And the Word was made Flesh
Christmas Day: 25 December, 1999
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden, St Peter's Eastern Hill
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.
The majestic vision of a great sweep of history, moving to a climax in Jesus, worded in the
remarkably few and very simple words used by St John in the prologue to his gospel, which is this
morning's gospel, has a number of characteristics a great work of art. It can uplift us with its
sense of vision. But its very beauty, the measured tread of its poetical rhythm, can also have
other effects. The danger is that we can hear these remarkable words, acknowledge what is
presumably a great truth, without being impelled to come to grips in any concrete way with what
excites the writer.
Surely Christmas should be a time for some degree of confidence or at least hope in response to
what we celebrate. Aren't cautionary even gloomy warnings out of place? I'm not sure. I want to
make my point by giving a little historical background, not at first to St John's gospel, but to
something else that is linked with Christmas in the minds of many people, before I return to St
John.
Many of us would have seen the ceremony of carols and lessons from Kings College Cambridge on ABC
television. One early Sunday morning in Advent, along with many other listeners, I was reminded
that this was 'must view' material by an excited voice on For the God who Sings'. I was told that
it looked absolutely gorgeous; and of course I had seen the trailers on television while waiting
for a very different view of life presented in 'The Bill'. Now I have to confess to a little heresy
here. It is this. Even though I know it is must view material and gorgeous, I feel a little
uncomfortable about lessons and carols from Kings. You see, I actually don't watch it any more. I
am not wanting to impugn those who find it a source of inspiration, those who may even find that it
redirects them to a faith that they thought they had lost. I would like to think that it can still
do those kind of things. But I remain uncomfortable with it, for two reasons. One is that it has
really turned into an exploitation of things that are peripheral to what economic rationalists
would call our 'core business': it is promoted to draw in the the viewer as an entertainment form,
albeit a refined one; it is advertised in a way that stresses nostalgia of various kinds. It is a
very sophisticated kind of Christmas card, in terribly, terribly good taste. But I have to leave
it, and I find it increasingly irritating, because I feel that the greater part of the heart of the
gospel, our core business, may be left out, lost in its tastefulness.
Its history reinforces this point in my naughty heretical mind. As we know it, this beautiful
ceremony is largely the creation of a distinguished dean of York, a priest named Eric Milner White,
who had an exquisite sense of English prose style, creating books of prayers that reflect how
steeped he was in English literary tradition of the most refined sort: the creator of a beautiful
world in words from which all that presented the shortcomings of ugliness, dirtiness, ordinariness,
was shut out. But here's the irony. He had also been a World War I army chaplain, and like many
others in the trenches, at the time, had his whole vision of life turned upside down. He was both
horrified and challenged, and at the same time, electrified by what he encountered. At the time, he
had an awareness, that many other service chaplains developed, that beneath the lack of formal
religious practice on the part of many of the troops, behind various unlikely exteriors, and the
predictable male behaviour in the face of extraordinary horror, there were people who grappled at
first hand with major ethical issues and the experience of the awe-inspiring and tremendous, who
simply found that the churches and institutionalised religion had little to say on fundamental
issues in which they were caught up. Milner White was one of many who observed more real
commitment, community and companionship, generosity, self sacrifice and love, in the formally
godless of the trenches, than in the dear old Church of England. Perhaps it was just all too
challenging. For after being demobilised, White showed little or no signs of what he had discovered
there on the battlefield. He doesn't seem to have come back from the treanches to find God in the
tightknit working communities of industrial Yorkshire; or to identify the community and love of
Yorkshire miners who were very similar to the men in the trenches. He returned to create a
beautiful but insulated world in the cathedral. Another contemporary of his said that as a result
of all that they had experienced, they had 'a queer little rent in the veil of common experience'.
Milner White seems to have patched the rent up as quickly as possible.
To return now to St John. St John certainly speaks of a God who is transcendant; the God of the
inspiring, the beautiful, the God of philosophical discourse and the highest possibilities of human
mind and imagination. But St John's prologue insists that it is not something different that we
encounter when we have what that other World War I survivor called 'the queer little rent in the
veil of common experience'. Christmas messages featuring allergy-free hay, sanitised and totally
disease free farm animals as well as the gorgeousness of lessons and carols from Kings, all
register the same thing - that we are not convinced that God would redeem, let alone have seen as
good, sheep that were flyblown, hay with insects and manure, and as for human beings - the less
said the better. In this context I have a particularly vivid memory of Howell Witt, that remarkable
Welsh bush bishop in North West Australia, in a small timber country church addressing this very
passage. As he strode up and down the tiny nave, he stopped to grasp the knotty arm of a farmer as
if he were applying a torniquet, declaiming as he did so "The word became flesh, man, flesh'. The
farmer looked as bemused or doubtful that this was really what God was about; as though he might
have preferred not only that the bishop let go his grip, and also that God should not have too much
to do with the world. That might have consequences.
There is certainly an extent to which institutional churches and individual Christians are still
trying to work out the implications of this revolutionary statement; and slowness to grasp the
message has been in the long run to our disadvantage. For example, their slowness to teach and act
as though treatment of the environment and natural resources was a major ethical issue has meant
that people taking this very (godly) issue seriously have generally gone outside the churches to
discuss it - they have found a forum there, rather like the companionship and self-sacrifice of the
trenches for Milner White and his friends. Something similar could be said of some of our
discussions of sexual issues, in which the churches have not responded as though matter and body
were potentially good, but rather as though the material and particularly the erotic were
inherently suspect. Sometimes some other religions seem to have a far more positive approach to
what most people consider to be some kind of love. From another direction, we can find anger,
frustration, a sense of worthlessness in many around us, and not just in those with serious
addictions. But we might find under the anger and frustration, a desire not just for material
comfort, but rather for dignity, care, companionship and values that are not strongly promoted by
the advocates of free-market economies. The values of many of the angry and depressed on our
streets are, I suspect, closer to ours, even though they express themselves in something far more
gritty than the refined prose of Milner White.
What might all of this suggest for us? We should aim at a church whose faith doesn't shut out much
of human experience, but seeks to grapple with it in the belief that God's light and life, the
light and life that according to St John's prologue lightens everyone, is somehow already present
and being shed on the widest possible, rather than the narrowest possible, range of human
endeavour. We don't need to act as though the light has been shut out of all but some approved
places and people. And while, please God, we don't have to deal with the extraordinary situation of
the trenches of World War I or anything of that order, we can still find that from time to time,
there is 'a queer little rent in the veil of common experience' - and whenever that happens, it is
the Word made flesh in our midst. Let us not just acknowledge that; and most of all, let us not
experience that 'queer little rent' only to patch it up as quickly as possible to make a tidy world
for God in which he appears on our terms alone. Let's enlarge the rent, so that there God bursts
through a very big tear, a magnificently untidy tear, too big ever to be stitched neatly again.
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