Knowing and loving – 28 November 2014

After all these years it seems to me that Advent is something near impossible to explain.  God comes into our life and our world, our hearts.  As St Paul puts it memorably in two words: in Christ.  The baby, the young man, the teachings, the death, the resurrection – Advent is our hope and our expectation that all this is so, that it happens and that it is true.  Incarnation is a solid Christian word, although it is outside the vocabulary of most people.  It means made flesh.  That is our flesh and bone.  In St John:  The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth.

That incarnation, made flesh, is for Jesus’s followers a haunting and life-changing thing.  We were made flesh.  If Jesus shared and knew, experienced, this mortal, fallible life with all its perils and ambiguities, then it is not really possible for us to be content to do less.  I came across a talk Rowan Williams gave to some ordinands on retreat.  He spoke to them about what he called the terrible threat of knowledge without love.  He is referring to our culture which is obsessed with needing to know, needing to have “the facts”, however distorted through an extremely compromised media, needing “answers”, is a common cliché, needing to see people properly exposed, humiliated and punished, needing to have “justice done”, needing scapegoats, someone to blame – all of this somehow perceived as the “truth”.  This knowledge is power but without love.  It produces typically revulsion, contempt, the illusion that we have the truth about someone or something – and sometimes even amusement at other people’s pain.

Incarnation requires of us something enitrely different.  The Psalmist says of God (Ps 103:14 KJV):  He knoweth whereof we are made, he remembereth that we are dust.   So must we.  The truth about us, the truth about someone else, is not told until we understand how and why with accurate sensitivity.  It is what William Langland, way back in the 14^th century, in Piers Plowman, called “kind knowing” – not just the alleged facts, but the doubt, the agony, the temptation, the darkness and abandonment.  Jesus is represented by St John as saying, I judge no one.  To the woman discovered in adultery he says, Where are your accusers?  Is there no one who condemns you?  Neither do I condemn you.  Rowan Williams writes how Jesus seemed to sense the precariousness of human goodness, love and fidelity… No failure or error could provoke his condemnation, except the error of those legalists who could not understand that very precariousness. 

To be incarnate to another person, as Jesus was, as we are called to be, is the polar opposite of humiliating, ridiculing, condemning and rejecting.  It is kind knowing, kind understanding.  And if it is difficult because we also have been hurt a bit too much, perhaps, or because it seems important to be stern and unyielding, then we may learn incarnation in the stillness and silence of our prayer.  It is the space and the context in which we are simply ourselves, without boasting and without excuses, present and receptive to God and to all truth.  God is incarnate to us and we to God.  Then the Spirit of Christ is able, as Jesus said, to bring us to the truth, the kind knowing, the understanding and love.