Is This God?

+ In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The lesson we will hear this morning tells of the angel coming to Mary, a young virgin in the village of Nazareth, and announcing to her that she will conceive and give birth to Jesus. Christians remember that angelic message with a feast called the Annunciation—you can see how the name of the feast, the Annunciation, comes from the word "announce"—and the feast of the Annunciation comes, as you would expect it to, just nine months before Christmas, that is, on the twenty-fifth of March. So today, we are celebrating the Annunciation.

There is much for us to learn from the fact that God chose someone so unimportant as this peasant girl to be (as one of the Christian councils officially called her), the Theotokos, which is Greek for "the one who gives birth to God." Today, though, I want to look at something yet more important, for there is obviously also much for us to learn from the fact that it was God to whom this virgin gave birth. So I am going to ask you to think this morning about a very difficult question, about the very beginning of Jesus’s life.

Christianity is fundamentally the belief that God became a human person, Jesus, the son of Mary, in order to carry out God’s plan of salvation. Much of early Christian history involves arguments about exactly how God could do such a thing. Perhaps God only appeared to be the human person Jesus; perhaps the power of God came down on the man Jesus at his baptism; perhaps God took the place of some part of an ordinary human being, so that God was Jesus’s mind, or Jesus’s soul. Eventually, the mainstream of Christianity—what we call orthodox Christianity—rejected all those ideas, and decided instead that God—specifically, God the Son, one in being with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit—God the Son, Christians decided, truly became a complete human person in Jesus. That’s a difficult idea to argue for, theologically, but the Church adopted it, in spite of its difficulty, because Christians felt that God’s plan of salvation had to include everything about us as human persons. If God had taken the place of Jesus’s human soul, then our souls would not have been saved; if God had taken the place of Jesus’s human mind, then our minds would not have been saved; if God had only appeared to be human, or had only adopted Jesus, then nothing about us was really or permanently saved at all. In Jesus, Christianity insists, God is being a complete human person.

In light of that difficult theological teaching, today’s feast, the Annunciation, the day of Jesus’s conception, fits together with the day we will mark next month, Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter. On Holy Saturday, we can think of the body of Jesus, lying in a tomb, and ask, if God was being a human person in Jesus, is God now being this corpse, this dead body of Jesus? And the answer is yes. So also now, at the feast of the Annunciation, we can think of this thing which is conceived in the Virgin's womb, and ask, if God is going to be a human person in Jesus, is God now being this zygote, this blastocyst, this embryo, this foetus, this first beginning of the body of Jesus? And the answer, again, is yes. God chooses to be a complete human person for our salvation, complete in terms of individual existence as well as in terms of component parts.

Why should we care so much about this principle? We should care, I think, because it is an almost inevitable human tendency to tell ourselves that there is some part of our individual lives beyond God’s reach, something which God does not know about, and (usually) of which God would not approve. Well, there are plenty of things in our lives of which God does not approve, from talking back to our parents to participating in an economy which depends on the misery of two-thirds of the world: but there are no things in our lives of which God does not know, and there are none which God did not die to redeem. So long as we think that there is something in us which must be hidden from God, we deny that God could transform that something, and so we deny that we ourselves can be wholly transformed.

Last month, in talking about the woman taken in adultery, I mentioned in passing Nathaniel Hawthorn’s novel The Scarlet Letter. One thread of that story concerns Arthur Dimmesdale, a minister who committed adultery and is for most of the book too much of a coward to admit it in public, though he tortures himself for it in private. Roger Chillingworth, the evil doctor with whose wife Dimmesdale had the affair, plays with Dimmesdale’s mind all through the novel, as if he were a spiritual leech that could live on Dimmesdale’s agony. Near the end of the book, when Dimmesdale finally has the courage to climb the scaffold in the public square along with his daughter and her mother, Chillingworth has become not just evil, but demonic, a stand-in for Satan himself. And Chillingworth catches Dimmesdale, just as he is climbing the steps of the scaffold, and says to him, "This is the only place where you could have escaped from me." Hawthorn’s point, though he himself probably did not mean it in the ordinary religious sense, is that it is precisely those parts of ourselves of which we are ashamed and afraid that give evil a claim on us. For Hawthorn, the solution is public admission of one’s guilt; but for Christianity, the solution is to recognize that those parts of human life are not beyond the power of the God who was willing to be both human zygote and human corpse.

Christian orthodoxy insists on the Annunciation and Holy Saturday (as well as Easter), it insists that God is with us from womb to tomb and beyond, partly to make a big theological point, but also partly to make an immediate point about our own spiritual lives, a point most of us need to be reminded of with some frequency. That point is that nothing in our lives is outside God’s plan for salvation, nothing in us is beyond his transforming power. That transforming power is the joyful proclamation of Easter, and this season of Lent reminds us that when we allow ourselves to think that there is in us a core beyond God’s redemption, we stop our ears against the Easter message.

Let us pray. Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

--John Wm. Houghton