Proverbs 8:22-31
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up, at the first,
before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills,
I was brought forth – when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
Reflection
The main theological trajectory in Scripture is to be found in God’s covenant with Israel and its working out in history. This reading reminds us of a different Jewish way of doing theology – the wisdom tradition which found God through the rationality of the world and the wisdom of human beings. Here God is imagined creating Lady Wisdom, beside him ‘…like a master worker’ as the world was made. This poem is about rejoicing in creation.
In its early centuries the Reformed tradition relied entirely on listening to the God who comes to us in the history of his people through the words of the Bible. It was a spirituality of the ear, of preaching and listening. It had its own quiet beauty – the simple white-washed walls of an elegant chapel with pulpit, table and pews, yet it devalued the visual. It wasn’t that they didn’t value art. Calvin said ‘…sculpture and painting are gifts of God.’ (Institutes I.xi.12), but they were clear that God had forbidden idols (Ex 20:4). Art was fine, but outside the church.
One of the great flowerings of art was in the staunchly Reformed Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Rembrandt was, according to some historians, a thoroughly Reformed artist. A recent book argues that Vermeer might have been a member of a Reformed grouping known as ‘The Remonstrants’, and in the nineteenth century, van Gogh, a minister’s son, was for a time a missionary working alongside a Congregational minister in London. All of them reflected something of God in their art.
Mercifully, Reformed spirituality regained its balance in the nineteenth century, discovering again the beauty of holiness. The wisdom tradition might be a minor key in theology, but it is an important one. We are rediscovering the relationship between beauty, grace and truth, not least as we look out over landscapes of shanty towns and slums where economic sin and ugliness walk hand in hand.
Prayer
Lord
Your beauty flows in the Earth
and touches our imaginations.
Open our eyes that we may be delighted,
moved and motivated
by art and artists
to see more of you,
and be drawn back
to the amazing story of your love for us
seen in Jesus Christ
the good and beautiful shepherd.
Amen