by CCW | 27 June 2021 08:00
It is sometimes called ‘the Mercy Gospel’. It is part of the “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke’s Gospel which complements the more famous “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew’s Gospel. Both ‘sermons’ present to us some of the most powerful ethical and spiritual teachings of the Christian Faith, teachings which we have either forgotten or of which we are completely unaware. Mercy, as this rather challenging reading makes clear, is inescapably connected to justice. Hypocrisy, starkly and sternly presented in the parable, is injustice masquerading as justice in the form of self-righteousness and judgmentalism so prevalent in the current confusions of our culture and in ourselves.
The mercy is that we “groan within ourselves,” as the Epistle puts it, waiting for the fuller realization of what we know is yet incomplete in us. Mercy lies in suffering the forms of our finitude and our sinfulness, our unrighteousness, but only if we can be brought to know our unknowing; in short, the blindness about ourselves that belongs to our self-righteous judgments about others. It is an ancient and classical theme and by no means unique to Christianity. Buddhism, for instance, arises in part out of a critical rejection of the Brahmin class of Hinduism who are seen as “the blind leading the blind” especially with respect to the question of human suffering. In today’s Gospel, the point is made in very graphic and personal terms as suggested in the use of the second person. Why do you behold the mote, the small faults of others, while remaining unaware of the much greater faults in yourself? Such is hypocrisy, the only answer to which is self-criticism and self-correction. We are quick to judge others but only so as to absolve ourselves in the emotive forms of passionate outrage.
We are hypocrites, to be sure. The mercy is that God calls us to self-understanding in which we are made aware of our absolute need for mercy. We all stand under the same condemnation; in other words, none of us is fully righteous. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one“ (Rom. 3.12) as Paul puts it, “the good that I would I do not, the very evil that I would not do is what I do” (Rom. 7.19). This is to confront the limitations and failings of our very hearts. Yet, this is good news precisely because it turns us to the desire for the mercy of God and puts a check on empty emotivism.
We meet within the Octave of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist[1], the patron saint of French Canada and associated with the European encounter with North America through the landing in Newfoundland of John Cabot supposedly on his feast day in 1497. Thus the Collects for the Nativity include prayers for the nation of Canada, prayers which are surely much needed. Yet John’s birth signals primarily his vocation within the Providence of God in the working out of human redemption. His life and death point inescapably and necessarily to the one for whom he exists. He preaches, as Luke puts it, “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Lk. 3. 3). He is not that forgiveness but the one who belongs to its necessary preparation and ultimate fulfillment in Christ who is the forgiveness of sins. The desire for righteousness leads to its highest expression in mercy.
Mercy does not override and does not counter justice. As Portia’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice so marvelously puts it, “mercy seasons justice.” In other words, mercy perfects justice. In the language of theology, it is about how the theological virtues transform the cardinal virtues, human qualities of excellence, into the forms of love. Mercy is the charity of God extended towards us in the face of our shortcomings and failings. Our hypocrisy lies in claiming to see when in fact we are blind about ourselves and one another, seeing the minor faults of others but oblivious to the major faults in ourselves. We are, in this sense, doubly blind.
Yet mercy is doubly blessed. “It blesses him that gives and him that takes.” And as Portia makes so wonderfully clear, “though justice be thy plea, consider this, that, in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation.” In other words, we all stand convicted of injustice. We are all implicated in one way or another in the injustices and iniquities of the world even when we think we are doing what is right and just. But far from leading to what easily becomes a kind of self-serving apology, really a way of excusing ourselves from ourselves and confirming the power structures of the status quo, it leads to the necessity of prayer. Our awareness that we stand convicted means that “we do pray for mercy,” as Portia says, and adds “that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” Words and deeds, prayer and action.
I mention Shakespeare’s play because it speaks so directly to our present world. In a way, it deals with our current struggles. How do we deal with the various forms of difference between peoples? How are cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and sexual identities along with social and political forces to be understood in relation to our common humanity? Is there such a thing as a common humanity or are we simply left with the unmerciful mercies of those in power, the few who act for themselves at the expense of the many? Which differences matter and in what way? Shakespeare’s play deals with the differences between race and religion, between male and female, between parent and child, between servant and master, between friendship and marriage, as well as the effects of money on these relationships. “Mislike me not for my complexion,” the Prince of Morocco says, the first of noble souls who seeks the hand of Portia in marriage. He is black, a Moor and Moslem. None of those things take away from his nobility and none of those things disqualify him in Portia’s eyes.
Portia’s dilemma is that she is neither free to choose nor to refuse in marriage whoever happens to choose the right casket which contains her portrait. Shakespeare wants us to feel her dilemma, her unfreedom, on the one hand, and to appreciate the intention of her father’s will in establishing the casket test, on the other hand. Only someone who is noble and true to their word would commit to the test, for in seeking her hand by way of the test they have to swear that if they lose, never to seek another in marriage, never to disclose their choice, and to depart immediately. Only those who are noble will keep their word is the basic idea. But this does not answer Portia’s dilemma which is about whether she has a voice, a say in marriage, the very thing which the BCP marriage service presupposes and requires. She is not property but a rational person. Shakespeare finds a way to give her a voice without negating the conditions of the test. In other words, he does justice to both; yet that is a mercy, too.
The deeper dilemma of the play has to do with the intersection between justice and mercy. Portia’s wise speech – she is one of Shakespeare’s greatest female literary creations – provides the pivot for the whole play precisely because it challenges our all too common notions about justice and mercy and opens us out to the profound dynamic of mercy as that which perfects justice even in and through our failings, assertions, and distortions of justice. What the play seeks to bring out is a deeper sense of reciprocity and harmony accomplished through the extremes of error and sin. Shylock seeks justice but it is really a mask for revenge. Revenge is a very incomplete form of justice, an injustice really because the claim of equality – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – hides the greater desire for superiority. We don’t just want to get back at the other; we want to destroy them or make them suffer and serve us. We want to maintain the relation of animosity and hatred but from the side of being winners over and against others as losers. We want to dominate. Shylock pursues justice only to discover that he is subject to justice himself and thus in need of mercy.
The play is powerful and important but easily misunderstood. Harold Bloom, the great colossus of literary criticism, deems the play impossible to be performed in the contemporary world because of the Holocaust. But that is to read the play primarily in terms of Jew versus Christian which misses out on the deeper theme of the interplay of justice and mercy which cannot be reduced to the polarity of Jew versus Christian. The Hogarth Shakespeare Press novel version of the play by Howard Jacobson, ‘Shylock is My Name’, brings out the point which Shakespeare too understands, namely, that mercy is just as much a critical theme in Judaism as it is in Christianity. In his reworking of the themes of the play, he depicts Shylock as the conscience of the protagonist and in a marvelous moment has Shylock deliver Portia’s speech! The point is that “charity is a Jewish concept. So is mercy,” concepts that carry over into Christianity and into Islam albeit in distinctive ways. The novel develops Shakespeare’s own insight into the fundamental humanity of Shylock and thus to the significance of mercy.
As Portia suggests, mercy “becomes,” in the sense of adorns, the political order better than the symbols of crown or sceptre, for while mercy “is above this sceptred sway,” meaning something greater than human power, it is at once itself and yet shapes and informs secular order. But only, she says, if it is “enthroned in the hearts of kings”; this is to make an ethical point that challenges the relation of person and office, of rights and responsibilities. Profoundly, she observes that mercy “is an attribute to God himself,” a sensibility and way of understanding denied by the arrogance and assertions of self-sufficiency. We are gods, it seems, yet what a farce and folly that is. We need the tension between institutions, like church and state, in order to temper the extraordinary forms of overreach and tyranny on the part of governments and corporations.
What Shakespeare has Portia say counters the overreach of contemporary politics in its denial of the integrity of subsidiary institutions without which our lives are more than miserable, more than “nasty, brutish, solitary and short” in Hobbes’ famous statement about man in the state of nature because they, in effect, have no life. You are nothing apart from what the state sees and wants from you, it seems. I do not think such a view has any future, especially as it promotes the discourse of endless division, itself the true meaning of the contemporary embrace of difference without any regard for what unites and holds together. Without that, our claims to mercy devolve into feeling and to the rhetoric of kindness but to whose benefit?. The mercy of the political in our disordered times is no mercy; it is endlessly self-serving and, for all intents and purposes, dead. I suspect that what drives some of the passionate outrage about the Residential Schools and the unmarked graves of hundreds if not thousands of indigenous children is equally a sense of impotence about just what to do. What actions exactly and in what way? Yet prayer is about seeking God’s direction for our hearts.
The readings for this day call us to a kind of humility which demands at once our willingness to be self-critical and to criticize the assumptions of the powers that rule over us and, to be fair, within us. In a way, the great challenge of this day is about what it means to be the Church. That has very much to do with the power of the concept of divine mercy precisely because it counters, on the one hand, and perfects, on the other hand, the forms of human justice. In praying for mercy we seek mercy not just for ourselves but for one another and in the communities in which we are placed with one another.
In some ways this is an old issue and question now phrased in modern terms. In the face of our current dystopias – our disordered and destructive worlds – what makes us think that we can create a utopia, a paradise? Such is mere blindness and hypocrisy. But then that is exactly what Jesus is saying to us and what he wants us to see. Such is his mercy.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 4 (In the Octave of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist), 2021
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