Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Second Sunday before Lent 2024

As someone who is a rather slow reader, I was encouraged by an Oxford English don who reassured me that unless a novel has gripped you within the first 20 pages, it really isn’t worth reading. Her feeling is that there are so many wonderful books out there, it isn’t worth plodding your way through something you aren’t enjoying, just out of some dutiful sense that you should always finish what you have started.

Of course, what goes for novels doesn’t necessarily apply to all kinds of writing. If I hadn’t been forced to go beyond the first 20 pages of Augustine’s Confession, for example, or the first 20 lines of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, or the first 20 words of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, I would be even less qualified to stand here and speak than I am. Some writing only begins to reveal its riches by intense, sustained engagement, and no little head-scratching and bafflement. I refer you to most things written by Archbishop Rowan Williams.

The prologue to the gospel of St John, proclaimed among us moments ago, manages to be both absolutely gripping, and completely baffling. If you aren’t left wondering what this Word is – the Word that was in the beginning, that was with God and, somehow, is God; let alone how this Word became flesh and dwelt among us – then you are quite astonishingly incurious. If you aren’t completely baffled by the whole idea of a Word through whom all things are created, that gives light to all people and makes them children of God, then you probably aren’t reading St John carefully enough.

Those of us who know what gospels are supposed to be about might justifiably wonder why John talks about ‘the Word’ rather than talking about Jesus. Mark is much more straightforward; his first line is – The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus; Luke with a stylish dedication, assuring the reader of his scholarly credentials.

But John is not just telling the story of a human life. Right from the beginning he presses this biography into a cosmic frame – the frame of all creation; all time and space. This life is about all life; all existence, from beginning to end. The other gospel writers are a bit gentler in pressing the crucial question of Jesus’ true identity. John dazzles us with it, from the very first line.

St Paul is also pretty punchy in his letter to the Colossians: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; in him all things were created; he himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Huge, baffling statements about the invisible made visible; of a man in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

We have just come out of the season of Epiphany, when we have been reminded of those key events which hint at the crucial question of who the child born in Bethlehem was and is. At the Epiphany itself, mysterious non-age-appropriate gifts hint at royalty, divinity, mortality. At the river Jordan, God the Trinity is manifested, as the Father acclaims the baptised Son, on whom the Spirit rests. At Cana, ‘The conscious water saw its God and blushed’ in the words of Richard Crashaw – wine hints at a new creation, and at the blood that will be shed for it. Then, only a few days ago, in a final blaze of glory, we marked Candlemas, and the presentation of Christ in the Temple – where a dazzled Simeon acclaimed him as ‘a light to lighten the gentiles’ – the true light which enlightens everyone, that came into the world.

Outside the doors of the church, these are difficult things to express. Technically, this is what is called Christology – the ways in which the Church has expressed who Jesus is, and what he means; the attempts to define in doctrine the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation – the Word made flesh, in St John’s terms.

Outside the church, and for some within the church, this doctrinal tradition begs many questions, and sits uncomfortably alongside a polite religious pluralism which finds the unique status of Jesus Christ understandably challenging. Scholars have tried to establish a clear line between the Jesus of history – what can be proved about him in historical terms, which actually turns out to be almost nothing of interest – and the Christ whom the Church proclaims and worships. The underlying assumption, the unspoken narrative that is nevertheless peddled, goes along the lines of:

There was once a nice gentle rabbi from Nazareth who taught people to be nice, and got into trouble for it and got himself killed. Then his rather impressionable followers suffered a mass hallucination, claimed he was alive, and made all kinds of whacky claims about him being God. Along came St Paul who became infected with the same delusion and spread it all over the Mediterranean, and turned it all into doctrine as a way of controlling people and establishing an all-powerful Church that would then make peoples lives a misery and cause lots of wars for many centuries, until the Enlightenment came along (thank God) and we found new and better reasons to have wars and more imaginative ways to make people’s lives miserable.

Dripping sarcasm aside, it must be admitted that the Church hasn’t always covered itself in glory in the way it has proclaimed the good news of Jesus Christ, but it deserves more credit than this narrative suggests. Whatever the shortcomings of the Church, its Christology represents the most careful, sustained and prayerful reflection on the person of Jesus Christ, to whom the scriptures bear witness, who comes to us in word and sacrament; a figure both compelling and baffling, who dwells in history, yet exceeds and encompasses it; who is either everything the Church says of him (and more), or is nothing, and worse than nothing – a fraud, a delusion, a divine deception.

To end on a daringly optimistic note, there could be reason to hope that our secular culture may once again be gripped by what we proclaim and worship. We assume all scientists to be committed materialists – telling us that there is nothing but matter, and all the things we value, like beauty, love, consciousness and the life of the mind, are all no more than evolutionary flotsam. But, believe it or not, some are willing to turn all this on its head – to suggest that its not matter that is primary, but mind, consciousness; that all things transmit or permit consciousness according to their capacity, and that it is consciousness that gives all things shape and purpose and direction. It may still be a long way from the God we proclaim; the God who reveals himself in Christ, but at least there is an acknowledgement that the material order reflects something that begs a narrative, a story, an account.

We speak of a Word that was in the beginning and through whom all things were made; a Word that implies rationality, intelligibility, perhaps even wisdom, running through the cosmos. We speak of that Word made flesh, fully human – showing us humans what a fully rational, intelligent, conscious life looks like.

In the first few lines of John’s gospel I hope anyone would find ideas that are gripping and enticing; that invite us into a fellowship of those who give, in prayer and worship, intense, sustained attention to this revelation, but who are not ashamed to regularly scratch their heads in wonder and bafflement at the Christ who will always exceed whatever we say about him. We may find that ours is just the time when these ideas have a new traction within our culture. We, and our gripping, baffling, and endlessly generative Christology, should always stand ready.