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The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running to obtain thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 21)
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The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 3:7-18
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 3:7-18
✛
The Implication of the Incarnation: You Too Can Be Human
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There is nothing that comes close to the message of Christianity. It is the greatest of all messages, the most stupendous news. The true God, the only God worthy of the name, is infinite, eternal, unchanging, strong beyond all our conceptions of strength, greater than anything the human mind can conceive. God is the mystery that surrounds and sustains beings of all sorts. He is the reason you and I exist, the unimaginable cause of everything, neither near nor far, closer to you than your next heartbeat, and yet vaster and more potent than the energy and expanse of the universe entire.
This God, who is the mystery that sustains all that is, according to the Christian message took flesh and became a human being. The infinite became finite, the eternal entered time, the unchanging cause of all became a human embryo. There is no story like this story: fantastic and cosmic and at the same time tiny and vulnerable. Or perhaps we should say that every true story is at best but a reflection, or an echo, or a working out of the consequences of this, the most important story, the story Christians tell.
Such a story cannot be heard without preparation. To lay the ground and prepare the way a man named John went into wild and unsettled land outside the towns and cities of the province of Judea, just shy of 2000 years ago. John was himself a wild and unsettling man. He wore garments of rough and itchy hair of the camel; he ate wild locusts and honey; and he preached—oh, how he preached!—harsh words to shake people from their complacency. The fantastic story that I have just described for you, the story of the Cause of everything becoming tiny and vulnerable in the midst of everything—that story John prepares for as one of harsh judgment. God is about to do a new thing, John says; and to receive that new thing, he shouts (we imagine him in no other pitch of voice), he shouts Repent! Be baptized for your sins! And he taunts the crowds (for they were crowds who came to see him): You hissing snakes! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Don’t think that you’re going to be okay when God comes just because you can claim Abraham as your ancestor; I tell you, God, who causes everything to exist, is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. John shouts, he provokes, he speaks of axes being laid to the root of trees and trees that have failed to bear good fruit being burned; he speaks of a winnowing fork, and the chaff gathered all together and burned with an unquenchable fire.
Is it with irony that Saint Luke comments, at the end of this passage, that with many such exhortations John preached good news to the people? I do not think so. The apocalyptic language of the Baptist functions to sensitize his hearers to the cosmic meaning and implications of the Incarnation. God becoming a human being upturns everything. If you hear the Christian message, really hear it, you will be aware that nothing in your life can be the same. If the eternal becomes finite, if the unchanging enters time, and if I realize that that is the true story of the cosmos and history, then my life must be changed, radically changed, if I’m to be true to that story.
That’s what a lot of people were thinking even when they heard John preach. And after he was done with his shouting and his taunting and his frightening images, during as it were a sort of question time, “Q & A” time after the sermon, they came to him to ask what it meant. If all this is true, what should we do? And he said, very simply, if you have two coats, share the extra one with someone who is coat-less. And if you have food, share it also. Astonishment must have run through the crowd. “Is that all we have to do?” “Surely I’ve missed something.” Another voice rose to address him: “What should we tax collectors do?” Again, a very simple answer: Don’t collect more than you’re supposed to. Now there must have been a lot of muttering in the crowd; tax collectors were notorious and hated people, and he’s telling them, just, be honest. Out of the increasingly muttering crowd came a third voice. And we, we soldiers, what shall we do? There is silence, waiting for his answer. And again it is very simple: Don’t use violence for personal gain; don’t tell lies; be content with your wages.
They were expecting something more radical. If God has come to earth, is all the difference it makes that we should share our goods and be honest and not use force to get our way? The strange answer of Christianity is yes. Yes, that’s all the difference it makes.
Christianity poses a greater challenge to the human intellect than any other religion. It forces us to confront the limitations of our understanding, and in doing so it takes us to the very precipice of mystery. Incarnation and Trinity are coherent doctrines—they can be proved to be not incoherent, and they are what we have to say given the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and yet in saying them we speak beyond the limits of the human mind.
Theology, that is to say, is a giddy business. But when we realize that we can have no substantive concept of God, that we cannot understand God, then it dawns on us that the point of Christianity is something so simple, so ordinary, that a Judean peasant could get it. The point, to put it plainly, is to be human. God came to earth to be human. The mission of Jesus was to show us what it is to be human. And the good news is that you too can be human: to be human is possible for every one who is here today.
For to be human does not require access to esoteric knowledge. You don’t have to abandon society, or stop paying taxes, or eschew the military. You don’t have to travel, or walk barefoot, or spend years developing techniques of spiritual detachment, or seek out something that’s deeply hidden. It’s in plain view. Share your goods. Be honest. Don’t use force to get your way. John prepared the way, and Jesus showed us. I simply quote my intellectual betters when I pass it on to you: To be human is to live by love.¹
__________
¹This last formulation was characteristic of Herbert McCabe.
