How we see and pray to God as Christians is inseparable from seeing Christ as God and Man and this affects both our prayer and the way we see and care for other people and our environment. The poet R.S. Thomas wrote in his poem to God called ‘Emerging’ that prayer ‘is the annihilation of difference, the consciousness of myself in you, and you in me’. Such a statement about God and humanity losing their difference builds from what theologians call ‘Christology’, seeking right understanding of Christ, which is a subject of today’s eucharistic readings. From the coming of Christ, his authoritative life, teaching, death and resurrection we get a new look at God impacting our prayer and worship.
How do you yourself pray to God? Do you see God beyond you or within you? I’ve recently come through a practice of centering prayer to focus on God within me, enfolding and irradiating me with love. The Holy Spirit led me through the Jesus Prayer and Praying in Tongues to contemplate the Father’s love in a restful way that energises my love for God and people. I now see God both beyond me and within me true to Christ’s promise in John 14v23 ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’.
How we see God as Christians is inseparable from how we see Christ as God and Man and this affects both our prayer and the way we see and care for other people and our environment. The poet R.S. Thomas wrote in his poem to God called ‘Emerging’ that prayer ‘is the annihilation of difference, the consciousness of myself in you, and you in me’. Such a statement about God and humanity losing their difference builds from what theologians call ‘Christology’, seeking right understanding of Christ, which is a subject of today’s readings. The Deuteronomy 18 passage predicting God will raise up a unique prophet in succession to Moses was chosen to point to the fulfilment of that prediction in the Gospel reading where Jesus appears in Capernaum giving ‘a new teaching – with authority!’ (Mark 1:27). In the Old Testament they write ‘Thus says the Lord’. Our Lord says ‘You have heard… but I say to you’. From the coming of Christ, his authoritative life, teaching, death and resurrection we get a new look at God impacting our prayer and worship.
The hermit monk Thomas Merton who died in 1968 wrote: ‘As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the ray of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man’. Thomas Merton’s image of Christ as a magnifying glass bringing God to a point sums up this article of the Creed for which some of us bow: ‘We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God who… for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man’.
I believe in a God who is above and beyond us but who has entered history in the person of Jesus. He is real to me because in Jesus Christ he has come down to my level to set fire to my spirit. The Bible says ‘God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life’ (John 3v16).
How could God have a Son? Is this no more than creating God in our own image? The objection raises the issue of our language about God. Christians believe that this way of speaking has actually been given by God as part of a divine revelation which shows God to be a triune God who is love within himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet how else could God be love before the creation of the world, without an object of love, unless he was love within himself? Love that is our refuge and object of prayer as in the text from St John I read earlier: ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’.
We know that love needs a body to express itself. To the eye of faith God reveals his love through reaching out to us in Jesus, his human face. To speak of God’s Son goes beyond reason because ultimately divine love goes beyond reason! God has no self-interest and is concerned to root out our own through offering us his one and only Son.
How you see Jesus – Christology in the technical phrase – is central to Christianity which is less being good to granny and kind to the cat than having faith in Jesus Christ as true God and true Man and living, praying and serving others from that reasoned yet heartfelt commitment.
The atheist Rousseau admitted: ‘It would have been a greater miracle to invent such a life as Christ’s than to be it’. H.G.Wells was ungrudging about Jesus: ‘An historian like myself, with no theological bias whatever, cannot portray the progress of humanity honestly without giving Jesus of Nazareth foremost place’. Lecky the historian of rationalism wrote: ‘Christ has exerted so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften humankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists’.
Such people admired Jesus even as they shrank back from affirming his divinity. Yet the great 17th Century philosopher Blaise Pascal could write: ‘Jesus is a God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair’. The novelist Dostoyevsky said: ‘There has never been anyone lovelier, deeper or more sympathetic than Jesus’. Before him St. Augustine was clear: ‘Christ is not valued at all unless he is valued above all’.
If Jesus is divine, humanity is dignified and raised to God. ‘By his divine power’, St Peter writes, ‘God has lavished on us all the things we need for life and for true devotion … that … we should share the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1v3-4).
To believe as a Christian is to welcome joyfully the love, truth and empowerment revealed to us in Jesus Christ with the faith of the church through the ages.
The most sceptical atheist will not deny Jesus Christ a place in history. For Christians he is more than that. He makes God real. History is his story! In recognising the uniqueness of Christ first signalled in today’s Gospel we have to say to those who think Christianity is made up ‘Sorry – it would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus!’
How do you see and pray to God? Try using Christ as your magnifying glass, ‘concentrating the ray of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to your spirit’. God is beyond us yet seeks to be within us, warming and enlarging our hearts, enfolding and irradiating them with love. As we read elsewhere in Deuteronomy, Chapter 33v27 in the King James translation: ‘The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms’. I end with the invitation to fully Christian prayer given by the 14th century German theologian Meister Eckhart: ‘You need not seek God here or there, he is no further than the door of your heart: there he stands patiently awaiting who ever is ready to open up. He longs for you a thousand times more than you long for him’.
In this eucharist Jesus Christ true God and true Man is awaiting you just like that, and is to come right into your heart, through his body and blood. Let us prepare to be centred afresh upon him in a new igniting of spiritual fire within us, so we can love him more and make him loved in our circle, our parish and our world. May the divine love which brings God’s warmth to us in the eucharist bring its warmth through our prayer and action to the cold hearted in the world, especially those who are living in darkness and in the shadow of death upon so many battlefields. ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ (John 14:23)
