To Woman

I wrote a nutshell of what the Bible is all about back here.  I’d like to expand on the notion of Woman though.

Woman is eschatology.  The man comes first, and the women comes second.  The man is the priest, but the woman is the sanctuary.  Wisdom is described as a woman, and She is described as being from eternity.  Since it is the Holy Spirit who indwells the Bride of Christ, I think it makes the most sense to understand Wisdom as the Spirit. Man and Woman both have their archetypal image in God.

The Spirit is also the sign of the last days. The Spirit is eschatological.  In a way, Jesus is the Adam and the Spirit is the Eve.  Biblical history moves from man to woman in an important way.  Prior to Advent, all mankind awaited the Man.  Now we all wait for the Woman.

This is also why men give their lives for their women.  They are being as Christ to the Church, and this is written on their very hearts.  Rarely are they conscious of this.  Pagans even know about this stuff.  All of the pagan deities are sexual beings.  Their cosmologies are marked by this as well.  The great epic battles are  fought over women.  Women launch a thousand ships.  This was simply a reality of the cosmos.  Christianity doesn’t deny it at all.  It begins with man and wife, and it ends with man and wife.  Courtship is all over the liturgy, as well as the wisdom materials.  The vision of the future, the perfect reality, is a wedding feast.

So we fight on.

Wrestling With God and With Man

Gen. 32:28 And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

The narrative of Jacob wrestling with God is one of the most challenging in all of Scripture. We are initially puzzled by how such a thing is even possible. How can God manifest himself as a man? Why isn’t the passage clearer as to the identity of the wrestler? How could Jacob win?

Jacob had always been a fighter. He fought in the womb. He fought his brother. He fought his father. He fought his father-in-law. Finally, he fought God.

A lot of this is because of the Fall. That is true. Fighting God, however, seems to go beyond that. After all, God could have just squashed Jacob. If Jacob is fighting God because of sin, then it makes no sense for him to prevail.

Indeed, God wants Jacob to fight. God’s desire is for Jacob to wrestle and grow, and every Jew bore Jacob’s new name. All of Israel identified with this wrestling.

And this is true of us all in a way. We have to wrestle with God and man. Salvation itself is a death and resurrection. The life of sanctification is a struggle.

Jesus said that the violent men take the kingdom by force, and it seems that we take all things by force. Learning how to do this is the challenge.