Integral Christianity

3 April 1986

Hatch End.

We live in the West in an age of perplexity. Things which were solid and certain convictions are being questioned on all sides. That they are questioned by unbelievers is natural, that they are attacked by the Godless is not surprising, but it is profoundly hurtful that within the Christian community the integrity of the Christian faith is questioned and undermined. And yet we continue in our services to proclaim a faith, which for many does not correspond to historical reality.

We have just read the Creed. Does everyone among us subscribe with the sense of certainty to all that it proclaims – the existence of God, the fact that God has called all things that were not before into existence not only by His mighty all-powerful Word but has loved them into existence, has called them to be in order to share the exultant joy of eternal life. Do we earnestly, realistically believe that God has truly become man through the Incarnation, that Jesus of Nazareth was, indeed, is, for all eternity the Only-Begotten Son of God become the Son of man born of the Virgin and of the Holy Spirit? Do we believe that He died upon the cross a human death because He had chosen so to identify with us as to share with us all that was the human predicament: to be born into a world of suffering and of death, a world into which man through sin had brought evil and destruction, that sinless He remained solid with us to the point of sharing all the consequences of the human fall, the human Godlessness and the human sin, of the greed, the fear and the hatred that were abroad? Do we truly believe that He accepted to share in His humanity the ultimate predicament of mankind, the sense that they had lost God? Do we realise to the depth of our soul with horror and pain the meaning, the intensity of the word spoken by Christ at the hour of His death, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” And do we realise that He rose from the dead, that at no moment was His divinity separated from His humanity although His soul was torn away from His body through death? Do we believe the words which we proclaim in the Creed? Do we believe the words which we hear and which repeat in our prayers? And if we do not believe them, what are we? How can we say that we are Christians of the same Church as the Apostles who believed every word of it, who proclaimed them, of the early Church that believed and framed this faith in the historical Creeds, of the martyrs who proclaimed their faith through their death having proclaimed it, preached it through their lives?

When we speak of faith, do we realise how far faith must reach? In the Epistle to the Hebrews the author says that faith is certainty concerning things unseen, those things which are not accessible to our senses but which we know to be true. And there are other things than God and the truth of the Gospel and spiritual experience that belong to this realm of the unseen of which we are sure, – love is one, beauty is one. There are certainties that are there although they do not reach us through our senses. Do we, can we say in the way in which the Apostle said, “We preach, we write, we speak about what our eyes have seen, our hands have touched, our ears have heard”? He spoke of his experience of Christ on earth but have we not a living experience of Christ risen, Christ alive, Christ victorious? Do we not from within this experience of the risen, the living Christ see that what the Gospel proclaims about Him as a man Jesus born in Bethlehem, died on Calvary on the little hill without the walls is true, historical truth, God’s truth to be received with awe, with amazement, with wonder but received in a way that will shape and indeed at times ultimately, finely change our lives, because to believe does not only consist in accepting the truth of such and such propositions, to believe means to be so sure of their truth that one can live in no other way than according to this truth, trusting the God who so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son that the world may be saved, trusting Him not only in general terms but in every possible way, at every moment of our life living according to His guidance, what we call His commandments, which are not ‘commands’ but which are a description of the way that can make us into citizen of the Kingdom, God’s own people on earth.

And also faith means faithfulness, – and are we faithful in our reception of Christ’s message and our living according to this message? If we want to play our role on earth in the terms of the Gospel, we must ask ourselves searching, painful questions about our attitude to what God has revealed in Christ about Himself, about man and about the world in which we live. About God the Incarnation reveals to us something unthinkable otherwise. The Old Testament spoke of God as the Holy One of Israel, the unapproachable, unsearchable God, the one of whom more than one saint of the Old Testament said, “Woe onto me, I have seen God, I shall die.” Yet he had seen only a glimpse, a shadow. But what God has revealed to us in Christ is that love, and God is love, is given, is given unreservedly, is given and remains helpless, vulnerable, totally at our disposal, ready to be tormented, crucified and killed, but as the lamb before the sheerer will not lift up his voice and protest against our unfaithfulness and our cruelty. God humble, God vulnerable, God helpless, God perfect revelation and vision of what love can be, indeed is, and also a revelation about man because in the Incarnation if truly, as we believe, God took flesh, became the Son of man, He reveals to us the greatest of man in a way in which no other revelation can do. It is not by looking at those who are powerful on earth that we can see how great man is. Man is so great, so deep, so vast that God himself can unite Himself with him and man remains man filled with divinity.

One of the ancient writers in the VI century describing or rather trying to convey how we can understand the Incarnation, the way in which the Godhead and humanity can be united in one person, says, “Take the example of a sword plunged into a burning furnace. When you put it in, it is grey, cold, when you take it out, it is glowing with fire, shining. And the fire and the iron are so united that you can now cut with fire and burn with iron.” This is the way in which divinity and humanity were at one, pervading one another, inseparable for all eternity in Christ. But what was true for Him is true for humanity. This is the measure, the scale of what man is and can be. We are called to become what Christ was. He became man being God, we are called to become partakers of the divine nature according to St. Peter’s Epistle while we remain human.

But there is perhaps even more to it because it is not only to a human soul that God united Himself in Christ, it is to a body, to His flesh. The Word became flesh, St. John tells us in the beginning of the Gospel. The Word became flesh, and this flesh, this body of the Incarnation is akin to all the matter of this created world; in him, as it were, all the created world could see itself glorified, could see itself shining potentially with divinity, expecting the revelation of the sons of God, as Paul puts it, in the expectation of the time when God shall be all in all. And all things created will be filled with the divine presence, will shine with divine glory and light. This is the message which we are to bring into the world, a message of exultant joy, a message of unconquerable certainty, of a hope that will not be deceived. Is it the message which we bring?

The early Apostles, the early Christians were a handful, very-very few, but they came into the world as a vanguard of the Kingdom, proclaiming that the end had already come, that the goal of all creation was already achieved in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ when God and man were united, and all things material could see themselves in glory, in the person of Christ.

What are we proclaiming? We are members of the body of Christ, not in the sense in which we become members of a society, of a political party, of a club, members in the sense of limbs, He unites us through baptism to Himself, he makes us, to use a phrase of a Russian writer of this century, into an extension through our time and space of the incarnate presence of God, however germinally, incipiently. Are we this? Do people who meet us look at us in amazement asking themselves, who are these people? They possess a love to one another, a love of God, indeed, a love of their enemies, which we can not fathom. Who are these people? They are alive with a life which is beyond our comprehension. Who are these people? They don’t belong to this world although they are in the world, they are not of it. Their country, the place to which they belong is God’s own place. If only people could look at us and feel, perceive this and hearing us could hear the conviction sounding in our voices. If looking at us they could see the light of eternity in our eyes and on our face, then the world in which we live could become another world. And the city of man, which is being built so awkwardly around us and indeed by us, a city of decency, of complacency, of comfort would suddenly explode and become something of the beginnings of the city of God, a city the first Citizen of which would be Jesus, the Son of God become the Son of man. And this is our vocation, this is our calling, this is why God sends us into the world as His messengers, messengers of God to proclaim a joy exulting, a joy glorious and a hope that nothing will brake because both our joy and our hope are rooted in God’s own promise and in God’s own act. Amen.