Provoked to Holiness

The Very Rev Dr Michael Ipgrave

In contemporary English, the word ‘provoke’ has a generally negative, somewhat insulting, connotation – to ‘invite to anger’ – but it still retains traces of an older, broader meaning: ‘to call forth, summon, invite’. For example, in Shakespeare’s Tempest [I.2], when Miranda asks her father Prospero, as he tells her the tale of her early years, ‘Wherefore did they not that hour destroy us?’, he replies: ‘Well demanded, wench: my tale provokes that question’. This means a sense of stimulation into an appropriate response, laced with some measure of being shocked, triggered into an action which might not otherwise have happened.

‘Provoked to holiness’ is a phrase taken from the witness of Louis Massignon (1883-1962), the distinguished French Islamicist, Catholic and mystic, who described himself as being ‘provoked to holiness’ by the example of Islam. Massignon’s view of Islam was built on a discernment of the authenticity of the God worshipped by Muslims. Bearing in mind the claim of Islam to derive from Abraham through Ishmael, he saw it as ‘the monotheism of those who have been excluded from the privileges awarded to Isaac and so to Israel and the Christian Church, and it calls these two to account for the use made of their privileges’. We can note three points emerging from this conception of Massignon’s...

A poem on being provoked by Ms Clare Amos, Anglican Communion office.

Jesus, living Word of God,
Your Nazareth promise of good news is timeless,
Still you offer it to renew our world today:
You offer release for those imprisoned by debt and poverty,
Life for those who know only death and despair.
Provoke us by your Spirit, so we no longer linger and delay,
Quicken us with the vision of a world transformed,
Challenge us to make hope real for all,
So that God’s kingdom may be celebrated in our time,
And poverty be turned to history.
Amen.

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Submitted comments

I am delighted to read your articles from time to time,it has new ingishts in thinking about Missions.

Atsongchanger, India, 21 April, 2008