Watching Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” the other evening was a good way for me to approach this Sunday’s Readings. You can see and hear me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN51pT8A8bc. The play is all about the foolishness of men and women, where the only wise person in the play is the Fool who says “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”; whilst two of the characters are not who they appear to be so that everyone misjudges them. It reminds me of that great line from another of Shakespeare’s Plays “As you Like it”, where we’re told “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.” Perhaps Shakespeare, when he wrote these plays, was thinking of St Paul’s 1st Letter to the boastful Corinthians who thought a lot about outward appearances, and did not like to think of themselves as foolish. St Paul turns these normal human ideas about who the successful and wise and holy people are upside down, reminding them of the foolishness of God and telling them that “It was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that he chose what is weak by human reckoning.” (1 Cor 1:26-31) . The play is all about the foolishness of men and women, where the only wise person in the play is the Fool who says “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”; whilst two of the characters are not who they appear to be so that everyone misjudges them. It reminds me of that great line from another of Shakespeare’s Plays “As you Like it”, where we’re told “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.” Perhaps Shakespeare, when he wrote these plays, was thinking of St Paul’s 1st Letter to the boastful Corinthians who thought a lot about outward appearances, and did not like to think of themselves as foolish. St Paul turns these normal human ideas about who the successful and wise and holy people are upside down, reminding them of the foolishness of God and telling them that “It was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that he chose what is weak by human reckoning.” (1 Cor 1:26-31)
But however hard we try, there is a tendency in all of us Christians, to want in some way to show God what we are doing for him. We’re like little children wanting to please our parents. We learn to walk, and they smile and clap and that pleases us; and after that there is no stopping us. Of course, without the love and praise of parents we easily become sad disturbed people, so it isn’t this that worries St Paul. He is very happy for us to aim to be good people in response to God’s love; but what he is concerned about is when this natural desire to please God becomes a time for boasting, when we begin to think that what we do for God is more important than what God does for us.
At the end of our Reading today he identifies a number of ways in which this can happen to us, and I think it is worth looking at three of them. The first is a great danger for someone like me who reads and studies a lot and therefore inevitably thinks of himself as a fairly wise person. It is made worse in that people expect me to say wise things, and then praise me for them. I have to remember that all my knowledge comes from God, and unless I share it with humility, it is all so much hot air.
The second is perhaps the most common problem for religious people, the endless attempts to be good, to be virtuous. We even make the mistake of thinking that unless we are good, God won’t love us. Quite the reverse of what Jesus teaches us, where those who think they are good are the most deluded. What we must meditate on is how God loves us, and the only goodness we can give back to God is the goodness that is his gift to us.
The third is the desire of some people to be holy, by which they mean practising their religion by keeping to a strict regime of prayer where any slip up means they are failing God. I’ve even had to help people who feel they’ve failed God if they fall asleep saying their prayers. I always tell such people that there is no better way to fall asleep than this. Yes, holiness, like goodness, comes only from God, and our prayer must always in principle be a responding, a listening to God rather than saying prayers at him. Remember what Jesus tells us “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (Matt 6:7-8)
Paul takes these three things – wisdom, virtue and holiness - that we easily can become proud about, and turns them on their head, saying very firmly, “The human race has nothing to boast about to God, but you, God has made members of Christ Jesus, and by God’s doing he has become our wisdom, and our virtue, and our holiness” This is very important, because we tend to be happy that Jesus takes on our sins, that his sacrificial love show from the cross takes our sins away, and indeed St Paul says as much a little later in this Letter, “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins.” (1 Cor 15:3) But here he tells us that just as we must hand over our sins to the Lord, so we must accept all the good things we do, not as ours, but as a gift from God. Our whole understanding of our place, in this weird muddle of good and bad that we are, has to be turned upside down.
Perhaps the most important lesson here is that true humility means laughing at ourselves a bit more, not taking ourselves too seriously. I’m often worried about people in the secular world who want to do away with the idea of sin. They seem to think that if anything we do can be explained away, then it’s not a sin. So if my bad temper is due to my upbringing then I cannot be blamed for it etc. The Christian, following the teaching of Jesus, would simply say “Of course we sin, of course we get things wrong. Making excuses for ourselves, or even trying to justify ourselves, misses the point. Better to face up to our failings without getting too screwed up about them. Why? Because we know that God understands and loves us, and will help us to be better. If we spend our time obsessing about our failings, we are stuck in a circle of despair.” Equally those who go on about their own successes are just as deluded. There is every reason for us to be pleased if we do something good, but if we get puffed up about it, all the good is wasted. Better rather to thank God that he has helped us in this way, rather than get into a rather silly obsession with oneself.
The other day I heard that Pope Francis had quoted G K Chesterton who said “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” Yes, Shakespeare echoing St Paul, tells us that we are all fools, and must try to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. But that doesn’t mean never being serious about ourselves, rather it means having a sense of proportion. The playwright who wrote “To be or not to be” can hardly be accused of not taking life seriously, can he ?
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