Incarnation

Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man.

About a week before he died, my father, who for sixty years was a Methodist minister, had a visit from a friend. Both knew that they had little time to live. Afterwards, my father reported their conversation to my mother. The friend had said to him, “I am resting on Christ.” My father said to my mother, “I can’t say that. All I can say is that I am resting on God.”

Christ has always been a problem for the Church. God we think we can conceptualise: an eternal being, omnipotent, omniscient, etc., etc. But Christ—man or God? Man and God? The Church spent a large part of its early years agonising over this strange figure, trying to get him right; and though the formulations were arrived at, the question has never gone away, nor will it ever go away. It is not that kind of question.

The Incarnation is the great difficulty in Christianity. It is most of what sets us apart from Jews and Muslims. It was a difficulty for my father, who would sometimes say that he thought his theology was more Jewish than Christian. After a lifetime of preaching, he would not, I think, ever have claimed to have ‘met’ Christ; though God was a different matter.

I suspect that there are many like him in the churches. They may not dissent from the creedal statements concerning the Incarnation, but the Incarnation as an experienced reality, as encounter with Christ as the living presence of God in our world—that is a different thing; an aspiration, perhaps, and no more. On their behalf we should ask the question: what does the Incarnation mean for us? Is it more than a theological definition? Can it be an experienced reality? It ought to be, because Christ was incarnate not just for thirty-five years of the first century, but for all time, for all humanity.

The heart of the question—and perhaps the heart of Christian faith—is this: how can we, here and now, know the truth of the Incarnation? Partly, of course, we know it because we are told it, by the Church and by the scriptures; and there is nothing wrong with that. Being told something is the way we come to know most things. But there is a certain second-handedness about being told; it is better, in the end, to know something for ourselves. How, then, can we, directly, know Christ the Incarnation of the Logos alive in our world?

Let’s start with some inadequate solutions to the problem. One is to relate to Christ simply as a memory, a memory held in the mind of the community that we call the Church. The Church remembers Christ and so makes him available to us. Now it is undeniable that this is partly what the Church does. The Church does remember Christ; holds him in a collective consciousness. But many groups do this for their founders. In the days when there were Communist parties, the comrades would piously remember Marx, or Lenin, or even Stalin. Human memory is capable of sacralising some appalling people. At the same time they would talk of the ‘spirit’ of Lenin being at work in the world. None of that requires an Incarnation. And if that is all we mean by knowing Christ, then the Church is rather like the mausoleum in Red Square: a shrine of memory.

Another inadequate answer is to generate what might be described as a virtual Christ through the way that we use religious language. If we refer to him often enough, invoke him often enough, then he will certainly become part of our world of reference. But the living Christ must be more than the result of an effort of imagination, a figure generated within the discourse of a dedicated community. This is not how Christ is real to the Church. We can certainly construct Jesus for ourselves as a kind of super-buddy always at our elbow, always knowing what we should do. But it may be hard to distinguish his reality from the reality of those imaginary friends that children often invent. We may run the risk of creating a Christ in our own image; and true meeting involves otherness, the unknown, surprise, even danger.

Not every sense of Christ is the presence of Christ. “Seeing Salvation,” the exhibition at the National Gallery a few years ago, conveyed very powerfully a sense of Christ within the artistic tradition of Europe; but that is not the same as the presence of Christ. What we are looking for is the direct encounter that will enable us to say, for ourselves, that we have known the Incarnation. How can we move toward that?

We could do worse than to start from the Epistle to the Hebrews. The writer of that amazing text makes a central point about the history of human relations with God. There was a time when God was out there somewhere, distant, separated from us by a gulf, across which human beings tried, endlessly, to throw bridges of sacrifice. But it never worked. We were here and God was there. But then, amazingly and against all expectation, we discovered God standing with us on our side of the gulf. So in a sense the gulf had vanished; we were with God because God was with us.

This is, of course, an account of the Incarnation; and it tells us that not only is the relation between God and man transformed by Christ’s coming, but also that our experience of God has changed. You might say that, apart from the Incarnation, God remains something of a speculation; an idea thrown out toward the hidden mystery of things. This idea may be vivid and it may be passionately embraced; but it remains, always, disconcertingly conceptual, something rooted in our attempts to make sense of the universe. It becomes the material for endless philosophical dispute.

But the writer of Hebrews is not talking about a concept. Something has happened; we have discovered God alongside us, as though we had glanced over our shoulder and suddenly seen him standing there. God has come close, and we can expect intimacy where before there was only distance. Whereas Yahweh belonged to the world of the patriarchs, the Ancient of Days always to be placated with sacrifice, Christ stands within our world. The concluding note of Hebrews is expectation: “Jesus … suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people with his own blood. Let us go to him, then, outside the camp, and bear his humiliation. There is no permanent city for us here; we are looking for the one which is yet to be” (Heb 13: 12-13).

Let us go to him: we go out to meet Christ, to share his life as he shared ours. Expectation is the key. Something so new is happening that the old order of faith, deep and true though it was, is overthrown. The Incarnate Christ has come very close, and our normal model of seeing—me here, you over there—does not work with Christ. If we wish to see him, we must change our way of looking.

Here a passage from St Augustine may help. In his Confessions, he describes a time of intense searching, when he tried to find the Lord in the objects of creation—sun, moon and stars—and in the images of his mind. He was looking desperately, trying to see the truth as an object set before him. But all the time he was looking in the wrong place: “But you, O Lord, were more intimate to me than I am to myself.” Just as the writer of Hebrews sees Christ as closing the gap between God and humanity, so Augustine sees Christ when he can no longer measure the distance between himself and the Lord.

But again, we have to ask, what does that mean for us? I have one suggestion: it works for me, it may perhaps work for you. I was listening to the Nunc dimittis recently at Evensong: “Lord, you let your servant go, in peace; because my eyes have seen your salvation.” What was Simeon saying? He was saying that in Christ he saw, unmistakeably, what he had always looked for, the redemption of all that he was. He knew that if he kept his eye fixed on Christ, he was saved—his life had been taken up into the life of God.

It seemed to me, hearing those words of the canticle, that I knew what they meant; that I too had seen my salvation. Not necessarily at that moment or in the way that Simeon did. But if someone had asked me whether, in the course of my life, I had been shown that which had the power to redeem and to transform my whole being, I would answer ‘yes.’ I might not easily be able to describe what it was—a sense of transforming love, of infinitely patient grace?—but I had been shown it. Whether I have done anything about it, is, of course, a different matter.

Look into your life, and ask yourself if you can join with Simeon in saying those words: “my eyes have seen your salvation.” Look for that glimpse of something that you would trust absolutely with what you are. When you find it, you are looking at Christ. It does not matter if it bears another name. If you have known the touch of salvation within yourself, you have felt the touch of Christ, because salvation comes from nowhere else.

Where does that leave my father, who, with death a week away, could rest on God but not on Christ? Well, names do not matter to God. He was resting on Christ. He was resting on that intimacy with which God, incarnate, enters our lives, shares in them, and saves us. That is Christ, whatever name we choose to call it. Amen.