2 before Lent
Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews
Like many others, I’m spending a lot of time at my desk at the moment. An app on my phone tells me I am moving around less than I used to, and I am all too aware that transitions between one meeting and the next require just a couple of mouse clicks, rather than a drive to Ely or a cycle across town. During the first lockdown I fixed a bird feeder in the garden directly in my sightline over the top of my computer screen, and the regular visits of robins, blue tits and blackbirds lift my spirits, even as they remind me of a freedom we are all currently denied.
On my desk sits an icon of the Virgin and child, given to me by a dear friend when I Ieft my last job. I find my gaze resting on it often. I ponder it when waiting for the pieces of a sermon to fall into place. When distracted in a dull meeting it can jolt me back into focus. When the messiness of my desk is an outward sign of trying to do too many things at once, it provides a welcome point of stillness. In the pastoral conversations that now take place on the phone or over zoom rather than face to face, the tenderness of Christ and his Mother recall me to the love of God for us all. At Evening Prayer, all done via the screen now, the icon is restful focus for contemplation. And in all the in between times – the times I spend wondering what the right response to the pandemic is, or worrying about individuals or its effect on church life and society; the times of fear in the face of mortality, or guilt over not having done enough or been enough, the times when I just don’t know what to do, there is the steady presence and promise of Christ. In his halo are the Greek letter ‘Ho On’ (O ΩΝ), meaning ‘The One who Is’ – the name given by God in the Old Testament when Moses asks who he is. The Christ child held by Mary does not have the face of a child, for he is the Word and Wisdom of God.
And he is that Word and Wisdom in human flesh, full of tenderness, and a love which encircles all creation, just as his arm enfolds Mary. This is Emmanuel, God with us, the Word who holds all things in being and by whom all things were created. But this is not the God of the deists or philosophers, the First Cause or the watchmaker who sets things in motion and then stands afar off. This is God in flesh, God in all the muddle and pain and joy and delight of human life, the Uncreated becoming part of creation. There is an intimacy here which was both distasteful and confounding to the philosophers of the ancient world for whom flesh was suspect, a hindrance to the life of pure reason.
But for Christians, this closeness of God is the heart of our faith: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God doesn’t draw us out of the world to some other, more pure, spiritual realm. He comes right into the world.
This is what Paul is so keen to stress in his letter to the Colossians. The church there had come under the spell of a mishmash of Jewish and Greek philosophical and theological ideas. ‘God’ was a distant, spiritual reality, and it was only possible to know him through various emanations, in each of which the essence of divinity was successively diluted. Angels, spirits, powers, even the stars, were cosmic bodies responsible for the destiny of human beings, who endured existence under the crushing burden of fate. Secret knowledge and ascetic practices – fasting and mortification of the flesh, for example – offered to an elite a way out of this cycle of despair, a way to transcend the limitations of human existence. In this scheme, Christ was sort of divine – an emanation among other emanations, offering a way to God but not fully divine himself.
And Paul is having none of this. Using what is most likely to be one of the earliest Christian hymns, he insists that, far from being one among many who participate in divinity to a greater or lesser degree, Christ, and Christ alone, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
This would have been a scandalous and baffling idea to those who held up the spiritual realm, the realm of God, over against the fallen, sinful world of physicality and the flesh. In their view, God couldn’t be sullied by contact with the material world – hence the need for so many emanations, which put a respectable distance between God and humanity. God made man, the Word made flesh would have made no sense. Flesh was something you needed to escape from; the body an encumbrance to a fulfilled spiritual life.
Over against this, Paul sets the figure of a particular body – a body through whom God offers reconciliation between himself and us, not escape from the world. It is a body that hurts when nails are driven into it; a body which makes peace through the blood of the cross.
Attempts to circumvent Christ and get at God without him will fail, says Paul. We don’t find God by seeking a way to escape our life; in Christ we find God embracing our life. By being born as one of us, he takes on all that it is to be human, both the goodness of our creation and the sin and death which mar it and which separate us from him.
And because sin and death could not break the eternal love which exists between Father and Son, the body which dies on the cross is raised to new life, a life which shares fully in the life of God. St Irenaeus wrote of Christ that he became man that we might become God. Christ restores the broken relationship between God and humanity. The life and love that he shares with the Father are now shared with us through the gift of the Spirit.
And it is this Spirit that enables us, with Christ, to call God ‘Abba’, Father. This is not a distant God, too holy to pollute himself by contact with humanity. God in Christ comes near and shares our life, so that all our joys and hopes and fears and sorrows are open to his life. The Colossians’ heresy is to think that God can’t and won’t involve himself with humanity. Their god is cold and distant, unapproachable and isolated. By contrast, Christ shows us that God’s very nature is self-giving love, and through his incarnation, death and resurrection he opens up the way for us to share in that eternal love which we call Trinity.
In Christ, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. This is the heart of our faith. It’s what enables us to look at that cross and see God hanging there. It’s the promise my icon holds out to me: that in all the bleakness, the bewilderment, sorrow and struggle of what we’re going through, God is with us in Jesus Christ, holding on to us in tenderness and strength, even when we struggle to hold on to him. He is the one who opens up to us the way home to the Father. He it is who gives content and meaning to our language when we say the word ‘God’. We can know God because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. In him, we know God and God knows us. And he goes on dwelling with us, the One who Is, through everything, drawing us to him in tenderness, enfolding us in his love, and promising us that in all our solitude, we are never alone.