Date Posted:13:47:55 02/27/08 Wed Author: Shannon Subject: Sober Judgment
Again, in lecture today, Dr. Jackson mentioned the idea of Christ making us see our own need for repentence as a way of bringing peace between men. He refenced the passages in the Gospels where Christ extends sin from action back to thought:lust therefore equals adultery; curses equal murder. In wrestling with this same question of how fallen man ought to live in this world--"What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?" (Hamlet)--Shakespeare seems to point his audience to the same humility and "sober judgement" that Christ demands. This is especially clear in Measure for Measure's many discourses on justice and mercy and the universal tendency of humanity to sin. Escalus chides Angelo to temper his justice by reminding him how little seperates him from the man he condems:
"Let but Your Honor know,
Whom I believe to be most strait in virtue,
Had time cohered with place, or place with wishing,
Or that resolute acting of your blood
Could have attained th'effect of your own purpose,
Whether you had not sometime in your life
Erred in this point which now you censure him,
And pulled the law upon you."
Isabella also prompts Angelo to consider this same root of human mercy: "No ceremony that to the great ones 'longs,..../Become them with one half so good a grace/ As mercy does./ If he had been as you, and you had been as he/ You would have slipped like him..."
It is through Isabella that Shakespeare illuminates the connection between this humility-derived grace and the Divine Grace offered through Christ:
"Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? Oh, think on that,
And mercy then will reathe within your lips,
Like man new-made."
All of this points to the description of the sacraficial life in Romans 12. What directly follows Paul's exhortation to "offer ourselves as a living sacrafice" and to "be transformed, by the renewing of our minds" is his command of humility:"Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you." And the remainder of the chapter are directions for life in the true community of the Body of Christ; in other words, the life of "peace through self-sacrafice".
