Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

I’m looking at the Epistle reading for today, and realizing I understand this passage differently than I did growing up. In this part of his letter, 1 Corinthians 2:1-13, St. Paul rhapsodizes:

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love him.
(verse 9)

In this bit of text, whether Paul patches together some OT references or sings a new hymn (possibilities suggested in the footnote in my Bible), he’s making a statement about ‘wisdom’, specifically, God’s wisdom.

I suppose I used to think of this refrigerator-magnet verse like it was a blueprint for my personal future: ‘God has such great things in store for me, you simply can’t imagine how good it will be.’ Perhaps this emphasis had something to do with a burning desire to know what God wanted me, as an individual, to do with my life, and that this verse was a secret invitation to finding that will.

However, Paul seems to have had something bigger and better than my myopic interpretation. Mind you, Paul’s ‘wisdom’ wasn’t flashy and impressive, humanly speaking. In fact, he states clearly that this it is something which the rulers of his time (even Paul himself) missed: namely, that Christ crucified is the ‘wisdom of God in a mystery’. Christ himself is the very ‘wisdom of God’, revealed to us in the form of a human, even someone who would suffer and die. The utter ‘folly’ (by human standards) of this story must be revealed to us by God’s Spirit, who ‘searches all things, yes, the deep things of God’.

So, I suppose my understanding hasn’t been totally subverted, but rather expanded to see the scope of Paul’s vision. He found the wisdom of God to be embodied in Jesus the incarnate and crucified Son of God, who is revealed to us by the Spirit of God. 

We could say, then, that Wisdom is truly trinitarian. In fact, Hildegard Von Bingen’s trinitarian antiphon O virtus Sapientiae, echoes this idea, when she allegorically refers to Wisdom’s ‘three wings’, one of which rises to ‘to the heavens’, another descends ‘to the earth’ and the third ‘is everywhere’.

This is the trinitarian reality that Saint Paul hymns in his letter, and it is indeed transcendent, involving God revealed to us in Christ through the Spirit’s help. This is indeed ‘good news’ for us, for our future, but it is our collective good news: we can all know the God of everything in the Son through the Spirit.

Yours in Christ,
Justin