Bolt's Man for All Seasons
BOLT'S MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
August 16, 2009
Today's gospel reading[i] is the fourth of five in the weekly Christian lectionary from the same chapter of John. All seem related to developing this gospel writer's view of the Christian sacrament of communion. Today we'll share bread and wine in remembrance of Jesus, based on words of institution that come from the other three gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, as well as from the Apostle Paul.[ii] But John uses quite different words of institution, if they can be called that at all.[iii] He emphasizes not bread and wine, but eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood. This sounds rather concrete and even primitive until we remember how much emphasis John has been putting on distinguishing the miraculous manna from heaven that the Israelites were given in the Sinai desert, and the miracle of making five barley loaves feed five thousand people, as Jesus was described as having done at the beginning of this chapter... Distinguishing both of these experiences from the true living bread that is Jesus himself. Jesus is the flesh and blood incarnation of the divine spirit of God on earth. He's been given as a precious gift to us to help us learn how to live our lives fully and meaningfully, with him as leading exemplar.
The lectionary today pairs this gospel reading with the story of what God gave to King Solomon.[iv] When God appears to Solomon in a dream and says, "Ask what I should give you," God is pleased that Solomon doesn't ask for long life or riches for himself, or for conquest of his enemies, but instead for "understanding to discern what is right." God then gives King Solomon "a wise and discerning mind." We know that Solomon goes on to experience a long and much beloved reign, showing his wisdom and beneficence as a great judge and as builder of the first temple in Jerusalem. Many of the so-called "wisdom books" of the Hebrew Bible are attributed to him, although no longer credibly: the Book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs.[v]
If we advance more than two thousand years from Solomon's time, there's an English saint, Thomas More, who's been portrayed as representing the very best in Christian discipleship and discernment of what is right. He was also a great judge and builder of the temple of English jurisprudence. I want to discuss the modern dramatic depiction of his life by Robert Bolt in his 1960 play, A Man for All Seasons, which won the Tony Award for best play in 1962 and the Oscar for best motion picture in 1966.
Thomas More, who lived from 1478 to 1535, was an Oxford-educated lawyer who became the Chancellor of England, the head of the judiciary among other functions, under King Henry VIII. He was beheaded by the King for refusing to deny the authority of the Pope and accept the King as "the Supreme Head of the Church in England." Henry had turned against Rome because of the Pope's refusal to annul his twenty-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had borne him a female but not a male heir to the throne. He married Anne Boleyn and convinced Parliament to pass an Act of Succession, vesting the crown in the new queen's issue, and an Act of Supremacy making it high treason to deny the King's title as head of the church. Henry had compelled the English clergy to submit to his will before these acts were passed in Parliament. But Thomas More, a deeply religious Roman Catholic lay person as well as highly- respected lawyer, never acceded to Henry's claim to be head of the church or to his divorce from Catherine.[vi]
The characterization of Thomas More as "a man of all seasons" comes from one of his friends, writing 15 years before his death. Robert Whittinton described More as"a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons."[vii] Among other things, More was an always-engaging conversationalist, a great poet, and an acclaimed writer -- his best-known work being his Utopia -- a word he coined.[viii] Robert Bolt lauds his "splendid social adjustment:" "So far from being one of society's sore teeth, he was...almost indecently successful. He was respectably not nobly born, in the merchant class... [He] distinguished himself first as a scholar, then as a lawyer, was made an Ambassador, finally Lord Chancellor... He corresponded with the greatest minds in Europe... He was a friend of the King... He adored and was adored by his own large family. He parted with more than most men when he parted with his life, for he accepted and enjoyed his social context."[ix]
Why I think Thomas More's example is most helpful to us today is that he was both a pragmatist and one who tried to walk faithfully in Jesus' footsteps. He was a very practical person, as well as a man of principle. He didn't want to die, telling his wife at one point in Bolt's play, "Set your mind at rest -- this (tapping himself) is not the stuff of which martyrs are made."[x] When his daughter tells him that a new Act has been passed in Parliament demanding that an oath must be sworn, at risk of treason, affirming the King's supremacy over the Church of England, More's first response is "What is the wording? ...It may be possible to take it."[xi] He critiques his son-in-law, William Roper, for constantly thinking in moralistic terms and making impassioned statements about right and wrong in God's name: "Let me draw your attention to a fact - I'm not God. The currents of eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain-sailing, I can't navigate... God's my god... But I find him rather too subtle... I don't know where he is nor what he wants." Roper responds in his typically absolutist way: "My god wants service, to the end and unremitting; nothing else!"[xii]
For Thomas More, the watchword is always conscience. When Cardinal Wolsey calls More to his office in the middle of the night to review a letter to the Pope, he says, "My effort's to secure a divorce. Have I your support or have I not?" The Cardinal then goes on to talk about ways that they might pressure the Pope. After it becomes clear that More will not go along with the Cardinal, Wolsey asks him to "explain how you as Councillor of England can obstruct those measures for the sake of your own, private, conscience." More responds, "Well...I believe when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties...they lead their country by a short route to chaos."[xiii] Early on, King Henry shows his appreciation for More's conscience as well. Although it's clear that More doesn't support the divorce from Catherine, at least yet, the king exclaims, "Thomas I respect your sincerity." Henry wants More's support "Because you are honest. What's more to the purpose, you're known to be honest... There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown, and there are those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with sharp teeth and I am their lion, and there is a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves -- and there is you."[xiv]
However, More's conscience is severely tested by his wife. His wife confronts him after he resigns his chancellorship because the English clergy have formally succumbed to pressure to sever their connection with Rome: "Hell's fire -- God's blood and body.... Sun and moon, Master More, you're taken for a wise man! Is this wisdom -- to betray your ability, abandon practice, forget your station and your duty to your kin and behave like a printed book!"[xv] Their relationship gets particularly poignant when she visits him in the tower of London, where he's been imprisoned by the King. Listen to this exchange: More says, "I am faint when I think of the worst that they may do to me. But worse than that would be to go, with you not understanding why I go." His wife, Alice, explodes: "I don't!" Just barely hanging on to his self-possession, More continues, "Alice, if you can tell me that you understand, I think I can make a good death, if I have to." She quickly responds, "Your death's no 'good' to me."
"Alice, you must tell me that you understand!"
"I don't! I don't believe this had to happen."
"If you say that Alice, I don't see how I'm to face it."
"It's the truth!"
(More gasps) "You're an honest woman.
(Alice responds) "Much good may it do me! I'll tell you what I'm afraid of; that when you've gone, I shall hate you for it."
Now what do you do if you're More? Following your conscience means extreme hardship and grief for innocent members of your family whom you love very much. It may mean that your spouse hates you for the rest of her life. More's daughter gets emotional too, pleading with him to take the oath like virtually everyone else in England already has, arguing that "'God more regards the thoughts of the heart than the words of the mouth' or so you've always told me... Haven't you done as much as God can reasonably want?" His daughter goes on to tell him what their house is like in the evening without him there, and without any source of sustenance for them: "We sit in the dark because we've no candles. And we've no talk because we're wondering what they're doing to you here."
More responds to his daughter that one's life isn't worthwhile once one's conscience has been compromised by lying in an oath before God: "When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water and if he opens his fingers then -- he needn't hope to find himself again. Some men aren't capable of this, but I'd be loathe to think your father one of them." And now his daughter responds, "So should I..." His wife also realizes in the end what's at stake in trying to live a godly life in imitation of Christ: "I understand that you're the best man that I ever met or am likely to; and if you go - well God knows why I suppose -- though as God's my witness God's kept deadly quiet about it!" As the stage notes of the play say, "They clasp each other fiercely."[xvi]
So Thomas More ends up being Solomonic. He doesn't ask for long life or riches for himself, or for conquest of his enemies, but instead for "understanding to discern what is right." He becomes the personification of wisdom, worldly and divine, and for it he's sainted four hundred years later by the Roman Catholic Church. He follows in Jesus’ footsteps as best he knows how, trying to live his life conscientiously, fully, and meaningfully. He meets a martyr's end as did his Lord and Savior, and as have so many other people of conscience since.
My college chaplain, William Sloan Coffin, who more than once went to jail in civil rights and antiwar activism, had a favorite hymn. It was James Lowell's "Once to Every Man and Nation, Comes the Moment to Decide," and he used it for the title of his memoirs. The hymn ends with this stanza:
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong;
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.
May we never be tested unto death, as were Jesus and Thomas More. But if we are, and if we are Christians, may we see ourselves then, as always, within the circle of the Communion that we will share today -- with Jesus as "the living bread that came down from heaven," uniting us all, and representing the Spirit of God nascent within all of us, which shall never die, but live forever.
BENEDICTION
The courage of the early morning's dawning,and the strength of the eternal hills,
And the peace of the evening's ending, and the love of God, be in our hearts. AMEN.
NOTES
1
[i] John 6: 24-35.
[ii] Matthew 26: 26-29; Mark 14: 22-25; Luke 22: 14-23; 1 Corinthians 11: 23-25.
[iii] See The New Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), Vol. IX, pp. 605-607.
[iv] 1 Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 3-14.
[v] Peter Calvocoressi, Who's Who in the Bible (New York: Penguin, 1999), p.174.
[vi] Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (Toronto: Irving Publishing, 1963), pp. vii-ix, 96-97, 105-107.
[vii] Robert Whittinton, as cited in Marvin O'Connell, "A Man for All Seasons: An Historian's Demur," Catholic Dossier 8 no. 2 (March-April, 2002), p. 16.
[viii] Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr., Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), p. 142.
[ix] Bolt, Man for All Seasons, p. xiv.
[x] Ibid., p. 35.
[xi] Ibid., p. 74.
[xii] Ibid., pp. 38-39.
[xiii] Ibid., p. 12.
[xiv] Ibid., p. 32.
[xv] Ibid., p. 52.
[xvi] Ibid., pp. 83-86.