“O Wisdom, that cometh from the mouth of the Most High…”

 

And now we’re just shy of Christmas day. Today, December 17, is when the liturgy changes gear and the Church starts to hum in anticipation of one of the two great Christian festival. The process of the salvation of mankind, which ended so dramatically on the Cross, began with the Incarnation, the en-fleshing of the eternal Word, the eternal Wisdom. That begins with the actual Incarnation, of course, on the 25th of March, the Feast of the Annunciation, when we mark the actual conception of Christ in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. But Christmas marks the day Wisdom appeared in human form. At Evening Prayer on December the 17th, we sing twice to Holy Wisdom the following words as the antiphon to the Magnificat. Our Dominican friends in Oxford sing it for us in the video above.

O Sapiéntia, quæ ex ore Altíssimi prodísti, attíngens a fine usque ad finem fórtiter, suavitérque dispónens ómnia: veni ad docéndum nos viam prudéntiæ. 

O Wisdom, whom came forth from the mouth of the Most High, powerfully comprehending all, and pleasantly ordering all things: come thou to teach us the prudent way.

The Messianic expectation grew in strength in the centuries before Christ, as the strength of the Davidic royal house began increasingly to ebb and then as the northern Israelite tribes all but vanished in the attacks of the Assyrians. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin alone remained, a stronghold in the hills of Judæa. Prophecies foretold the restoration of the fortunes of the nation, with the return of a great King to the household of David. Simultaneously, as the Jewish nation and culture was built around Jerusalem and the synagogue system began to develop, the contemplation of a personified Wisdom and the study of Scripture to attain that Wisdom became part of the life of the people. Naturally, in the Christian synagogues in the earliest years of the Church, before the destruction of the Temple, the divine Word of God become man was identified with the Wisdom of God. At this next Sunday’s Mass, we shall hear that Christ was born into the tribe of Judah, the tribe of which David was a son also. Christ took his human form from Mary his mother, a daughter of the same tribe of Judah, a daughter of David.