Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Third Sunday of Epiphany 2025

Who is this King of Glory? Throughout Advent, we asked this question (based on Psalm 24) in a series of reflections that you can still listen to on our Abbey YouTube channel. As we prepared for the coming of Christ at Christmas, we thought about who exactly we were expecting. Who it was that we were preparing for. This season of Epiphany gives us some of the answers to that question. On the Sundays after the feast where the magi came bearing gifts, each one telling us something of who Jesus is, we have a series of Gospel readings that continually reveal to us: Who is this King of Glory?

At the Baptism of Christ, The Holy Spirit descended like a dove, and a voice from heaven declared: ‘You are my son, the beloved.’ Jesus is the Son of God. Last week, Jesus turned water into wine, revealing something of God’s ever-abundant, overflowing generosity. Jesus is what he does. And then, this week, Jesus stands up in the synagogue, unrolls the scroll he has been given, and reads from the prophecy of Isaiah. And the eyes of all are fixed upon him. ‘Today’, he says, ‘this Scripture’: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me.” “He has sent me…” ‘This scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’ Jesus is who people have been speaking about, writing about, for hundreds of years. But it is not someone else who proclaims it this time; it is Jesus himself. Jesus is who he says he is; that is part of today’s epiphany.

In Luke, this episode takes place right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry: an opening statement, a manifesto that goes beyond the admittedly crucial revelation that Jesus is someone who cares for the sick, the outcast, the oppressed. Jesus is the one who brings good news to the poor, who proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour. Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus is what he does.  Jesus is who he says he is. But not only that – Jesus is he who says. Jesus is one who speaks.

Thinking about Jesus in terms of language is, of course, not new. ‘In the beginning was the word.’ The Logos, the Word that became flesh, is fundamental to our understanding of the second person of the Trinity. ‘The still unspeaking and unspoken word’ as TS Eliot’s Simeon describes the baby Jesus. But it’s very easy to think about language as – abstract. Words floating ephemerally in our minds or out of our mouths. Signs and symbols more or less anchored to solid, dependable physical objects. Our love of pushing the boundaries of language with metaphor, allusion, sarcasm and all our playful parts of speech can make it feel even less anchored to any kind of material reality.  You cannot touch language; you cannot grasp it. It can be used to describe reality as it isn’t, and though there are words I’m sure we’ll always remember (that first “I love you” perhaps,) 99% of the words we read, speak and hear we will forget.

That abstraction of language, the idea that it is “something of the spirit” contrasted to physical reality, is something that Rowan Williams pushes against in his book The Edge of Words. For Williams, language is unmistakeably a material process. Not only is our production inescapably embodied, in and of our flesh (in speech, our lungs, our teeth, our tongues, in Sign Languages, the body is the means of communication), but the very fact that it is communicative means that it depends on references. This is more than just me pointing at this pillar and saying, 'This is a pillar'. Language requires other bodies who hear or see and interpret, against which we can check our common pool of understanding. I don’t know whether you’ve experienced the particular humiliation of mispronouncing a word or picking the wrong one and people looking at you as if you’ve just suggested we should stand on the ceiling. I know I have. Language requires stuff, and it requires other people. It is only God who can be in the midst of nothing and speak, and in speaking, create all things. ‘And God said: ‘Let there be light.’

In this season of Epiphany, when we contemplate God as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, God born and growing and walking and sitting and eating, and yes speaking, the embodied fact of our interpersonal communication takes on a whole particular weight and meaning. Jesus is fully human. He has that body with lungs and teeth and a tongue, but he is also fully divine.  As Jesus is born into the messiness of being a human with a body, an extraordinary transformation takes place in what it means for us to be humans with a body. In Christ’s birth, death, Resurrection and Ascension, we are, through grace, enabled to partake of the divine nature – drawn up into the eternal life of the Trinity. Soul and body. It is why we say in the Apostles Creed that we will use at Evensong this afternoon: ‘We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.’ The body matters because Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, made it matter.

Jesus is the one who says, the Word made flesh, who was sent to preach, to proclaim, to tell us about God in his actions, his self, and his words. Those words are not some floaty abstract that is all very nice but ultimately ephemeral; they are grounded in the embodied physicality of God-made-man. And because of the incarnation, that means our words are too.

Our language is important, and we should take it seriously. This is not some mealy-mouthed finger-wagging telling you not to swear, but rather a recognition that our language is how we are human together, and goodness me, do we need reminding at the moment how to be human together. Our language is not divorced from our selves, but is grounded in the embodied nature of being human and being human in community. As Edward Schillebeeckx put it: 'We must remember that every human exchange, or the intercourse of men one with another, proceeds in and through men’s bodiliness.” This is true whether we are on Twitter (or X) or sitting across a table from each other.  We are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.

For some of us, this idea that our speech is so loaded could feel a bit intimidating, but I’d like to return to Rowan Williams via St Paul’s wonderful explanation to the church in Corinth of what it means to be the body of Christ. For Paul, because we are members of that one body, there is a unity in our Baptism into Christ’s death and Resurrection. But we are also called to be different. We are not all apostles, we are not all preachers, we do not all speak in tongues, and we do not need to – which might be a relief! The one body has many gifts, and it needs them all. Speaking is just the most noisy type of language. To Rowan Williams, one of the most important parts of speech is silence. The silence where we have been pushed beyond words. The communication that comes when language runs out of road. It is important, he reminds us, not to romanticise silence too much: there are silences which are absolutely corrosive. The silence of the downtrodden and oppressed is a form of captivity, and Christ came to proclaim liberty to the captives. But if we place the importance upon language that I have suggested we give it, we are therefore called to pay attention. To listen when people speak. To listen in the place where there are no words for the Word of God. We are called to join that congregation in the synagogue, silent, our eyes fixed on Jesus, waiting for him to say: ‘Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ To speak is Holy. To listen is Holy. In both, may we know the presence of him who is the Word made flesh.