“You have received a spirit of sonship, in which we cry aloud, Abba, Father”
“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”, Dame Julian of Norwich, the famous mystic and theologian said in the 14th century. Hardly a time one might think of as being well and good. It was a time when northern Europe was convulsed by plagues and death was rampant and regnant. Is her famous saying simply a kind of desperate optimism? Or is it based upon a deeper understanding of the world and our humanity in relation to God?
I think it is the latter. It is a profound insight into the idea of Divine Providence which always sees the goodness of God at work in everything. It belongs to the radical idea of God himself. Perhaps, therein lies our modern dilemma. We have lost the confidence in thinking God and his ruling providence. We are too much enamoured of our own desires and fantasies in the projections of our will and power upon the world and upon ourselves. Therein lies the way to misery because we have forgotten God and find ourselves in what Amin Maalouf rightly calls a “disordered world”.
This morning’s readings help us to think about Divine Providence in challenging ways. The passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans locates our Christian identity in Christ’s sonship and makes it clear that our being “children of God” requires the idea of suffering with God, suffering with Christ. Somehow even suffering becomes something good and not just an evil. We are the “children of God” who are the “heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ”, Paul says, “if so be that we suffer with him” for only so can it be “that we may also be glorified with him”. Powerful words that counter the prevailing assumptions about suffering and death in our world and day. They are words, too, that are based upon the idea of God and God’s Providence as being the real truth of human experience.
But how can we think this? Only because of the witness of the Scriptures to the story of Jesus Christ. Notice that what Paul is saying goes beyond the simple oppositions of flesh and spirit. Led by the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, we learn about our essential sonship precisely through what happens in the world of human experience. We are not in flight from the world and the flesh as if it were something evil. That would be a kind of Gnosticism. No. What changes is how we see ourselves in the world. We are, Paul is saying, to know ourselves in Christ and he in us. That changes how we experience the world and ourselves. It makes it possible to live in a principled way in a fallen and dismal world and even in a fallible church where councils have and may err, particularly when the forms of our spiritual understanding and identity are forgotten or compromised.
Divine Providence changes how we think and act. The Gospel cautions us about the hypocrisy of false prophets at the same time as reminding us that there is an inescapable connection between our thinking and our doing. This is one of the themes of the Trinity season. “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. Our actions have consequences; they are not without meaning, though there are questions about that meaning. We are being challenged to act out of what we have received and known. Words and thoughts are not enough, which is not to say that they are meaningless. The point rather is that they are to have their proper expression in our actions. “Not everyone that saith, ‘Lord, Lord’, shall enter the kingdom of heaven”, Jesus says, indicating to us that it is not just false prophets whom we should beware but our own falseness, our own sense of deceit and self-delusion. But that in turn is predicated upon the idea that our thoughts and actions matter. “He that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven”, Jesus is saying, enters into the kingdom of heaven.
This is only thinkable and livable if we realise that we live in God’s world, a world ultimately governed by God’s Word and Spirit. All of the great literature of consolation, the consolations of philosophy really, argues for the rule of God in and through the sins and follies of our wounded and broken humanity. “O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason”, Boethius says in his great work called The Consolation of Philosophy, a work written in the sixth century when he was imprisoned and ultimately executed on false charges. The Scriptural phrase that underlies that work is about the divine reason that moves “sweetly and strongly (suaviter et fortiter)” through all things. That is to have a strong hold on the idea of God and God’s Providence. Note that the literature of consolation which reflects upon divine Providence, whether it is Julian of Norwich or Boethius, is written in dark and difficult times; perhaps, not altogether unlike certain features of our own world troubled by violence and terrorism, at once random and deadly.
The idea of divine providence does not mean that everything that happens is simply God’s will and purpose for that would be to ignore human evil, the very thing that the readings do not allow. Suffering and evil are not denied. If anything we are made more fully aware of our own propensities to falseness. But that awareness also awakens us to truth. After all, there is no falseness of prophets or ourselves without the truth which is always first and foremost. A lie has no power apart from the truth upon which it utterly depends. Our actions often reveal intentions which is another way of saying that our thoughts and actions are meaningful and purposeful. That can really only be in a world that is governed by the reason of God and where the struggle for us is to act in accord with God’s will. Without that all is random, arbitrary, accidental, and miserable.
Divine Providence is actually the condition of our freedom, a freedom from ourselves and the things to which we are enslaved. Our freedom lies in our being “the children of God”, sons through the essential sonship of Christ, “cry[ing] aloud Abba, Father”. Notice the wonderful intimacy of those terms. In praying the Lord’s Prayer, which begins with the words “Our Father” as commanded by Jesus, we confess God as Trinity. We are drawn into the intimacy of the divine life of God, the life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That sense of spiritual identity governs our lives, our lives in the Spirit, come what may in our world and day.
We are awakened to the Providence of God as the ruling principle in our world and to ourselves in the wonder of that Providence as the “children of God”. In God, as Julian rightly reminds us, “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”, whatever the confusions, whatever the uncertainties, whatever, too, the sufferings.
“You have received a spirit of sonship, in which we cry aloud, Abba, Father”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VIII, 2016
Christ Church & St. Thomas’