by CCW | 30 July 2023 10:00
“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He was the Duke of Milan but preferred his books in the study of natural philosophy to the mundane duties of running his dukedom which he had delegated to his brother, Antonio.. Betrayed by his brother, who in cahoots with Alonzo, the King of Naples, usurped his dukedom, Prospero and Miranda are set adrift on the seas on a derelict raft. Never mind that Milan is not an Italian port city! They wash up on an island – “the Bermoothes” – Bermuda, as it turns out. Not such a bad place to come ashore, I suppose. The play is the only play of Shakespeare that is set outside the Euro-Mediterranean world. Miranda at the time in the play was three. Now at fifteen she learns who she is, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. Prospero’s answer to her question “how came we ashore?” is “by providence divine.”
The play explores the ambiguities of Prospero’s intent. His knowledge of nature in Renaissance eyes is a kind of magic – so-called ‘white magic’. It belongs to early modernity in different ways to see knowledge as conferring a power over nature. We should be only too well aware of the deadly consequences of such knowledge in our own times. Prospero conjures up a storm, a tempest, to bring his betrayers to the island and under his power. But to what end? Revenge? Or something more? Reconciliation?
There is a nice sense here of the interplay between natural and moral philosophy. On the ship are not only his betrayers but also the son of one of his betrayers, Ferdinand, the son of Alonso, King of Naples. As well there is the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, who gave Prospero his books as he was being set adrift. On the island, there is Caliban, the symbolic image of the indigenous cultures in their encounter with European culture. Shakespeare not only explores the complexity of that encounter but provides a Euro-critique of itself that derives from the indigenous cultures themselves.
The play unfolds the love theme between Ferdinand and Miranda that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation are extended even towards those who show no remorse, no change, such as Prospero’s brother, Antonio, and Alonzo’s brother, Sebastian, unrepentant scoundrels and miscreants both. Yet grace is greater than those who resist it; they are sustained by what they refuse to embrace but, at the same time, what they cannot enjoy. There’s the rub.
The Providence of God is the condition for true human freedom. Our actions can only really have meaning in an intelligible world, the world which God has made and which exists for something more than our whims and fantasies. We are part of that world, part of creation, indeed, a special creation, having been made in the image of God. For Christians, the Providence of God is written in the story of Christ. And we are meant to read our lives and our actions through the story of Christ in us.
Today’s readings complement last Sunday’s about the quality of our life in Christ – bearing fruit unto holiness. In other words, being who we are and who we are called to be in Christ means living from the life-giving vine without which we are dead. And it seems, even deadly. “Beware of false prophets,” Jesus tells us, echoing a powerful theme in Ezekiel about false shepherds, here imaged as wolves “in sheep’s clothing.”
And not just wolves but “ravening wolves”, feeding themselves and not their sheep. This image of injustice and abuse of power is as ancient as The Epic of Gilgamesh; and entirely modern in a world governed by a technocratic elite that benefits itself. It is a chilling indictment or at least a warning to all in positions of responsibility. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Actions not only have consequences; they reveal intent. And that is where the wonder and mystery of this Sunday lies.
It may seem that we are exhorted to action, “doing the will of my Father which is in heaven.” And yet that turns almost entirely upon the ontological principle of our fundamental identity in Christ as “the sons” and “children of God”. The language is clear – sons and children are the same though without negating the image of sonship that grounds us in the concrete universality of Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, as we profess in the Creed. This is entirely about our spiritual relation to God and to one another in the body of Christ which transcends ‘sex/gender’ binaries but unlike our current confusions does not negate them. For that would be to deny the concrete givenness of creation, on the one hand, and the ways in which we participate in God, on the other hand. Once again, we are reminded of the sacramental nature of our participation in God which is grounded in the redemption of the sensual and the finite. As one of our Anglican divines, Bishop John Pearson so wonderfully puts it, “Christ is man born of women to redeem both sexes”.
The point is the idea that our being in Christ as “the sons and children of God” requires its expression in our lives and actions. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Somehow, and this is at once troubling and freeing, who we are in Christ is to be made visible in how we speak and act towards one another and in relation to God. The inward and the outward cannot be in opposition and division: wolves in sheep’s clothing, as it were. The image is powerful and recalls immediately all of the complaints and confusions that belong to our life. For immediately we are convicted, as Ariel convicts the betrayers of Prospero in The Tempest, that we are all “men of sin.” At issue is whether we can learn from that revelation. This is something which is constantly set before us in the wisdom of the Scriptures such as we have in the readings from 2nd Samuel in the daily offices, readings which challenge all and every form of human presumption which is really about looking too much at ourselves and not enough at Christ and ourselves in him. It is wonderful to consider how King David is brought out of himself to self-awareness and responsibility, by Nathan the Prophet, by the wise woman of Tekoa, even in and through the machinations of Joab.
The deeper point, grasped by Shakespeare, (perhaps influenced by the Collect and readings for this day, who knows?), is the providence of God at work in and through us, even in spite of our deceitful, wilful, and broken hearts. In the Gospel Jesus challenges Israel and us about the very essence of ourselves. His words convict us in a most compelling way about our fundamental identity as “the sons and children of God.” Our freedom is found in seeking that God’s will be done, not ours, and finding that all that we desire and seek in the midst of this troublesome life is found only in God. And so we may learn like Prospero the freedom that belongs to God’s grace in our lives and which alone can bring out in us the fruits that belong to human dignity and truth.
O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas: “O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason,” as Boethius puts it in his great poetic and philosophic treatise, ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’. That everlasting reason is not about how we see and reason and experience things in our limitations and divisions; it is about how our thinking and our doing are gathered to God whose reason is at work through us as “the sons and children of God.”
Enfolded in the providence of God, we are embraced in his life which is our life. That is the radical meaning of our doing the will of our Father who is in heaven. Such is the holiness that we cannot not seek. Our text at once convicts us and compels us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 8, 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/07/30/sermon-for-the-eighth-sunday-after-trinity-8/
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