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Encountering God Hands On, Face to Face

John 1.1-16, Colossians 1.11-29

There are parts of the New Testament where we could easily get the impression that Jesus had always been part of God until he became human, when he somehow left behind all the glories of heaven and condescended to share a less complete, less satisfying existence as a human being. So, for example, there’s the famous hymn which St Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippian Christians: ‘Though he was in the form of God, Christ Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.’

There’s a name for this understanding of what God was doing for us in Jesus. It’s called Kenotic Christology, from the Greek word for ‘emptying’, ‘kenosis’. God emptied himself out, abandoning much of what it normally means to be God, in order to share our human experience. But there’s a problem with this, for it assumes that God had never really been with his creation before he became human and isn’t really with us now, except in so far as he’s got a lot of memories of what it used to be like.

If we rely too much on this idea, God ends up in a similar position to people who’ve been on the holiday of a lifetime. Perhaps they can no longer afford to do that kind of trip again, or maybe they’re no longer physically able to go, but they can still look through their photo albums - or their collection of digital images - and bring the experience back to life so that they can relive it. Or perhaps their memories are so vivid that they can relive them just in their mind’s eye, as my mother used to do when she was confined to bed in a nursing home, reliving mountain walks that she had gone on in Switzerland and Austria. Is that how God remembers being with us in Jesus?

John says it isn’t! He says that Jesus was with God from the very beginning, but also that all things came into being through him - so that he’s been with the whole of creation, intimately connected with each atom, since the moment of the Big Bang. He’s never been away from us.

It’s part of God’s nature, and the nature of God in Jesus, to be with us always - in history, but also in pre-history, in the present moment and into the distant future. As John puts it, ‘He was in the cosmos and the cosmos came into being through him.’ God didn’t empty himself or hollow himself out to become one with us, it’s fundamental to his nature to be involved with us and Jesus’ coming to live among us only shows us that this has always been true.

And that brings us to John’s main point about the coming of Jesus - it’s something so tactile that he can honestly say, as he’ll go on to spell out in the first of his letters, that the Word of ‘God lived among us.’ He says, ‘We have heard him, we have seen him with our own eyes, we have looked at him and touched him with our hands.’

He’s not just talking about a vague spiritual experience, something purely in the mind. He’s talking about a hands-on, face-to-face encounter. John says that people actually met God in Jesus. They heard him speaking to them, he breathed on them, spat on them even (when he was healing them), and reached out and touched them. The incarnation is what someone has called ‘a multi-sensory experience’.

Of course, we can only read about it now. We have to take John’s word for it. But he assures us that it’s true. And there is a way that we can join in the same experience. When we share Holy Communion with Jesus we too get to touch, to feel, to taste and to see his presence with us.

Paul makes a very similar point to the one made by John, or is it the other way around since Paul was writing first? Jesus, he says, is the image of the invisible God, and in him all things were made and still hold together now. But to what John has to say, about Jesus overcoming the darkness with God’s light, (Paul calls it ‘rescuing us from the power of darkness’), Paul adds the idea of reconciliation. By becoming God with us, in life but also in death, he says that Jesus reconciled all things to God, so that there is no longer anything which can separate us from God’s love.

Finally, Paul introduces the idea that, if Jesus is in us and with us, then other people can meet him in us too and in our community as we gather together in his name, even if it’s an encounter between them and Jesus that takes place at one remove.

That’s why keeping a presence in a village like this does matter, for if we’re faithful to him in what we’re doing and saying, Jesus is incarnate in us. Paul even has the audacity to see that if we suffer for Jesus’ sake, or for the sake of his Church, we are completing what is lacking in his afflictions, so that in us the wonderful work of his incarnation goes on.

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