It can happen to us that we are staying in a strange boarding-house and need to get up in the middle of the night. We fumble our way along the corridor looking for a light-switch, and fail to find it. But we make our way by the moonlight streaming through the windows. Next day in broad daylight we see where it is, but it is then too late. Day by day In our offices we read over and over of a restless people, Israel, who repeatedly failed to live seriously their covenant with God, and repeatedly suffer as a nation from ill fortune and the attacks of stronger neighbours. Israel is always restless, never getting onto an even keel. It is a sad catalogue of a nation’s slipperiness and backsliding and failure. People are of course always the same. Every generation has a need to think of golden ages that are better than the present. For the Jews a great golden age was the time of David. Hardly a paragon of virtue, was David, but they ignored all that, because people need heroes and golden ages. More and more as time went on, people came to feel and hope that God would send another David. The feeling was inchoate, an undefined gut-feeling – God would send somebody. With the prophet Isaiah this feeling begins to get interesting. In our first lesson he talks about a virgin conceiving and bearing a son who shall be called “God-with-us”. Well. That is what we really want. God to be with us. We want to be within the everlasting arms, held safe. This inkling of Isaiah’s, this hazy, not-very- well- defined intuition, showed they were making first steps on a journey of discovery.
The dream of a golden age, of times when things were better, will always be with us. A deep desire for stability at the top, for a society held safely by a leader you can trust. Today, we can see this at work in extreme right-wing politics and unrealistic expectations of politicians. Politicians may be doing an admirable job in the circumstances, but they are human beings just like us, and it’s never going to be perfect. The Jews of the old Testament at least had one advantage over us: the prophets knew that only God could fill the gap. We don’t have that, they did. At the end of our Old Testament, when the story is basically over, the prophet Malachi speaks of a one, and asks who can endure the day of his coming, who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire. In the Jews’ searching and hoping, this was as far as they got.
Then God dropped a bomb. Christ came, and did his work, and died and rose again. It took a long time for the dust to clear. Carl Barth said that the resurrection is a crater left by a huge explosion, traceable to the incarnation. However, it’s the oddest bomb you’ll ever come across, because it exploded through a quiet, unobtrusive entrance into the world. Why can we call it a bomb? The Old Testament is strewn with covenants, all like failed peace treaties. Now it’s different: there’s no abstract covenant now. Something has happened in the concrete world, an irreversible event. God has come to be with us. Now we know, often despite appearances, that everything is held in a safe pair of hands. This is the only one who can truly be our saviour. This is the only golden age that is for good. It will not disappear at the next failure. It does, however, take an awful lot of digesting. The inching forward that we see in the Old Testament still inches on in the New, as disciples and believers struggle to make sense of what has happened. There was gradual realisation in the New Testament about the nature and significance of Christ. It was not at all clear at first how one could talk about him as God with us, and then you can see it developing through the Gospels and Epistles and Revelation. The inching forward still went on and on, after the canon of the New Testament was complete – on and on, with many a mistake and detour until it reached a major staging-post in the Council of Nicaea. Things had been said which could no longer be said afterwards. Great theologians like Origen and Evagrius are two among many who got it in the neck later for putting things wrongly. The refining still goes on and on, into our own day and beyond, as we too strain to see. Strain to understand the bomb.
The incarnation looks impossible for people today. How can you believe in that? Where do we look in order to get it? We can say first of all, of course, that modern physicists find things just as strange in the universe God has made. An impossible contradiction of this kind would be nothing strange to them. But that’s not the best place to start. First of all, like Charles Gore our founder, we should look to the incarnation at the heart of human darkness. Among the poor, the suffering, the imprisoned, the tortured, the victims of war. The incarnation directs us not to turn our eyes away, but to get involved, and to follow the example of Christ who emptied himself in order to become a servant. The incarnation, however, doesn’t just lead us to Imitation of Christ by our own human efforts – it gives us the Church and the sacraments. That is where imitation of Christ has the best chance – that is where our eyes will be opened to see Christ in all the dark situations that people end up in. But it is never automatic. A friend of mine told me about when she started teaching in primary school: she found that every year there is one child who can’t learn to read and write. The others race ahead, but this one can’t even start. Then there is a miraculous moment when they suddenly can do it, and by the end of the year all the children are reading and writing happily. That is a parable about our grasp of the Christian faith. Getting the implications of the incarnation is not automatic if you go to church. Many Christians spend years without realising the implications of what is being asked of them – to some extent or other we all do. Sometimes there is a breakthrough; often it’s much more a slow inching forward year by year, as, with a fair wind, the church and the sacraments gradually open our eyes to see.
St Paul puts it in a nutshell in today’s first reading, where he says of the gospel, “he promised [it] beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures … concerning his son who was descended from David … and declared to be Son of God with power … by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace …”.
By this grace may we enter ever more and more into the astounding mystery of the incarnation.