Prov 8.1, 22-31; Col 1.15-20; John 1.1-14 (2nd Sunday before Lent)
“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8
Facebook. What's it all about? In the five years since it started on 4th February 2004 it has become a social phenomenon. There are over 175 million people signed up in this worldwide network of friends. They upload 850 million photos each month.
There are 20 million active user groups, including St Paul’s Knightsbridge, Stale Expressions of Church and the Richard Coles Admiration Group.
And what’s it all about? Well at it’s most basic level it is about communication on the worldwide web. But more than that, it’s about presenting an image of yourself to family, friends and anyone else who is allowed to see your facebook.
And of course it is highly selective in what you choose to display. I wouldn’t try to give a false impression to people who look at my facebook. It’s just that I don’t happen to have any photos of myself that weren’t taken at least 10 years ago.
And when my hard-working colleagues read in my status that ‘Nick is on a course’, it is only for the sake of brevity that I haven’t written, slightly more accurately, ‘Nick is on a golf course!’
However, you still pick up a fairly good impression of what someone’s like from their facebook.
You could just write a letter. The Valentine’s card I received yesterday spoke volumes: “Every time I see you dearie, I can believe in Darwin’s theory.” It’s a succinct and topical way of saying they admire my animal magnetism.
But if I want some one to know what really makes me tick, I need to spend time with them face to face. Self-communication is better done person to person.
Even then, there are limits as to how completely I am able to communicate myself to another person, partly because I don’t fully know my own self.
The Christian faith is in essence the self-communication of God to us human beings, and it has been a progressive revelation over several thousand years.
The Bible tells us that God’s first self-communication was in creation itself. In today’s Gospel, John deliberately starts with a reference back to Genesis, ‘In the beginning was the Word’.
The passage from Proverbs refers to this Word as ‘Wisdom’ who says: "I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race (8.30f)”
St Irenaeus was to express this in his famous phrase: The glory of God is Man fully alive: Gloria Dei vivens homo.
St Paul puts it this way in the opening of his letter to the Romans:
Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.We celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday this weekend. So let him have the last word on this:
This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather the impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe including man as a result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man and I deserve to be called a theist.But in the wisdom of God, simply becoming a theist by considering the universe was not all that God wished to say about himself.
So, thousands of years later in human development, there was a fuller, deeper self-communication: the Word, the Divine Wisdom, became flesh, and dwelt among us.
This was the greater self-communication of God in Christ, a human being like us who lived and taught among our ancestors.
And in a world that was full of pain and suffering, which was, as Darwin observed, red in tooth and claw, God not only became one of us, but suffered with us and for us.
There is of course no answer to the question of why God created so much pain and death in his universe. It’s an essential part of the process of evolution and was a problem that stopped Darwin and many others from fully embracing the God of love whom we see in Jesus Christ.
But although the life and cruel death and resurrection of Jesus doesn’t give us an answer to our questions about the cosmos as it is, it does signify to us the depth of God’s concern and identification with our struggles, and his great desire to reach out to us in love.
There is a third and crucial stage in the progressive revelation of God and this is not determined by the unfolding of history, or the development of human culture and self-understanding.
It is determined by our own personal response to the love of God.
Facebook aficionados will know that you receive messages from people who wish to ‘be your friends’ and who are then able to see your facebook.
But before they can do this you have to accept their request, and if you don’t want to, you simply press ‘Ignore’. They are not told that you have ignored them, and the hope is that they will eventually forget they asked to be your friend and go away. But some are persistent.
God not only reveals his wisdom and glory in creation; he not only reveals his love and compassion in Jesus Christ; he persistently, persistently requests our friendship.
In Kant’s words: “God is not an it to be discussed, but a Thou to be met.”
Or in the words of the Psalmist and of our text this morning: “O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.”
Men and women, down through the centuries have experienced, have tasted the love of God. By the mystery of the Holy Spirit we believe we are able to apprehend God, to know him.
This is what John marvelled at when he wrote in this morning’s Gospel:
But to all who received him… he gave power to be become the children of God… and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.This was what Irenaeus had in mind when he wrote: the glory of God is Man full alive.
This is what Jesus meant when he said: “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness.”
At this Table we see all the progressive revelation of God, all his self-disclosure met in the meal of his love.
We bring the gifts of creation: bread and wine, music and liturgy, the best that our culture can offer; and we offer the one perfect and complete sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the suffering servant; and we bring our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice. We take God into ourselves. There can be no fuller self-communication this side of death.
As we draw near with faith, the invitation to friendship with God is given again this morning:
“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8
