Prophecy in Wisdom

“For if the righteous one is the son of God, God will help him and deliver him from the hand of his foes.” (2:18)

Reading

The wicked, who think life is short and death is the end, turn on the just man because his life rebukes theirs: “Let us lie in wait for the righteous one, because he is annoying to us; he opposes our actions” (2:12). “He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the LORD” (2:13), “and boasts that God is his Father” (2:16). So they decide to test him: “Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him” (2:20). In its first sense this is any faithful Jew mocked by apostates.

Fulfilled

At the Cross the chief priests, scribes and elders say almost the same words: “He trusted in God; let him deliver him now if he wants him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God’” (Matthew 27:43). Matthew's wording echoes this passage and Psalm 22:9 together. The Church reads Wisdom 2 in the fourth week of Lent, beside the Gospel in which the authorities try to arrest Jesus (John 7). The answer comes a few verses later: “For God formed us to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made us” (2:23). God did help him, not by taking him down from the Cross, but by raising him from the dead.

See also

Prophecy in Matthew; Isaiah 53; Psalm 22.

“He shall take his zeal for armor and arm creation to requite the enemy,” (5:17)

Reading

After the wicked see the just one vindicated, the poem turns to God himself as a warrior who arms for judgment: “Shall put on righteousness for a breastplate, wear sure judgment for a helmet, Shall take invincible holiness for a shield, and sharpen his sudden anger for a sword” (5:18–20). It begins with the promise: “But the righteous live forever, and in the LORD is their recompense” (5:15). The picture builds on Isaiah 59:17, where the Lord puts on justice as a breastplate.

Fulfilled

St. Paul gives God's own armor to the Church: “Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). Believers are to be “clothed with righteousness as a breastplate” (6:14) and to “take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (6:17). The armor God wears in Wisdom, he now shares with his people in Christ.

Unfolding

Paul's armor is for a struggle “not with flesh and blood” but against spiritual powers (Ephesians 6:12). The battle continues in the life of the Church, the same battle Revelation shows between the dragon and the woman's offspring (Revelation 12:17).

“For she is the reflection of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the power of God, the image of his goodness.” (7:26)

Reading

Solomon describes Wisdom in the richest language of the Old Testament: “For she is a breath of the might of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty” (7:25). “Although she is one, she can do all things, and she renews everything while herself perduring; Passing into holy souls from age to age, she produces friends of God and prophets” (7:27). “Indeed, she spans the world from end to end mightily and governs all things well” (8:1). In its first sense Wisdom is a personification of God's own wisdom at work in creation.

Fulfilled

The Letter to the Hebrews says of the Son: “who is the refulgence of his glory, the very imprint of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). “Refulgence” translates the same rare Greek word that Wisdom 7:26 uses for “reflection.” St. Paul calls Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24) and “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). The Fathers read this passage of the eternal Word, and it shaped the Creed's confession of the Son as “Light from Light.” This is the New Testament's and the Fathers' reading in the light of Christ; the author of Wisdom did not yet know the Word made flesh.

See also

Prophecy in John; Proverbs 8:22–31; Baruch 3:38.

“For when peaceful stillness encompassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, Your all-powerful word from heaven's royal throne leapt into the doomed land,”

Reading

In its literal sense this is the night of the Passover in Egypt. God's word comes down like “a fierce warrior bearing the sharp sword of your inexorable decree” (18:16), striking the firstborn of the oppressors and setting Israel free (Exodus 12:29). It is a word of judgment.

Fulfilled

The Church's liturgy hears in these verses the night of Christmas. They are the entrance antiphon of the Second Sunday after Christmas, Dum medium silentium: in the middle of the silent night, the all-powerful Word came down from the royal throne. This is a liturgical application in the spiritual sense: the same Word who once came in judgment to free Israel comes in the flesh, as a child, to free the world (John 1:14). Revelation shows the Word one last time as a rider from heaven: “his name was called the Word of God,” and “Out of his mouth came a sharp sword to strike the nations” (Revelation 19:13, 15).

“…that they might recognize that one is punished by the very things through which one sins.” (11:16)

Reading

The last part of the book retells the Exodus as a series of contrasts: the same creation that punishes Egypt blesses Israel. Water fails the Egyptians and flows from the rock for Israel; creatures plague Egypt and quail feed Israel; darkness covers Egypt and light shines on Israel. In the crossing of the sea “all creation, in its several kinds, was being made over anew, serving your commands, that your children might be preserved unharmed” (19:6). Even judgment serves mercy: “But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook sins for the sake of repentance” (11:23).

Fulfilled

The Exodus is fulfilled in Christ's Passover, his passing over to the Father by his death and resurrection (CCC 1340). The book's great confession, “For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made” (11:24), points to the love that gave the Son.

Future

Revelation retells the plagues of Egypt once more in its trumpets and bowls (Revelation 8–9; 16), with the same principle at work: the persecutors receive what they have done, “For they have shed the blood of the holy ones and the prophets” (16:6). And the redeemed stand by the sea singing “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” (15:3). As in Wisdom, the purpose of the plagues is repentance (Revelation 9:20–21; 16:9).