Sophia Became Flesh: The Subversive Wisdom of God
If your image of Jesus paints a thousand words, then what’s in a name?
A quick etymological study reveals the diverse and growing significance of the various names attached to Jesus of Nazareth. The Hebrew prophets called him Messiah, Prince of Peace, and Mighty God. Paul preferred to call him Christos. His followers titled him Son of God. John called him the eternal “Word.” And most modern Christians can be forgiven for thinking Christ is Jesus’ last name.
But there seems to be another name for everything, including Jesus.
Scholars have long connected the “Word” of God with the even more ancient name, the “Wisdom of God,” or Sophia. The writer of Proverbs tells us Sophia was with God in the beginning. In the apocryphal Book of Sirach, Sophia is literally the Word of God. “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,” she proclaims. Jesus’ use of bread and wine echo’s Sophia’s cry to “Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled.” Even the Apostle Paul equates Christ with Sophia, calling Christ the “wisdom (Sophia) of God.” So, it is safe to say “Sophia became flesh and dwelt among us.”
And since the ancient Hebrews believed the name of a person was identical to the person herself, calling Jesus Christ Sophia not only reveals the Divine Feminine side of Jesus, it also embodies the wisdom of God into our world. Theologian Marcus Borg describes the Sophia of God as a kind of subversive wisdom, a wisdom that undermines conventional religious wisdom by “offering another way, another path.”
Conventional religious wisdom is what most of us grew up under. If you are deconstructing your faith, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s what everyone in your small Southern or Midwestern town assumed to be true. It’s the worn-out, taken-for-granted beliefs that have become so ubiquitous to be normative, and to question them prompts the powers that be to give you a new name: heretic.
The similarities between the status quo religion of Jesus’ day and modern evangelicalism are staggering. Both are best known as a legalistic, rewards and punishments form of faith that pits a punitive God against a world of original sinners. Both are male-dominated, with an almost fetish-like compulsion to control women’s bodies. Both are intrinsically created to maintain purity culture. Both express a relentless desire for power, even if that means getting into bed with Herod or Trump. Both create a rigid establishment of boundaries determining who’s in and who’s out based on outer actions. Just like first-century Judaism, instead of subverting the larger imperial culture, conventional Christianity merely reflects it in spiritual form. Maybe that is why it is so hard to distinguish evangelical values from the Republican Party platform.
Into this world comes Christ Sophia, the very wisdom of God. A Wisdom that turns the warrior God of macho evangelicalism into a womb-like God of limitless compassion. Wisdom that warns the first will be last, and the last first. Wisdom that shames the rich and upholds the poor. Wisdom that scatters the proud and lifts up the lowly. Wisdom that requires nonviolence instead of an eye for an eye. Wisdom that calls for purity of heart, not an outer purity of pompous piety. Wisdom that destroys patriarchy by elevating the worth of women. Wisdom that widens the circle of God’s love to everyone, not just the self-appointed elect. Wisdom that offered the world another way, the transformational way of death and resurrection.
Sophia utterly subverts the broad way of dominator religion leading to destruction, abuse, and spiritual trauma by inviting us down the road less traveled. A road many of us are walking through the wilderness of deconstruction as we flee the trappings of conventional Christianity. Maybe this really is the “Way” of wisdom after all. A way carved out by Sophia herself generations ago. A way that leads to life, freedom, and a new name for us all.
