse 23, Wisdom says, “I was set up from everlasting.” The Hebrew word there means perpetual or forever, a meaning that was enshrined in the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint where the word used for “everlasting” is aionios which means “eternal.” So Wisdom is not a part of creation, but exists eternally alongside God. This Wisdom from Proverbs 8 is the Word who is spoken of in John 1 who undoubtedly had Proverbs 8 in mind while he was writing: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him.” So this means that the Son is co-eternal and consubstantial with his Father, but also that his person can be identified with Wisdom itself. And we see that Wisdom expressed in the underlying order and intelligibility of Creation.

The mystery at the heart of the 12 days of Christmas, indeed, the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith, is the Incarnation of the Word. We speak of the Word as one person with two natures. That he has one person means he has one center of consciousness, a coherent unity so that when he acts, we can say “Jesus did x” without having to caveat that it was the divine person or human person. If he had multiple centers of consciousness, he would schitzophrenic. At the same time, we affirm that the Word subsists in two natures, meaning Jesus is fully divine and fully human simultaneously. However, the Church has always been clear that these two natures cannot be confused or combined. In other words, when Jesus hungered, that was because he had a human body; his divine nature cannot hunger. When he prayed in the Garden that the cup would pass, that was a prayer from his human will; his divine will was unchanged and didn’t waver. What this means is that Wisdom itself refers to the divine nature of Christ. As a result, we can say that Christ’s human nature was fully wise because it was unified with the divine, but it wasn’t Wisdom itself because his body and soul were created things and therefore creaturely. The beauty is that in his Incarnation, Christ becomes a roadmap or template for us to follow. He shows us what Adam and Eve could not: what human life looks like as it is supposed to be.

So what does it mean for Jesus to grow in wisdom when he in fact is Wisdom itself as St. Luke mentions: “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” We should point out that Luke’s observation is probably meant to mark a fulfillment of Isaiah 11:2 which says of the messiah: “And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding. The spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” The perfect union of human and divine natures in the Incarnation means that the human nature of Jesus is bestowed with all of its needs at each particular stage of human development. For example, Jesus would have known what perfect obedience was to his parents while he was a child. He would have known his Father’s will in every situation. But his human nature had to grow just like all human natures: his body grew and he experienced growth spurts, puberty. Similarly, he had to acquire language, learn social conventions, and all the other things people have to undergo as they become adults. John of Damascus says, “By making what is ours [meaning his humanity] altogether his own, he made his own the progress of people in wisdom and grace.” And because he has done this, all of us who are moving from the disorder of sin and the woundedness of our human natures can look to him as we grow in union with God.

And what is it that he points us to? If we follow his example, what is the result? The answer can be found in the words our Lord spoke to his parents when they found him in the Temple: “I must be about my Father’s business.” In all things, Jesus knew his primary mission was to accomplish what he had been sent here to do: die on the cross for our sins. And so throughout his entire life, this one objective stood before him as his primary task. He knew this was his task when he had massive crowds following him, he knew this was his task when he was by himself, he knew this was his task when his disciples were often misunderstanding the point, he knew this was his task when he was forsaken by the crowds and by the 12, he knew this was his task when he was being spit on, whipped, forced to carry his cross, and he knew this was his task when they were nailing him to the altar of the Cross. Everything he did was about moving forward to that moment.

It’s true that we don’t always have the clarity about our specific life journey. Most of us don’t know when or how we will die. However, this doesn’t change the fact that our calling is the same as what Jesus’ said to his parents in the Temple: “Be about our Father’s business.” We become about our Father’s business when we stop compartmentalizing our lives, by saying “I’ll give God my Sunday mornings but not my Monday nights” or when we say “I won’t do this sin, but I can’t possibly give up that sin.” We become about our Father’s business when we put aside the lesser goods we have been pursuing as ultimate goods, when we stop seeing financial acquisition and economic prosperity, political power, cultural popularity, and fleshly pleasure as the primary ends for which we have been created. We become about our Father’s business when we pursue his vision for human flourishing that is found in submission to his will and call, when we begin to see him in others, especially the downtrodden, when we pursue Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and virtue. We become about our Father’s business when we recognize that the Gospel is the center of our lives and that everything about who we are is shaped by the fact that God loved us so much that he gave his only begotten Son for us and that he humbled himself to share our humanity so that we might be in communion with God.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.