The Wisdom of Submission

The New Revised Standard Version Two Kinds of Wisdom

Two Kinds of Wisdom

13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. 14 But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. 15 Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. 16 For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. 17 But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. 18 And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

Friendship with the World

4 Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? 2 You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

The New Revised Standard Version Friendship with the World

7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Intro

How do we learn? Where does insight come from? What is the source of wisdom? Is it from above, pure light descended upon us from God almighty? Is it enfleshed, something our bodies know, something springs up from within us?

These are some of the key questions that undergird James’ epistle and the philosophical arguments of his age. These are also still key questions for us — though we often frame them with knowledge or being informed. We tend to speak less of wisdom and more about being knowledgeable or insightful.

If we recall from the first week of our study, James is writing to the “twelve tribes in the Dispersion,” meaning Jewish Christians who are spread out across the Roman Empire and beyond in the first and possibly second centuries. It is uncertain exactly when James was written and the audience is so wide, spread out over the empire, that we need to look at more general understandings of the context to explore this a bit more.

Thankfully, this text today is very easily placed in the Hellenistic Greek mindset, with its high regard for the pursuit of wisdom. The Greek philosophers prized wisdom as one of the highest levels of human understanding and thinking. So James’ description of two kinds of wisdom, one from above and one from below, would fit nicely alongside thinkers like Plato or Socrates.

Where does wisdom come from? Again, we find ourselves with this question.

Does it come from an oracle out in the wild, someone who is taken over by a spirit and able to speak truth from beyond? Or do we take a more postmodern angle and say that wisdom comes through experience, it is a lived knowing?

Let’s get into the text and see where James takes us.

Wisdom from above

In framing wisdom, James asks another question: “Who is wise and understanding among you?” In a sense, he’s challenging his hearers to identify wisdom in their communities (note that he’s going to challenge those communities to quit bickering and fighting in a moment…perhaps he’s encouraging them to look for the wise ones around them as potential mediators or models for healthy disagreements). He says, look — who is wise among you? Friends, you know it. If I asked you the same question, you would look around the room and I’m sure you would see folks here that you regard to have wisdom. (Again, as I always remind us when dealing with wisdom…if you’re a person who immediately says, “I am wise,” well…you might not actually be. Wisdom doesn’t call itself wise.)

How do we recognize wisdom, well, it seems that we know it when we see it. And it is easy to identify in others because it bears a gentleness. The works of the lives of the wise ones bear gentle, yielding, merciful fruit in the world.

These last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Edwin Friedman’s book, “A Failure of Nerve” as a part of a leadership course for my doctoral program. Friedman argues for leaders to be well-differentiated from their organizations — basically, leaders must have an inner calm and strength of will that does not flap in the winds of organizational up and downs. Leaders are grounded, we say. Leaders with wisdom are able to differentiate their own perspectives and stance from the emotions and struggles of their organizations. This is a taste of wisdom — healthy differentiation from the whirlwind of the world.

The wisdom that James is describing as coming from above looks a lot like healthy differentiation in leadership and community. The purity of what comes from God roots us in who we are and invites that self, formed by God, to act in ways of justice, peace, and mercy — ways of wisdom.

Wisdom from below

James then contrasts this pure wisdom from above with the wisdom that comes from below, a wisdom that is earthly, unspiritual, devilish.

Interestingly, the Greek word for wisdom is sophia and it’s the same word that gets used for both wisdom from above and wisdom from below. Sophia. Wisdom is sophia, whether its from above or below. Sophia, wisdom, is indifferent, in a sense. There is not something inherently good or bad about sophia, sophia just is.

This bit of exegetical work is important, because it reminds us that the source of wisdom is what is key. Where wisdom comes from matters. Above, below, pure or base, it matters where we gain wisdom.

Now, for the wisdom that comes from below — it’s earthly, unspiritual, devilish. Again, the Greek words are helpful here: earthly (epi-geios) means something that in the Greek mindset was rooted in ground, bodily, and therefore detached from divine or heavenly realms. We might use the word base or useless, good for nothing. Stay with me here. Unspiritual is “psy-chi-kos”, perhaps also translated as soulless. It is, again, detached from the heavenly. It lacks soul, lacks the psyche that is illuminated by God’s light. And finally, demonic, or dai-mon-iodes — we think we know this word as a particular evil character, a devil or demon. But moreso, the sense here is more like forces that are in opposition to the heavenly realm and divine wisdom. We might say evil here — the power of evil in the world that is opposed to the flourishing and shalom God intends for creation.

I’m pulling those words out here because it’s important that we don’t simply write that list off as generally bad ideas or bodily wisdom that must be shunned. Unlike sophia, which is neutral (neither good or bad), the source of sophia must be considered — are these forces in partnership or opposition to the wisdom of God?

James gives us great examples that help this all click. He goes on to talk about divisions in the communities he’s writing to — murder, theft, adultery, bodily cravings that produce unjust and harmful fruit. We know what this is like. While we might not want to go out and murder our neighbor, we know what it’s like to feel enmity and conflict with others. And we know that often, while we might like to think we are on the right side of conflict and therefore justified in our positions, we must swallow the reality that when we get caught up into conflict and division, it is most often that we are relying on insight and wisdom that does not come from God. We feel our angst rise up, we get defensive — these are not postures of godly conflict.

Certainly, there is space for godly conflict. But we know that it carries a different character. It is respectful, while disagreeing. It is honoring of the other, knowing that iron sharpens iron, that conflict is grist for the mill.

The kind of wisdom we must be careful about is one in which we do not heed God’s voice, do not pay attention to God’s leading, and lean on our own angst and discomfort to lead.

Caution on detaching from our bodies or the earth

Before we close, I want to note the need for caution with this division of above and below. The Christian tradition has struggled with perspectives that dismiss the role of the body as any valuable source of wisdom. We’ve had times in our history where we’ve completely divorced the mind from the body, saying wisdom and connection to God only come through spiritual, not embodied, means. When this runs rampant, we get what early Christians denounced as Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the belief that the body does not matter, that all knowledge and wisdom and insight come from the spiritual realm alone, into the head. This line of thinking can lead us to denegrate the body, to destroy creation, to abuse and neglect the earth and ourselves. This is dangerous.

And that’s not what we’re getting at here. What this is about is asking, once again, what the source of the wisdom is. As Christians, we believe that when we come into relationship with Christ, God’s image is living within us. God designs us to bear the image of God in our very being, our bodies. Our bodies tell of God’s lovingkindness in all their beauty. And, wisdom from God can be found in our bodies. We tune ourselves to listen to our bodies, to become aware of the still small voice of God in us, to notice the work of God’s image in us. This is straight up, orthodox Christian theology. So never let us divorce our bodies from the pursuit of wisdom — our bodies tell us.

The thing we must be cautious about is where our body is receiving wisdom from. Is it through prayer and petition to God? Is it in the integration of head and heart, mind and body? And does it bear the good fruits of God’s lovingkindness in how it is lived out? Then wisdom can be found in the body.

And wisdom can be found in the earth. We simply must not look to the object, the things, alone for wisdom, but rather look for the spark of life, the image and marker of God’s handiwork — that is where we find God and God’s wisdom.

Godly Wisdom Bears Earthy Fruit

And this wisdom bears fruit. Again, if you were to look around, we would know folks who we see bearing the fruit of wisdom. And perhaps, we notice when wisdom has been highjacked by those more base sentiments, those parts that are still detached. We notice the fruit of wisdom. We must celebrate wisdom, nurture it in ourselves through listening to God’s voice.

This is where the word submission comes in. The last verse of our reading today says this: James 4:7-8 “7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”

We submit to the wisdom of God by drawing close to God. This happens in prayer, in silence, in action and in worship. We draw near to God so that we might recognize the sophia that comes from God with greater clarity. It is in this submission, letting the disconnected knowledge slip away, that we find a freedom to live out the work of God and bear good fruits.

Lord, in your abundant wisdom, lead us. Amen.