Second Sunday of Lent, ...and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord

…and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.

I served my title curacy in a huge, sprawling parish in Portsmouth, which covered the North End of Portsea Island. There were 20, 000 residents, three church buildings, and the environment was relentlessly urban. There were few trees or green spaces. Instead there was street after street of charity shops and pound-saver stores, with small terraces and semi-detached houses whose facades often concealed poverty and disadvantage.

At least twice year one of our churches would host a dramatic production, a full-scale musical in the spring and a revue in the autumn. These attracted the participation of all sorts of people, young and old, churchgoers and visitors alike. They were significant community events which always drew audiences, but what fascinated me was their impact on those who performed in them. Take a child from very modest circumstances, with very modest aspirations, and put them in a spotlight, and the effect can be quite magical. I remember seeing inarticulate teenagers whose day to day interests did not extend much beyond their cigarettes, dead-end jobs, and the fortunes of Pompey FC being transformed by the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd. On stage, saying or (more often) singing lines written by someone else they would visibly blossom and flourish, gaining stature and confidence before the spectators’ very eyes.

Performance, particularly musical performance, does that to people. At Rowan Williams’s suggestion I’ve spent much of this week listening to Jacqueline Du Pre’s interpretation of Elgar’s Cell Concerto. I’ve been entranced by its power and intensity. It needn’t be Du Pre, though. It could be Leslie Howard or the choir of St Peter’s Eaton Square, for in this Eucharist we are blessed by the weekly offering of fine music and in almost any such offering we are bought face to face with a mystery which is theological as well as aesthetic.

In the offering of music we see a performer realizing the work of a composer. The performer is a human being with her own identity and integrity. As the composer’s work is realized the performer’s identity does not shrink or diminish. Rather, it is stretched and amplified. The performer sings or plays at the full extent of her powers and skill, bending every muscle and sinew, every attention and effort to the work, and she is thus fully, vigorously, vitally, alive. Yet the consequence of that power and skill, of that attention and effort, of that vigour and vitality, is that another is made present. The performer at the peak of her performance realizes perfectly, or close to perfectly, the work of someone else. The performer’s fullness of life is saturated with the vision of the composer.

The musical metaphor does what words cannot: it expresses what Christians hold to be true of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s only Son, our Lord. The history of the early Church from Pentecost onwards is the history of our forebears in faith trying to work out who their friend Jesus had been and who he was. They remembered a man who had been hungry and tired, who had wept and who had been angry. Yet they remembered too a man who had forgiven people’s sins and healed the sick, who had declared that God’s kingdom was at hand and had challenged the Jerusalem authorities. Above all, they knew that three days after his death he had been raised to life. So who was he?

For centuries the argument rumbled on, and thus it was that various beliefs about Jesus came to be approved, whilst others were identified as heretical. In time the community of the faithful decided that Jesus was not a divine being wrapped in a passing semblance of humanity; neither was he a mere mortal possessed of occasional heavenly powers. He was something more, something different, yet it was impossible to say exactly what. And thus it was that when the bishops met at Chalcedon in 451 they settled upon a formula for reconciling the irreconcilable. Jesus was fully divine: he was God of God, Light of Light, begotten, not made, and of the same substance as the Father. Yet he was also fully human: he was born of a woman, he suffered under Pontius Pilate, and he died a human death.

Fully human and fully divine: the Chalcedonian definition is a brilliant form of words which has been the cornerstone of Christian orthodoxy ever since. But the negotiations of those ancient bishops and the precision of their language can barely begin comprehend the subject it addresses. Perhaps music can; perhaps when we see and hear a great artist perform we can understand what Jesus is and who Jesus is. He is a man, raised as a carpenter’s son from Nazareth, with the identity and integrity of any human being. And yet his human life is a performance of God’s work, of God’s love. While he never loses that human integrity and human identity his humanity is saturated with divine life, just as is Jacqueline Du Pre’s with Edward Elgar’s. God’s life is made present in Jesus’s life; God’s life is brought to birth in Jesus’s life.

We share our humanity with Jesus. He is our brother. Yet our humanity is all too often an obstacle to God’s purposes. It stubbornly avoids the composer’s score and the conductor’s baton, and prefers instead its own elegies and its own codas. The result is discordant cacophony. Our discipleship of Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, calls us to hear heaven’s music and to give ourselves entirely to its realization on earth. Amen.


Sunday 17 February 2008,
2 of Lent.