There is a fashion now for ‘natural wine’, which comes out an orangey colour, and can be acceptable or can be utterly awful. People are paying a lot of money and it’s quite the thing in the hipster eateries of Hackney and Islington. The brutal truth is that it’s just how wine used to be made before we got the hang of it. The people at the time of the Gospel today would have been very familiar with it – quickly matured, usually in stone jars, added to so that some of the old feeds the new, the Greeks call it Romeiko and in Crete it’s the house wine of every rustic taverna, although tutted at by politer places on the coast. My Romanian friends make it in plastic jars, and it’s kind of OK. Hipsters so come across a strange paradox: in trying to discover something new, we can only discover something old, and this applies to every human endeavour I think, as we gaze int the sky at night, beholding a star that may have died millions of years before. In the church too, we find in the ancient rituals of the year, the alive, ever-changing presence of God. We are so often simply finding out what God laid down at the beginning of time.
Solomon knew that if he wanted wisdom, the wisdom needed to govern God’s people properly, he couldn’t invent it, make it up as he went along. He had to be given it, from the only source able to give it to him, that is, from God himself. Only the Ancient of Days possesses the kind of wisdom Solomon seeks, wisdom older than time itself.
We are, I suppose, used to thinking of God as old. There is good sense to that: God has always existed. But it is equally true that God is always new. We live our lives bit by bit, one part passing away just as another comes to be. We can only get older and older, but God is the same creative force that made us babies and who will receive our souls to Him at the time given.
God is so alive that he has all his life all at once and forever. God is no older now than he was in the time of Solomon or the time of Adam. God alone is old and new at the same time, and He calls His Holy Church to be old and new at the same time, as a reflection of His own divine self.
That’s why the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a treasure or a pearl of great price. We can search all our lives, work diligently, but without God’s help all we make and do will be only either original or true. Only when we come across God’s truth will we find something really new and fresh and also really foundational, something which shows the wisdom of the ages.
This wisdom isn’t something we can make on our own or even deserve by our hard work. We are given it, as Solomon was also given it, simply because by God’s love we have the great fortune to do so. The treasure, the pearl, comes without any merit of our own. We come upon it because God in his goodness shares his wisdom with us. We don’t even fine it by looking for it, it just comes up in our dragnet because God wills it t do so, He wants us to fine Him, almost to trip over Him, as He is everywhere, sometimes He will be specifically somewhere that we might perceive Him more fully. He draws us in, He gives us His gifts – once He has given us something, it is ours – the treasure belongs to the man who owns the field, the pearl to the one who buys it. However, there is the caution that even though it has ben given to us, it has been given by He who made it, and He has a purpose for all things, for each one of us. We have free will, but it has been given to us by our Creator.
These gifts, though bestowed on us freely, are not cheap. Indeed, when you find the treasure, you have to sell everything you have to buy it. When you come across this great treasure, this ancient newness, you have to give up on all the tired dustiness and all the vain inventions in your life, we have to give up whatever came before in order to possess the fulness of what is now given to us – to live fully, we have to begin empty and to be filed with whatever is of God, and to reject that which is opposed to His rule. Then the ones sorting the contents of the dragnet will not find us dead and rotting, no use to anyone.
God offers us his wisdom, the wisdom of the ages, but something genuinely startling and fresh and new. As good scribes of the Kingdom, we have to learn to take out of our treasure chests things which are both new and old, the ancient wisdom of the God who is both old and new at the same time, and become more fully His children, young and old, ancient and alive.