It was utterly compelling. It’s not so easy for us to realize that the message that Jesus brought to the ancient world made people sit up in amazement. In a world full of us-and-them attitudes, Jesus told people to love one another. In a world full of vindictiveness and conflict, he told them to love their enemies. In a world where ordinary working people were considered to be rubbish, they were told that they were of infinite worth, and loved and treasured by the maker of the universe. In a world where power and riches were what counted, theywe were told to pity the rich and powerful – the poor are the blessed ones.
The power of the Gospel comes in part from powerful principles and ideas it holds before us. People will always focus heavily on Christianity’s teachings and its ideas.
However, in the Gospels and Epistles there is something else as well. Many of the teachings, the Beatitudes for instance, could have been taught by any wise man or woman. But Jesus hooks this up with another dimension. He plunges into the hurly-burly of human life. Today’s gospel is a colourful example. The crowds, individual voices piping up, the plot-within-a-plot of the woman with the issue of blood interrupting Jesus who was trying to fight throughthe crowds to get to Jairus’ daughter. In hubbub, there are people too who laugh at him. The people, the sweat, the noise, the pushing and shoving, and then – the calm of the child’s bedroom. All of this is a tap-root of what the gospel is. The melée, the face-to-face, the sheer people – this physical drama – is as important as the teachings and the ideas. It isat the heart of the Gospel – it shouts loud and clear: Incarnation.
We don’t concentrate a lot of attention on the Incarnation, but it is fundamental. The Holy One, the Creator, the one who is and who loves infinitely in eternity, comes into the flesh and sweat and emotions and struggle. The sheer audacity of this is very difficult to encompass in words, and difficult to comprehend. If you think it’s difficult to see how the doctrine of the Trinity works, well what about this? How on earth can it make sense that the supreme Lord of the universe who is beyond our imaginings, and infinitely greater than the world he has created, how can it makes sense that comes into it and submits to it, not like an excursion or a dipping of the toe, but the whole hog. This cannot be grasped by human reason. But Modern science is educating us in such mysteries. \itis acknowledging in our time the need accept with huge contradictions, and to understand the universe as something that cannot be comprehended by the logics we attempt to construct to make sense of it. The Incarnation is so key to the gospel, to the life of being Christians, that we need to shine a bit more of a light on it than we are inclined to.
It’s true that much of Jesus’ teaching doesn’t depend on the Incarnation – the Beatitudes again, for instance. But a significant part of them do – think for instance of the parable of the sheep and the goats – whatever you have done to any of these, you have done to me. This blending of teaching and Incarnation was from the start characteristic of Christianity. It reached its climax in the crucifixion and the physical resurrection of Jesus. It has been a hallmark of the best of Christian spiritual and pastoral discourse down the centuries. Think of George Herbert in his book The country Parson. The priest is to visit every home and every hovel, “even though he have to bow low to get into it, and even if it smell never so loathsomly, for therein is Christ and those for whom Christ died”. Charles Gore our founder was of course a great apostle of the Incarnation in a time of huge social injustice, and this identification with the Incarnation as a key to loving our neighbour, is a characteristic of Catholic Anglican thinking at that time.
We need to pick this up again, this clarion-calll of the incarnation, and find out how we must present the Incarnation to an unbelieving world.It’s good to proclaim Christian teachings and ideas to our world, tachings about how to live well. But they only reach their full power when they ride on the rocket of the Incarnation.
The trouble with trying to proclaim the Incarnation to the world is that by talking about it we are reducing it to ideas. The ideas can only be proclaimed adequately in the doing. That mens throwing ourselves into the hurly-burly and letting our actions speak. So for instance we can have little doubt where Christ would be if the Palestine of his time were troubled by asylum-seekers, refugees and illegal immigrants. He would not be building walls.
In monastic life, are we not avoiding the hurly-burly? It might look like that, but all of us here know in the community that it is an engagement with the hurly-burly of life in all its humanity in a very particular way. And the longer you are in community the more the hurly-burly comes to bear. The monastic contribution to living the Incarnation is partly in the engagement we have with all manner of people in all sorts of ways; but also monastic life is a highly unusual and powerful incarnation: simplicity of life, community and mutual love, living with God in every moment, holding the flame of prayer for the whole church, holding a geographical place for God, and many other things.
Living incarnationally is for all of us. May we work and pray so that the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ may be a beacon to the people of our time, and may the church live the mystery of the Incarnation to the full.