Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity
“You have received a spirit of sonship”
It was the year 524. The place was a northern Italian town called Pavia. There, in prison, languished a scholar named Boethius, falsely accused of treason against the Arian king, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Boethius would be brutally killed. But not before writing, while in prison, one of the great intellectual and spiritual classics of the West, The Consolation of Philosophy. It, along with Boethius’s theological works, would have an enormous influence upon the development of European culture and understanding.
The word “person” for instance, so much in vogue in our own culture in the discourse of natural rights and identity politics, has its roots in the definition of person that Boethius provided in his treatise about the humanity and the divinity of Christ, Contra Eutychen. Distinguishing between nature and person is essential for understanding the unity of God and man in Christ and for thinking about the unity and difference of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; in other words, Boethius developed a concept that serves to illuminate an understanding of the names of God revealed in Scripture as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From such language and terminology for God, there is the natural application of the term to our humanity, especially since for Boethius, following Augustine, man is imago Trinitatis. Being made in the image of God means being made in the image of the Trinity. Such are some of the fruits of his labours by which he is known.
We have, perhaps, as a church and culture forgotten all this. There is something entirely providential in being reminded about the legacy and deeper meaning of such terms as person, defined by Boethius as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” For it reminds us that the language we use about ourselves has its roots in language about God; the two are inseparable. And isn’t that central to the Christian witness in the contemporary world? Namely, to proclaim that our humanity is radically incomplete without God, in this case, that even our language of political and social discourse is grounded in theology? “You have received a spirit of sonship,” Paul proclaims, and from that, and only from that, we might say, flows the true meaning of our actions. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” We are at once our actions and yet more than our actions.
