Crafty Volpone, the main character in Johnson’s eponymous play, has devised an interesting means of accumulating wealth: he pretends to be ill in order to receive gifts from those who hope to be on the receiving-end of his will when he passes away. The charade doesn’t end. He never “recovers” and yet also never passes away (the whole thing’s a ruse, remember), and the gifts continue to accumulate. But the gift-givers don’t stop giving. “Surely” they think, “he can’t be alive too much longer… just stay on his good side a little longer and you’ll be rewarded.”
Thus, they mutually become enslaved.
Both sides are locked in a vicious cycle: Volpone can’t end the charade or else the gifts will stop. His gift-bearers can’t stop the giving because doing so might forfeit their favored place on the man’s will and they’ve already sunk so much into the investment they can’t just walk from all of the wealth they’ve poured into the operation. But, then again, as long as Volpone keeps-up the charade he cannot fully enjoy the wealth he’s amassed.
A round knot of sin and greed and mutually-compounding deception –and that’s only the first Act of Johnson’s play!
Good labor is revolting to Volpone and his “visitors”. They must devise some way around it. But look at how much frustration and toil comes from trying to avoid toil and frustration. See what burdensome labor Volpone exerts in avoiding labor!
After the Fall Adam and Eve were told that Pain and household division, frustration and toil, futility and thistles, would be the fruit of their labors. Volpone’s answer, it seems, is to avoid labor altogether. The irony is that the more he seeks to avoid the thistles and futility of labor, the more deeply the thorns and frustration sting him.
This past Sunday we observed Rogation prayers and rites –blessings over our labor, our community, our produce, our lives. For those for whom Rogation is a foreign thing just think of it as the time of the year where we proclaim that Easter doesn’t just come to save our souls, it comes to redeem our bodies and the work we do with them.
If part of the curse was that our labor would be marked by fruitlessness and toil and pain and division in our households, Rogation tells us that just as much as Easter has saved our souls from damnation and eternal separation from God, it also brings into redemption our toil and our households. We may still be Adam’s children, Adam’s heirs, but now that ground we were told would bear “thorns and thistles” has been made to bear Christ risen from the ground of the tomb. The ground itself is changed. So must the way we labor.
We encounter Christ in the labor of our hands, in the home and outside of it. We encounter his cross and Passion when we are stung by thorns and thistles, and also when we are stung by layoffs, dirty diapers, and unexpected mechanic bills. We encounter his resurrection when will we labor we are filled with joy and peace and see the work of our hands not fruitless but transformed into feast-days, tithes and offerings, music and BBQs.
Volpone and the others who try to amass their wealth by deception, fraud, deceit, could hear the message of Rogation. Labor need no longer be eternally conjugated to toil, nor work to frustration. Deliverance from the futility to which our labor was subjected in the Fall does come by crafty subterfuge, or figuring-out ways to avoid labor as such. Already we receive a foretaste of the fruitfulness of labor that we were designed for and look forward to a greater fruitfulness when all the work of our hands occurs in the glory of the Resurrection and we receive the bounty of what we’ve sown in hope –beginning with our own bodies.