NOTES for Pro 8:1-9:18

The water spoken of in the words of the Proverbs of Solomon becomes, in Christ's words, the water of life. The "strange fountain" is everything that captivates our heart and distracts our mind. Everything that keeps us from following Christ. Water washed every living thing from the face of the earth in the flood. And, as Isaiah says: "...the remnant of the house of Jacob will rely on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth." Can it be that only through upheavals of such scale can a person turn to God?

We know of cases when great grief or joy allowed a person to discover God in this world. But following Him, the daily labor, becomes inconvenient for us; we do not understand and do not see God. And weak in heart and will, we follow pleasures and entertainments that are pleasant but not useful for our soul. And all the more we assist evil works. All the more we are on the side of what will bring the world to the Second Coming.

But the Power and Glory of Christ have been revealed to us; He suffered for us, He took our sins upon Himself. And not to understand the price, not to see how the world around us changes if we strive to be with Christ, how much more joyful and full our own life becomes, this is our experience of the fall. Our experience of resisting Christ, unworthy and destructive.

‘Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant,’ says Miss Folly in today’s reading. Let us read this text not as the Russian Synodal translation gives it—‘a foolish woman’—but precisely as ‘Miss Folly,’ as we read in the New International Version, which says ‘woman Folly.’ This is exactly how it should be read in the spirit of the New Testament proclamation, so as not to offend the dignity of women, which Christ raised to a level commensurate with that of men.

Where could this absurd idea that stolen waters are sweet have come from? How can anyone believe it?! This perception of sin is mentioned once more in the Book of Proverbs and once in the Book of Sirach. It seems a paradox: everyone who sins knows the burden and pain of sin for themselves. This is heard again and again in the Bible; we need only look at the Psalms. ‘There is no peace in my bones because of my sins, for my iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden they weigh upon me. My wounds stink and fester because of my folly’ (Ps 38:3–5).

Let us recall that when the serpent tempted Eve, she saw that ‘the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable’ (Gen 3:6). It was later, when they had been expelled from paradise, that Adam and Eve came to know the full weight and pain of the burden of sin. At first, however, sin seems so pleasant. This is especially true of sins against the seventh commandment of the Decalogue. How can we imagine that stealing or killing could be pleasant?! Killing and stealing for pleasure are already a matter of mental illness. But violations of the seventh commandment positively entice us with their sweetness. Few understand that this sweetness contains the terrible bitterness of expulsion from paradise. The parallel passage in Sirach says, ‘Every kind of bread is sweet to the fornicator’ (Sir 23:17). Perhaps this is because sin against the seventh commandment contains all the other sins as well: a person steals one person from another, kills the love between two people, and knowingly blasphemes against the Lord by disobeying His instructions, and so on.

But let us turn to the beginning of the chapter of Proverbs we are reading today. Yes, there we are again called ‘lacking in understanding.’ Of course, before the Lord that is indeed what we are. Yet it says, ‘Come, eat my bread and drink the wine I have mixed.’ In other words, the commandment by no means deprives us of the sweetness of bread and wine; on the contrary, it grants us both that sweetness and the Lord’s love.