Category Archives: Theology

16 Jul

Che Guevara among the fishermen

Pope Francis has been taken to task. Asked why he had rarely spoken of hard-working, tax-paying families, instead concentrating on the marginalised and poverty-stricken, he said: “You’re right. It’s an error of mine not to think about this,”

Well, it would indeed be nice to see him take a few minutes off from his effusive rhetoric about the picturesque poor. True, Jesus commanded his disciples to care for the poor, but his attitude towards poverty was rather more complex than that of Guardian-reading sentimentalists. Jesus actually called the poor blessed. Why? “Because theirs is the kingdom of God.” And when he was anointed with expensive ointment, a Guardian-reading disciple protested, “This ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.”

Jesus replied, “Ye have the poor always with you, but me ye have not always.”

That wasn’t very Christian of Christ, was it, Francis?

Jesus also said that it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven, the province of the poor. So you would think that the Pope might be led to have sympathy for the rich and spend more time and effort helping them in their hard task of entering the kingdom.

Francis’ predecessor Benedict XVI is one of the greatest theologians since St Augustine. Francis –  great self-publicist as he is and a close friend of vox pop – is no theologian. But he must have attended Sunday School when he was a nipper. There he would have read, or had read to him, the Gospel stories in which Jesus has much to say about the poor, but where he is also seen spending much time with the rich and influential.

He eats often in the houses of rich Scribes and Pharisees. He also eats with “publicans and sinners.” But when we hear that word publican, we should not imagine that it connotes a scene in which Jesus likes to go out of a night with his disciples – the lads – for a few pints at The Rose & Crown in downtown Capernaum. The publicans were not landlords. They were public servants – actually tax-gatherers for the occupying Roman power. Naturally, they were loathed by the poor.

Jesus loved the poor? Of course he did. But he also loved those well off enough to put on a wedding that lasted ten days, attended by numerous guests. Not only did Jesus attend the wedding – with the lads – but when the wine ran out, he created a further 180 gallons of the stuff.

The Son of God who said, “Blessed are the poor” also said, “I am come that ye might have life; and have it more abundantly.”

The Pope and just about every bishop and clergyman you have ever heard are so fond of preaching that mawkish Christmas sermon about Jesus being born into poverty in a stable. As if the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity had been a lesser condescension if he had been born Mayor of Tunbridge Wells.

He wasn’t born into poverty. His earthly father was of the house and lineage of King David. Joseph was an established craftsman and a member of the middle class,

We know the Pope is a Catholic – but does he read the Bible? 

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08 Jul

The meaning of TEC

I recall the intense pleasure when I was first first taught the rudiments of the differential calculus donkey’s years ago: this seemingly miraculous, and charmingly simple, means of calculating increases and decreases in rates of change. Well, I don’t think the editors of Church Times needed the calculus to measure the catastrophic increase in the pace of the decline – literally dismemberment – of the Church of England. That newspaper is really the house journal of the C. of E. and it is read by more than 90% of the clergy and a good proportion of the laity. The current edition must give them all pause for thought, for it has devoted ten pages to consider the “apocalyptic” decline of the English church which, some claim, will barely exist in twenty years’ time. Most churchgoers are elderly or old. Their numbers are not being replaced. Thus – we might say rather late in the day – appraised of the crisis, we have those ten pages of head-scratching in CT, as sociologists, clergy, theologians and religious pundits cast around for what might be done.

On the basis of the well-known fact that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, we should ask first what has been going on in the English church in the last half century which has – shall we say – coincided with its collapse. Let me mention a few of what seem to me to be the most significant features.

The last fifty years have seen the rise of theological reductionism. Bluntly, this means that ancient doctrines, always previously proclaimed as true and the foundational beliefs of the church have been, in the jargon, demythologised. So Jesus was not born of a virgin and he didn’t rise from the dead. His miracles were really “acted parables” – that is more jargon for the claim that they didn’t actually happen.

Concurrent with theological reductionism has run a fifty years programme of liturgical “reform” which has seen the discarding of The King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. This means that there is no longer observance of the rule that all the realm shall have one use. In fact, these changes mean that you have no idea what you’re going to find in a church service until the service begins. It’s a sort of churchy babel in which no two churches do the same thing and many priests and ministers seem to do as they like.

In addition to these changes, the bishops, the clergy and the synod have endorsed the secular mores of the age.

I have commented enough on these matters and I will not do so again here, but conclude with a single observation:

In those churches where the ancient doctrines are still taught as true, where traditional scriptures are used and where the moral teaching which stood the church apart from pagan practices is still taught, there is life and growth. Churches in Africa, Central and South America and parts of the Far East are burgeoning.

By contrast, the churches which have most successfully modernised themselves are failing, and – perhaps this is where the calculus comes in – those modernising more rapidly are also failing faster.

The church which has modernised itself to the greatest extent is the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA).

Recently this institution changed its name from  ECUSA to The Episcopal Church, known widely as TEC

Some, basing their remark on observation, say that TEC stands for The Empty Church

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07 Jul

A woman of evasions

Ten years ago I was living in the City of London, only three hundred yards from St Paul’s and the Rev’d Canon Lucy Winkett who came on Thought for the Day this morning to reflect on the bombings of 7th July. It was a strange performance. Ms Winkett began by saying that one of the first indications something was amiss was that mobile phones weren’t working. This, she said, “Cut us off from one another.” It made me wonder how people were not cut off from one another before mobile phones were invented. But then she got serious:

She said that on 7/7, “Prayer became less a petition and more an accusation, and for many God was indicted.”

I confess I had to go to the BBC’s website and play that sentence again and again to try to discover its meaning. I still haven’t discovered its meaning, so I shall have to resort to asking questions and hope that someone reading my blog will be able to help.

Question: Why bring poor old God into it? I thought the atrocities committed that day were perpetrated by a group of Muslim lads from Yorkshire. Surely, if anyone is to be accused or indicted, Lucy, they were the ones?

Question: Was God being blamed because political correctness demands we don’t blame the Muslims – in spite of what the historical facts reveal?

Then Lucy reached her peroration and told us firmly that “the easy language of faith” is inadequate for the understanding of what happened on 7/7

Question: What is easy about faith and its language?

I can speak only from personal experience and a lifetime’s conversations with teachers and friends about the matter of faith, and I can tell you that neither they nor I has ever felt that faith and the language of faith come easily.

Question: Of whom was Lucy speaking when she mentioned users of the easy language of faith? I’ve never met any.

Question: Is there, please, someone reading this who does find that faith comes easily and therefore that its language can be described as easy?

Perhaps there is only one person who finds faith and its language easy. Perhaps that person is Rev’d Lucy Winkett?

Can you hear me, Lucy?

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05 Jul

Prayers before a capitulation

Here are three prayers issued by the Church of England for the minute’s silence in commemoration of those slaughtered on the beach in Tunisia.

“Father, you know our hearts and share our sorrows.We are hurt by our parting from those whom we loved: when we are angry at the loss we have sustained,when we long for words of comfort,yet find them hard to hear,turn our grief to truer living,our affliction to firmer hope in Jesus Christ our Lord.Amen.”

***
”Lord, have mercyon those who mourn who feel numb and crushed and are filled with the pain of grief,whose strength has given up. You know all our sighing and longings:be near to us and teach us to fix our hope on you through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

***
”Lord, do not abandon us in our desolation.Keep us safe in the midst of trouble,and complete your purpose for us through your steadfast love and faithfulness,in Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.”

No mention of the rightness of our cause in waging war on a terrorising barbarism, only the gospel of touchy-feeliness.

“Numb and crushed…strength given up.” There speaks the church militant! I’m only surprised that these prayers were not accompanied by a rubric saying, At this moment the officiating priest shall raise a white flag.

What a falling off there has been from better days and better ways! In AD 732 the Christian Charles Martel fought the Battle of Tours to halt the Muslim takeover of Europe. Again in 1571 an alliance of Catholic maritime states repulsed the Muslim threat at Lepanto.

So here is a prayer in time of war from The Book of Common Prayer (1662) – a book which, of course, the C. of E. has discarded:

“O Almighty God, King of all kings, and Governor of all things, whose power no creature is able to resist, to whom it belongeth justly to punish sinners, and to be merciful to them that truly repent: Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies; abate their pride, asswage their malice, and confound their devices; that we, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore from all perils, to glorify thee, who art the only giver of all victory; through the merits of thy only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

And here is the second verse of the National Anthem:

”O Lord our God arise,

Scatter her enemies,

And make them fall:

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix:

God save us all.”

I look forward to the day – not to be long delayed – when the pusillanimous, faithless, gutless C. of E. issues A form of prayer for a people who died of political correctness.

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02 Jul

The Bible and other rubbish

The house of bishops in the Episcopalian Church of the USA  has voted to alter its canons to remove the stipulation that marriage must be between a man and a woman. By this ECUSA has repudiated biblical teaching and indeed the 2000 years old doctrines of the church. The scriptural definition, which is also an injunction – what in better days we called a commandment – “A man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife” is thus rendered null and void. The Bible says, “Male and female created He them.” Don’t be ridiculous! Don’t be so unprogressed. The Bible was in the wrong for millennia. Thank goodness – do I really mean goodness? – that the liberated lights of ECUSA have now come to put things right.Nowadays we know that male and female are only social constructs. You are what you say you are. You can do whatever you want to do. And to hell with both the biological evidence and the authority of scripture.

Well, that’s all happening in America, so it doesn’t affect us, does it? But it does, because the Church of England and ECUSA are in communion. So I suppose the Archbishop of Canterbury is very upset and angry over ECUSA’s apostasy. Surely the Archbishop will leap to defend the age-old biblical teaching and denounce this un-Christian innovation? I can just hear him saying, “What you have done is an abomination and contrary to the word of God.”

Actually, I have just read  Dr Welby’s official response on the Church of England website. He says, “We must respect the prerogative of The Episcopal Church to address issues appropriate to its own context,”

That’s socking it to them Justin! Attaboy – you tell ‘em! There’s leadership for you. There’s the prophetic word of judgement from the Primate of All England.

I bet the prophet Isaiah himself wished he had coined that ringing condemnation: “…address issues appropriate to its own context.” That would really have made the hearts of the heathen quake.

In truth, what we are hearing in this latest Archiepiscopal pronouncement is only confirmation of the fact that, as a moral and spiritual authority – you might say as a church – the C. of E. has resigned. Its long history of speaking truth to power and of being the conscience of the nation is finished. The bishops, the clergy and the General Synod now exist only to endorse the rapidly-changing nostrums of secular society. Not only is this the way things are, it is, according to Welby’s predecessor Rowan Williams, the way things ought to be. In one of his last sermons before he retired, Williams told us, “The church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.”

It makes a change, I suppose, from St Paul’s “And be ye not conformed to this world.” (Romans 12:2)

But what did St Paul know? He was all, like, so biblical. He’d never make bishop in the enlightened church of today in which what were once defined as mortal sins are now exciting new lifestyle choices.

We have despised the word of God and effectually re-written the Bible in those places where it tells us things we don’t want to hear.

The worldwide Anglican Church should know that there is a destiny in store for those who do that: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life.” (Revelation 22: 18-19)   

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23 Jun

A whiff of grapeshot

The Church Militant Tendency was well-represented on the BBC this morning when Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser came on Thought for the Day to tell us that the victory at Waterloo was a bad thing: “We worship the Prince of Peace, not the Duke of Wellington.” By contrast, he insisted, Napoleon was a good thing. If he had won and taken over in England, he would have abolished the nobility and we would have had no more of all that reactionary stuff about the Establishment of church and state. Fraser told us straight: there is nothing about patriotism in the Christian Faith.

It’s worth taking a few moments to summarise the doings of Fraser’s hero Bonaparte. He was no egalitarian, no people’s man. He set himself up as tyrant of France, killed four thousand by cannon in Paris in a single day, established concentration camps in the Caribbean and destroyed hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers out of naked self-interest.

Ordinary Englishmen did not long for the rule of Napoleon: they celebrated in the streets when they heard the good news from Waterloo.

Why does Fraser admire the tyrant Bonaparte? Because the socialism and collectivism espoused by such as Fraser always ends in the establishment of tyrannies. Where these doctrines are practised moderately, they lead merely to the impoverishment of the people. Where they are practised thoroughly, they lead to genocide and the gulag.

Never mind the history of the 19th century, Dr Fraser: just cast your eyes over the 20th century. Consider Napoleon’s heirs and successors: Stalin, Mao and the national socialist Hitler.

Actually, Giles Fraser is quite a phenomenon in his own right and deserves our close attention.

He is the philosopher-priest who appeared last year on Christmas University Challenge  to demonstrate that he doesn’t know his Aristotle from his Spinoza.

Fraser is that former canon of St Paul’s who, when the rabble-rousing oiks from Occupy turned up, invited them into the cathedral and told the police, who were trying their best to protect the place, to go away. By these actions, Fraser not only precipitated his own resignation but also that of a fine dean.

What should have been the fate of the ecclesiastical-political lout Fraser? A posting into some decent obscurity would have been merciful .

Instead, he was immediately championed by the Bishop of London who proclaimed, “Giles’s voice is a voice that must continue to be heard.”

And so heard it is. He was given a new parish, a column on The Guardian – where else? – and regular appearances on Thought for the Day. He also turns up to parade his mastery of the non sequitur on The Moral Maze

Such a man should have been dispatched with a whiff of grapeshot. His hero Napoleon would be the man to do it, of course.

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16 Jun

Laudato si

Pope Francis is proving to be a nippy mover. Following his encyclical denouncing capitalism, he has written to us all again in a long letter about climate change and what he refers to as “the planet.” Well, he was wrong to condemn capitalism which is the single economic system to have raised more millions out of poverty than all the other systems ever tried. Perhaps the Holy Father can make up for his earlier mistake in his new letter? And, contrary to popular opinion, the Pope is not infallible except when speaking ex cathedra on matters of dogma.

It’s a gloomy read. Climate change is a catastrophic threat to our well-being, and even to our survival, and most of it is our own fault.  He adds, “The Earth is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorized to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”

Is it really as bad as all that?

No, not really. The prophets of doom themselves in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – whose non-scientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist – reckon that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of 0.05◦C per decade. Effectually, there has been no warming for the last fifteen years.

Leave aside for a moment the apostles of the new secular religion of man-made apocalypse and instead bring on the experts and some facts. Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, writes, “In the constant media barrage of possible greenhouse-related catastrophes, almost any event is now linked to climate change. We should not spend vast amounts of money to cut a tiny slice off the global temperature when this constitutes a poor use of resources and when we could use these funds far more effectively in the developing world.” For saying this, Lomborg has had death threats from the new politically-motivated apocalypticists. Other scientists who do not toe the global warming-is-happening-and-it’s-all-our- fault line have received the same. There are plenty of dissenters. A whole regiment of senior climatologists and meteorologists wrote to The Times last year to complain that they couldn’t get their research findings published – because they disagreed with the maniacal orthodoxy.

If we enjoy a warm spring, the fanatics and obsessives put it down to global warming. If we have an extra cold winter, they tell us it’s a result of global warming. If my nose feels cold or you get an attack of the gout, it will be owing to global warming. The same explanation will be given if England retain the Ashes – or indeed if we lose them. In short, global warming has taken upon itself the character of a fundamentalist religion. And it is the nature of such religions that nothing, but nothing, is allowed to count against them.

I can remember the 1950s and 1960s, colder decades, when the experts confidently threatened us with an imminent ice age. The records over the millennia show that the one thing we know for certain about the climate is that it is constantly changing. The regular cycle of climate change on earth is a series of ice ages interrupted by short periods of temperate weather. There are many eminent geographers and geologists, who have not swallowed the propaganda about global warming, and they tell us that actually we are overdue the next ice age.

Even in the period we call modern history, there have occurred much bigger climate changes than anything we are seeing now. Parts of the 18th century were much colder than today. Dickens speaks of times when the Thames froze over for weeks on end. Whereas in the 9th century, there were vines growing in Greenland. Are we to suppose that the warmth which produced vines at such a northerly latitude was owing to Vikings driving around in four-by-fours? Why do you think Greenland was so called? Because a thousand years ago it was fertile. Since then we have had global cooling. How do you think Hannibal got his elephants over the Alps – with skis and crampons? No, only because in his day there was hardly any snow or ice in southern Europe. Incidentally, the Greens are notorious for getting their predictions wrong. Again I can remember the oil crisis of the 1970s when they told us assuredly that the world would have finally run out of oil by the year 2000. Wrong again, spectacularly.

Furthermore, Global warming is reckoned to be caused by two gases: methane and carbon dioxide. The fact is that the amount of methane in the atmosphere has actually reduced in recent years. And, within the margin of error, levels of carbon dioxide have remained the same. Carbon dioxide is a gas necessary to sustain life on earth and most of it comes from plants and human exhalations. Actually, warming is good for us: there are far more deaths from cold than from heat and, given the chance, people migrate to warm countries.

Why is there this obsession with global warming, this fierce insistence that it is happening and that it is our fault? First, it’s a nice little earner for the university laboratories. Governments have been persuaded by the Green lobby that global warming is happening and so they are chucking money at research departments that will tell them what they want to know. After the fall of Communism, the Left has adopted pretended care for the environment as a stick with which to beat big business. Global warming is happening, they say, and it’s all the fault of the nasty capitalists. Green is the new Red. Strange how people who say they care for the environment deface it with useless wind farms.

The global warming apocalyptics is in reality a new totalitarianism. The government and the BBC will not even discuss climate change. Those who dispute it are shamefully called “deniers” – which is meant to compare them with Holocaust deniers. The former Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, says sceptics are dishonest and “wilfully ignorant,” and Prince Charles calls them “headless chickens.”

As Lord Lawson of Blaby has written, “There are hundreds of millions of people in dire poverty, suffering malnutrition, preventable disease, and premature death. Asking the poor to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable disease, and to increase the numbers of premature deaths.

“Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.”

I don’t expect this Leftie Pope Frank to be hearing many confessions from penitent members of the IPCC

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18 Feb

Infantilised pedagogy

I can manage only so much spiritual exaltation at a quarter to eight in the morning, so that’s why I needed a second cup of tea before listening to Lucy Winkett deliver her oxymoronically titled Thought for the Day. It began with that infantile pedagogical device, so beloved of the clergy: first, patronise your listeners by finding some item in the news and then stitch on to it a spiritual “message” so that we thickies will understand. Alan Bennett’s spoof sermon on Beyond the Fringe comes to mind with its “Life is like a tin of sardines. You open the tin and consume the sardines therein, but there’s always a little bit left in the corner, isn’t there? is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine.” Although Bennett’s offering was at a rather more elevated intellectual level than Ms Winkett’s contribution.

Back to the infantilised pedagogy then. She began by telling us about the planned expedition to send people to Mars. Those going would require courage and perhaps even a little foolishness, she said. And then she packed the real spiritual punch. Lent is like that trip to Mars. ‘Cos Lent too is a journey – geddit, thickies?

I weep, because this sort of stuff interferes with my attempts to earn a living, part of which I do by writing satirical articles for the newspapers. But, given the likes of Ms Winkett’s sermonettes, satire becomes impossible, for they are living parodies.

Best to stop talking about her then and think for a minute about Lent. This penitential season has become a consumerist gimmick. It features in the same sections of the newspapers that cover dieting and lifestyle. Are we to give up biscuits or booze?

As John McEnroe used to shout, “You cain’t be serious!”

Let us suppose for a minute that Lent is a time for trying to think and learn more about God. I know that sounds bizarre, but I ask you to entertain it, if only for a moment. How might this be attempted? In The Book of Common Prayer, the Psalms – all one hundred and fifty of them – are printed, a few to be said every morning and a few every evening in the month. You could read them each day, before breakfast and before supper. They are a treasure house of rare devotion and the Prayer Book uses Miles Coverdale’s sublime translation. I had a Jewish friend who could read the Psalms in their original Hebrew; but he claimed Coverdale’s version was an improvement – in much the same way that Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust is said to be better than Proust himself

So I suggest reading the Psalms. Then you can think about going to Mars – or at least you might eat a biscuit.

But if you must insist on giving something up for Lent, I suggest you give up Thought for the Day

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16 Dec

C.of E. RIP

Ooh, we have got the willies!

I’ve seen some correspondence among my fellow believing Christians in what’s left of the Church of England in which they declare that they are dismayed by the determination of the powers-that-be to “fast track” the soon-to-be consecrated women bishops into the House of Lords.

Sex-discrimination, you might say, at the sacerdotal level

One of the letters I saw asked, “Does this mean the Church of England is  busted flush?”

Of course the Church of England is a busted flush and it has been so for decades: from the 1960s when it gave up believing the New Testament, the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth and Our Lord’s miracles; through the 1970s and 1980s when it replaced the matchless liturgy of the English Church with trash and doggerel.

And so into the 21st century and Archbishop Rowan Williams’ last sermon before he retired in which he told us that “The Church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.”

Whatever happened to “Be ye not conformed to this world…”?

And now, and according to Mullen’s First Law of Ecclesiastical Polity which states that every succeeding Archbishop of Canterbury is bound to be worse than his predecessor, Justin “Oil” Welby has gone and cancelled the 2018 Lambeth Conference of all the bishops from the Anglican Church worldwide

Why?

Because he can’t face the prospect of all those wonderful, faithful, orthodox, devout and true bishops from Africa coming to London and telling him that he’s got it all wrong about homosexuality and women in the episcopate.

So what will happen?

It’s easy to foretell because we have the model before us in the case of the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) which over the last three or four decades has become so secularised and accommodating of progressive values that it has ceased to be a Church in any sense of the word.

The C. of E. is now only the politics of the PC soft left, The Guardian and the BBC, with all its fashionable causes from socialism-lite, appeasing the Muslim fanatics and the pagan fantasy of global warming

ECUSA – and now the C. of E. – are frankly apostate – and proud of it

So what is the believing Christian to do? Rome looks increasingly dodgy under the virtual communist Pope Francis. Some of my friends look east to the Orthodox. For myself, I am content to discover a little authentic Christianity wherever it can be found: a faithful Protestant sect, a traditional  Anglo-catholic outpost, a chapel where the gospel is preached

Anything but this shameful, politically-correct, utterly secularised, completely compromised hypocritical, time-serving, contemptible shambles the C. of E has now become 

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10 Dec

Homo Factus Est

Archbishop Justin Welby has taken to writing in Radio Times where he says, “Of course, no gift, however pricey, can truly reflect the gift God gave the world in sending Jesus to share our suffering on the cross, bear the weight of our wrongdoing and offer us the hope of life.”

“Share our suffering on the cross”? Which cross is the Archbishop on then?

Well, forgive him a clumsy locution, a slip of the pen, a slip of the brain. We all do it. But there are profound matters behind Welby’s muddle.

Principally this: the differences between ourselves and God are not negligible but greater than we can imagine. Christmas is that time of year when leftie clerics offer us their sermons about God’s condescension in his willingness to be born “into poverty.”

As if the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity’s kenotic act in the Incarnation were the more remarkable for that he was born in a stable in Bethlehem rather, say, than as Mayor of Clacton.

In fact Jesus was not born “into poverty.” Joseph was a respectable craftsman of the middle class and the lowly place of Jesus’ birth was a temporary inconvenience owing to the census.

There are even more important considerations than this.

St John’s Gospel opens with the shocking announcement that the Word became flesh. The Greek word is not soma (body) but sarx (flesh) which means something much lower down in the order of things; something very nearly despicable. This terrible miracle cannot be apprehended, let alone comprehended, by the naked intelligence. That’s why it is accompanied by signs in the heavens: the star, the angelic chorus. The closest feel we can ever have for it is in those nativity stories in St Matthew and St Luke, in St John’s mystical prologue in the first fourteen verses of his Gospel – and in a sublime musical composition such as Bach’s A Christmas Oratorio.

How else to describe the event in which the sublime Creator of the starry heavens and of all that there is became something that is the next thing to filth, for our sake? Then the sinless one suffered the consequences of sin. This is a world away from the chummy bathos in such phrases as “shared our suffering.”

There is no suffering like unto the suffering of Jesus Christ.

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.

The miracle is, as C.H. Sisson said, “That he came here at all, where no one ever came voluntarily before.”

Et Incarnatus Est.

You are here to kneel.

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