By the Rev. Jeff Boldt

One of the most memorable lectures from Wycliffe College was Bishop George on the missionary movement.  Loads of people, including married couples, went out to Africa where they were surely going to die of tropical disease.  Packing their belongings in their own coffins, they went in droves.  When the Bishop called my wife and I out of the blue in 2022, modern medicine had lessoned the risk.  And thank God, since in our first two years we had a lot of medical emergencies – emergencies that we would have had here anyway, but emergencies nonetheless.  Three sets of stitches, parasites, h-pylori, covid, Kawasaki disease, and a miscarriage.  But again, thank God, during a double hospitalization for Kawasaki, Jenn had an emergency c-section and delivered our fifth, Azaryah, on the anniversary of the previous miscarriage.  During all of this, we felt uplifted by the prayers of this diocese.  (And since then we’ve only had one broken bone!).  Having kids is a constant reminder of the vulnerability of human life. 

This year I’m teaching on the patristic period.  The early church in Alexandria was founded by St Mark.  And yet, the earliest teachers we hear about are Gnostic (the Sethians, Basilides, Valentinus, and on and on).  The main issue on the table for them was the problem of suffering.  They simply couldn’t believe that the Father of Jesus Christ was also the creator.  Creation is flawed.  For, it seems like all our problems are caused by our bodies, by the laws of nature.  Gnostic salvation, therefore, was an escape from the body initiated by secret teachings.  Today I will reveal the “secret” teachings of Egypt’s first teachers who mesmerized the ancient world. 

Now, the Gnostics par excellance where the Valentinians.  They taught that creation was the failed pregnancy of a cosmic female figure named Wisdom, or Sophia.  We know this figure from the beginning of Proverbs where she rejoices in God’s act of creation.  The gnostics, though, didn’t rejoice with her.  They couldn’t understand how creation could be good if evil exists.  The most extreme Gnostics, therefore, encouraged their members to give up marriage altogether.  Better never to have kids than to bring someone into this world – still a rather common view today. 

In response to this challenge, the Church affirmed the goodness of marriage and clearly taught that the Earth and her children were created by God.  Creation was not an accident.  It was good.  When God formed Adam from dust, his craftsmanship was perfect.  It was only when Adam and Eve chose sin, that there were consequences: Eve would have labor pains.  And God put enmity between her offspring and the offspring of the Serpent, the first of whom was Cain; the last of whom was Jesus.  And so Eve’s fallen children would be redeemed by Christ. 

 Our reading from Isaiah today prophesies the adoption of her children by the God of Israel.  In the chapter immediately preceding our lesson (54), Isaiah refers to the cosmic woman under the name of Jerusalem – a barren mother who finally gives birth when Jesus, “the Suffering Servant,” of chapter 52-53 is raised from the dead.  Jesus is the resurrected bridegroom, Jerusalem the bride, and we are the children.  The growth of the Church, therefore, is understood by Isaiah in terms of birth. 

John also thinks in terms of birth, but just as often in terms of fruit.  The Christian is grafted onto the source of life.  The first time the apostle refers to “life” is in his famous commentary on Genesis 1:1-4.  Turn therefore to John 1:1 to see what I mean. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not covered it.

The first thing I will pass over quickly, is that “beginning” is a divine name, in this case, of the Father.  The Word is therefore “with” the Father, “in” the Father, and even “begotten” by the Father.  The second thing to notice is that “life” is “in” the Word.  John is elsewhere clear that the third person of the Trinity is the “Spirit of Life.”  We therefore have a trinitarian pattern – a pattern that is also present in Genesis 1, where God creates through his Word (“let there by light”) while the Spirit covers the “face of the earth.” 

The third thing – which the Gnostics did not fail to notice – is that there is a hidden female figure in Genesis 1 – the Earth, whose face is covered initially by a veil of darkness then by the light of the Holy Spirit.  Whose face is this?  The parallel commentary on this passage from Psalm 104 identifies the covering of light with God’s own robe, and identifies the woman overshadowed by the robe as Wisdom.  The Psalmist next identifies this Wisdom with the earth, from which comes all living things:

How many are your works, Lord!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures. (24)

So here Wisdom, the Earth, is pregnant with God’s creatures.  This takes us back to the title, “mother of all the living,” which Adam gives to his wife Eve in Genesis 3.  Eve’s name in Greek, is Zoe, the word for Life.  Thus, John says she is “in the Word” just like Eve was in Adam and proceeded from his side to be his bride. We fail to notice all these connections, but the Gnostics didn’t!

They thought Sophia’s pregnancy was a mistake.  But John is actually saying that she is a creature of the Holy Spirit, who is “in” the Word.  She is good.   She is the new creation.  She is Christ’s bride.   

In both his Gospel and in Revelation, John is clear that we are children of this mother, the Church.  Yet our birth is, like Christ’s: virginal.  John says that we are “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (1:13).  So while it’s true that the Bride’s husband is Jesus, we are not born of the husband’s will – he was dead and in the grave when we were conceived.  Furthermore, his Father is our father.  And yet the Bride, like Mary, did not conceive by the Father, but by the Holy Spirit.  In a reversal of Eve’s procession from Adam’s side, Christ proceeds from Eve as a kind of Branch. 

This is a “secret” of John’s theology.  He uses a procreative analogy when he talks about the relationship of the Father and the Son: birthing, begetting. But he uses a botanical analogy when he talks about the relationship of the Spirit to the Father and the Son: proceeding.  This word, which we use in our creed, is elsewhere translated in the Bible as “branching.”  For example, seven branches “proceed” from the candelabra in the tabernacle.  So we come full circle to my “secret” interpretation of John 15: 

Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

The hidden woman is present in this passage as the branches proceeding from the vine, just as Eve proceeded from Adam.  We are the fruit she bares.  And the sap that nourishes her us is the love of the Holy Spirit.

The first teachers in Egypt seem to have been gnostic heretics.  Yet what about the people in the pews? (they didn’t have pews back then).  These anonymous orthodox people provided the basic argument of the earliest Christian Apologists who countered Roman accusations that Christians were cannibals and lawbreakers.  Their argument was that Christians were conspicuously loving – they took care of their neighbors, they didn’t kill their kids, they treated their families lovingly, they in fact upheld the law.  The proof was in the pudding, as it were.  For as Rodney Stark has pointed out, what opened the floodgate to new believers in the Roman empire was not only the fearlessness of the martyrs, but the fact that Christians took care of their neighbors during the plague.  Furthermore, the Church attracted women in droves.  No longer forced to abort or expose female infants by their husbands, and indeed taking in female infants left exposed by Romans, the Church’s numbers exploded. 

At its most basic level, the fruitfulness Jesus talks about in the Gospel of John – I am the vine, you are the branches – refers to both the genealogical and the moral growth of the Church.  The genealogical aspect of Church growth comes down to the baptism and catechesis of our kids and our converts.  For baptism is the new birth, and “cleansing” is a verb in Greek that also means “pruning.”  In baptism our sinful flesh is pruned so we can bear fruit.  This is what it means when Jesus says, “[the Father] cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”  Pruning is essential for fruitfulness. 

The moral aspect of Church growth is spelled out in Paul’s epistle today.  Right now we are growing up into the kingdom of God. But when we get there, we will no longer need to grow into faith, hope, or the gift of prophecy.  Neither will we have kids nor make converts.  What will remain is love, and our abiding in that love.  What will remain is Christ in us; Christ born in us just as he was born in Mary. 

This secret wisdom is not beyond the ordinary Christian.  We don’t have to leave behind our bodies or our marriages to attain it.  We don’t all have to be serious theologians to understand it.  For by abiding in the love of God, we will naturally bare fruit.  We will naturally teach our kids, tell our neighbors, and bear the sufferings of this world in Hope.  For as Paul says, love never fails.  One can travel all around the world, but this is true wherever you go. Amen.