“A capable wife who can find?”
The Reverend Shearon Sykes Williams, Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 22nd, 2024
When I was in seminary, I had a professor who always said that when you are trying to decide which reading to preach on to “find the passage that begs a lot of questions and preach on that.” And our reading from Proverbs today certainly does that. “A capable wife who can find?... She is far more precious than jewels. She girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong…She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue….”
There is no doubt that this passage from Proverbs is based on patriarchal assumptions of biblical cultures 3,000 years ago. One of the aims of Proverbs is to teach young men how to live wisely within a social order where choosing a capable wife was very important. And the woman described is strong, resilient, resourceful, industrious, loving, and generous. She is a good wife, a good mother, managing the household as well as business affairs beyond the household, while caring for the needs of the poor. So, on one level, this portion of Proverbs instructs young men to be careful in choosing a wife and gives them the qualities to look for, qualities that will endure.
Our cultural assumptions today are quite different from that of Proverbs. We don’t believe that women have to be wives and mothers to be valued. Gender roles are not so defined. And we recognize that women’s lives have meaning and purpose beyond the domestic sphere and that married women are not solely defined by their husbands and children.
Proverbs does not envision a world where people have the freedom to choose whomever they want to share their life with. There was no understanding of sexual orientation or gender identity. So the question for us today becomes, is there any wisdom in this passage for progressive, inclusive Christians who celebrate the dignity of every human being, the equality of women and the variety of families that we feel called to create? I believe the answer is yes. Because the ultimate aim of Scripture as a whole, and Proverbs in particular, is to show us how to live faithfully, how to live wisely, how to live in deep mutuality with others and especially how to live a life that is productive, kind and giving. It is important for partners to support one another, for parents to support children, and it's important to have a stable household, whatever our household may look like. So, on one level of interpretation, Proverbs gives us relationship guidance, and on another level, it gives us an image of Divine Wisdom. And this I think is where things get especially interesting.
In the earlier parts of Proverbs, Divine Wisdom is personified as a woman who invites people to a feast so that they may learn how to lead godly lives by coming to the table to seek God’s guidance. Early on in Christian tradition, theologians saw this as an image of the heavenly banquet and a foreshadowing of the Eucharist . The female figure of Wisdom who invites everyone to the feast was identified with Christ, who came into the world to show us the way to God. In the beginning of John’s Gospel, he picks up on this idea and tells us that Jesus is the Word, the Logos, through whom God both created the world and redeemed the world. So we have both a male and female image for Jesus, Word and Wisdom. Listen to the words of our Eucharistic Prayer today. The prayer is relatively new, but it is based on this ancient understanding of Jesus as both Wisdom and Word, female and male. And this is important because we need a variety of metaphors for God. God is the God of many names and yet no name we can ever give God is enough because God is beyond all names. No language can ever capture the majesty and mystery of the Triune God we worship.
The passage we have today about the capable wife falls at the end of Proverbs and refers back to the image of the wise woman who invites everyone to a feast to learn how to live a godly life. The woman in today’s reading provides an example for all of us of how to live a faithful life, seeking God’s will in humility and being faithful to our closest relationships. She summarizes the virtues of wise living discussed throughout Proverbs and encourages us to follow her call. Ultimately, this woman is much more than a normal person. She points us to God. She encourages us to choose a lifelong commitment to seeking wisdom, a choice we have to reaffirm every day. As theologian Kathleen O’Connor observes, the husband in today’s reading is a stand-in for all of us, everyone who is devoted to finding Wisdom. This wife embodies the right attitude at the heart of a life lived in faith, the “fear the Lord’ which does not mean to live in worry and anxiety but live in awe, wonder, gratitude and humility before God. And when we have that posture toward life, it benefits all of the communities that we are a part of. We come together today to seek wisdom in all things, and to ask God to show us the path of life.
“ …She is far more precious than jewels. She girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong…She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue….”