Word of God: Scripture fulfilled

Nehemiah 8.2-4a, 5-6, 8-10 ‘They read from the book of the Law, and gave the meaning.’

1 Corinthians 12.12-14,27 ‘You are the body of Christ and individually members of it.’

Luke 1.1-4; 4.14-21 ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled’

 

‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

 

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Scripture is fulfilled; fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

 

Scripture, in the words of the letter to the Hebrews, is ‘living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword’. (Hebrews 4.12)

 

The fundamental conviction of the Church is that the Bible, our Holy Scripture, the Word of God, is central to the Christian life and to Christian worship: it is alive and active; feeding us, challenging us, inspiring us, guiding us on the way of holiness.

 

The Bible is the guarantee and witness that the living God binds your life and my life into the unfolding story of creation and covenant and redemption.

 

And Jesus says, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.

 

This tells us something really important about the logic of Biblical Christianity worth considering today.

 

In the synagogue in Nazareth, we are given a key, the key to unlocking the scriptures.

 

The key is Jesus Christ, the Anointed One of God, the one who declares, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ (Luke 4.21)

 

He is the key and the fulfilment of scripture, he is the Living Word.

 

The Church reads scripture always in the light of the Crucified and Risen Lord.

 

We see that at Easter, when a great series of reading from the Old Testament is read: promises and pledges, good in themselves, yet waiting to be fulfilled for all humanity in Christ.

 

We see it in the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles, St Luke’s second volume (Acts 8.26-40).

 

This is when an important official of the Queen of Ethiopia is on a journey reading a passage where Isaiah is talking about a servant who will suffer for the life of others (Acts 8.32-33).

 

The Ethiopian asks the Apostle St Philip, ‘who is the prophet talking about? Is it about him or about someone else?’ (Acts 8.34).

 

In response, ‘Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told [the Ethiopian man] the good news about Jesus’. (Acts 8.35 quoting Isaiah 53.7,8)

 

Philip has used the key!

 

Scripture opens up in relation to who Jesus Christ is.

 

Sadly, the Bible is seen by many today as either irrelevant to life, a remote document of the past or perhaps as a text to be dissected and analysed.

 

That is fine as far as it goes - great for a literature student and it can give some insights - but it does not treat the Bible as the fulfilled Holy Scripture that it is, a living and active, converting, inspiring word, burning with God’s love and presence and holiness.

 

Analysing the Bible as literature is just dull, and doesn’t do justice to the power of scripture.

 

Can you imagine if Jesus stood up in the synagogue that Sabbath day and read that stunning piece of Isaiah and declared:

 

Today you have heard a text that is from Trito-Isaiah, which is chapters 56-66 of so-called Isaiah, composed after the exile in Babylon, not to be confused with Proto-Isaiah (chapters 1–39) written in the 8^th century BC; or Deutero-Isaiah, which is chapters 40–55, and is the work of an anonymous 6th-century BC author writing during the Exile. It deals with the power dynamics of what politics should look like when exiles return home.

 

Now that may be academically accurate: but it’s word not made flesh.

 

It attempts to rob the text of its power: no action of the anointing Spirit, no good news to the poor, no liberty for captives or oppressed people, no recovery of sight for the blind, no jubilee.

 

That takes us back to the key.

 

For Jesus picks up the scroll, unrolls it, reads the text, sits down and declares, ‘today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.

 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon him,

    because God has anointed him

    to proclaim good news to the poor.

God has sent Jesus to proclaim liberty to the captives

    and recovering of sight to the blind,

    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour, the jubilee.

 

What we seek and find in the scriptures is a living encounter with Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, that is a way that avoids fundamentalism and liberal scepticism.

 

We know the dangers of fundamentalism when it comes to the Bible and we should also know the perils of how the Bible is treated by many even in churches today.

 

The trouble is that both the fundamentalist and the liberal takes the Bible literally but not seriously: it suits both to do that; one so as to overclaim what the text says and the other so as to underplay it.

 

The absence of dinosaurs in the Bible makes the fundamentalist say that dinosaurs are made up: that’s taking scripture literally but not seriously.

 

The absence of dinosaurs in the Bible makes the liberal say that the Bible is limited and not applicable today: that’s taking scripture literally but not seriously.

 

The Bible is sacred word not scientific text book; it is of human authorship but divinely inspired.

 

The tradition of the Church is to take the Bible totally seriously, but not literally, in every aspect of what we read; it feeds and inspires the living faith of the Christian.

 

Read the Bible, mark it, learn it, inwardly digest it!

 

We do this in personal reading of the Bible: at the very least check out the readings for the coming Sunday each week, or get Bible reading notes.

 

We do this too as we come together to worship and hear ‘the word of the Lord’ because we come to meet Jesus.

 

Our text today was from the beginning of St Luke’s Gospel, and at the end his gospel the power of the Bible proclaimed in the Eucharist is affirmed

 

Two disciples walk along the road to Emmaus, they are joined by the Crucified and Risen Jesus, yet they fail to recognise him.

 

They start talking about Jesus, to Jesus, and, as they walk along, we read that, ‘beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself’. (Luke 24.27)

 

At journey’s end they break bread together and they recognise Jesus.

 

As he went from their sight they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’ (Luke 24.32).

 

May our hearts be set on fire through the scriptures, may our ears tingle with eagerness to hear them, may we be set free by the one they proclaim and may we say with the psalmist:

 

How sweet are your words to my taste,

sweeter than honey to my mouth!

(Psalm 119.103)

Nicaea 1700th Guest Post - Would it Matter if Jesus was not fully God and fully Human?

This is a guest post from Fr David Adamson-Hill, priest with responsibility for St George's, Waddon in the Parish of Croydon. It is written to mark the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 2025.

Would it Matter if Jesus was not fully God and fully Human?

 

Docetism is an easy heresy to fall in to; the belief that somehow Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, was in some way less human than we are; as if God was disguised in the body of a man. The truth of the incarnation is that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, and the Christian 'faith is grounded in the divine human relation'[1] which only becomes possible because of the absolute and irreducible humanity of Jesus. Ignatius of Antioch, the second century bishop and martyr, neatly sums up the problem:

 

'Every denial of the reality of the humanity of Jesus means a denial of the reality of our redemption, for if Jesus only seemed to have a body, then he only seemed to redeem us...The whole of Christianity then evaporates into a mere semblance of reality.'[2]

 

            A modern day problem for Christians in trying to grasp the full humanity of Jesus is the temptation to try and escape the finitude of our human condition. In a broad sense this can mean escaping the terminality of death, though most people realise this is impossible and undesirable. More subtly and more realistically, it means the desire to escape the normality of life – the everyday situations and context that bind us to the world. Like all human beings, Jesus had his time and he participated in our history under specific conditions. This specificness, which is key to human identity, places Jesus in a context that is very human. Being “bound” by anything less than the same conditions which “bind” us would take away from this humanity.

 

            Why does this finitude matter? It matters because 'through the incarnation, the Son of God experiences at first hand what it is to be human – with all our limits'[3] By Christ living within human limits, we, as humans, begin to be liberated 'from our inclination to regard our limitedness as an affliction.'[4] In fact, what it is to be human is turned on its head. No longer should we try and fit the knowledge of Jesus into our human experiences, but rather how we think about what it means for us to be human is changed by our sharing in the life and time of Jesus. I’m a big fan of the Scottish Dominican theologian, who says 'we human beings have to learn to understand ourselves as being allowed to partake in [Jesus’s] humanity.'[5]

 

            This recognition that humanity in general is able to partake in the specific humanity of Christ in fact opens up a new way of being human – in God's self revelation of Christ, God has made possible the 'humanization of humanity.'[6] This full humanization is seen in the way Christ responds in complete faithfulness to the Father's call. Arguably, it is Christ's faithfulness in the face of pain, fear, and death that best express this freedom found in faithfulness. In order to understand the freedom and faithfulness of Christ, we must recall that 'God is most emphatically not an escape from human ills enabling us to evade the horrors and suffering of human life.'[7]

 

Christ's faithfulness only means anything to us as humans because Christ had the human freedom to choose whether or not to to run away from his impending death, and Jesus of Nazareth had no foreknowledge to help make that decision. Without this human power of choice and self-determination in the face of uncertainty, our salvation would be completely undermined. In this faithfulness, there is no escape or easy way out, but there is victory.

 

            If Christ's humanity is reduced by a forcing of divine foreknowledge into his self-awareness, then there is a real risk of reducing the saving power of Calvary. 'The human consciousness of Jesus did not pre-exist in heaven. To claim that would be to threaten the genuineness of his humanity.'[8] This is the key point; that without genuine human fear in the face of death, without a knowledge of Resurrection, how are human people able to relate to the human Christ? The Resurrection itself would lose meaning as well; it would no longer be the result of an act of complete faith, the 'act of surrender to participation in the divine life according to our human nature.'[9] To enter fully into death means to understand and experience death as terminal. The difference with Christ is that 'At the very point where the history of any other human being would stop unconditionally, he has a further history.'[10]

 

            In the face of the total humanity required for our salvation through Christ, how then can Christ's full divinity, the relation to the eternal logos be explained? A lot of confusion comes from a lack of appreciation of what the term 'person' really means, when the word is used in a theological sense. To say that Christ is fully human, and to say that Christ was a human person, is to say two different things; there is a difference between nature and person, with person being a subset of nature. 'Nature is what makes one human or not. Christ has a completely human nature. Therefore Christ is completely human.'[11] Christ is completely human without being a human person, in fact person hood (what we have) is not the fulfilment of human nature – fulfilment is what Christ is, the incarnation of the divine logos.

 

            This fulfilment takes the shape of a new way of being human, which is to say a new way of being faithful to God. Before this new way of being, God's call was the same, but humanity never fully responded to the call, to the fulfilment of humanity’s own vocation. To introduce you to another Dominican theologian, Edward Schillebeekcx, who writes that in Christ we find 'a man in whom was concentrated the entirety of man's vocation to faithfulness.'[12] This faithfulness is being attuned to the self-communication of the divine, even to participate in this communication. Human persons are called to continue this participation as children of God.

 

            Human persons now have the possibility, and the example, of living in this ongoing self-communication of God, living with the freedom to accept it or otherwise. In Christ 'humanity becomes “fully human” - able to share in the divine life, the “theological act of encounter with God'[13] through Christ's full humanity. The existence of Christ's humanity 'is what establishes and thus reveals human nature in all its possibilities.'[14] This true human nature is something that, left to our own devices, humanity cannot achieve – but humanity is not alone, it is given grace – the possibility of participation in the divine, through the ability to speak of divine life 'incarnate in the personal freedom and will of Christ'[15]

            Kerr writes that 'The life of the man Jesus was a limited life in a restricted time. Yet that life, with all its limitations, was the life of the eternal Son and Word of God.'[16] To have the same 'personal freedom' as Christ, which is key to sharing in the Divine life, means realizing that it is good to have life limited by time; there is freedom in accepting that the way of transcending humanity as it appears to human persons is to accept an un-transcended, completely normal, version of humanity.

 

            'Because of his boundless love, Jesus became what we are that he might make us to be what he is' so goes the famous saying of St. Irenaeus.[17] In this is summed up what it means to become 'fully human' – it is the vocation to intimacy with God through Christ. This is the revelation of the ultimate destiny of all humankind, shown once and for all in an individual, and accessible to all through that same individual. The openness that is required for this is what is given to us in the human life of Jesus Christ. Without this human life, there could be no intimacy with God; human persons could not have seen what it really means to be a human being, and the human destiny and calling to community with God could not have been fulfilled.

 

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[1]Jennifer Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God: The Theological Anthropology of Edward Schillebeeckx (T&T Clark: London, 2009), p. 143

[2]Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (Continuum: London, 2012) pp. 178-9

[3]Gerald O'Collins, SJ, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995), p. 236

[4]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 23

[5]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 26

[6]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 127

[7]Harry Williams, The True Wilderness (Continuum: London, 1965), p. 46

[8]O'Collins, Christology, p. 254

[9]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 150

[10]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 31

[11]O'Collins, Christology, p. 25t6

[12]Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Sheed & Ward: London, 1963), p. 13

[13]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 150

[14]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 26

[15]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 160

[16]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 35

[17]Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. V, Preface (Ex Fontibus Co: Dublin, 2010), p. 554

Baptism and Being Transformed

The Baptism of the Lord 2025

Isaiah 40.1-5,9-11 ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’

Titus 2.11-14; 3.4-7 ‘He saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit’

Luke 3.15-16,21-22 ‘When Jesus had been baptised and was praying, the heavens were opened.’

 

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people.

Titus 2.11

 

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The Advent proclamation of John the Baptist, so familiar to many from Handel’s Messiah is ‘comfort ye, comfort ye, my people’ and it is soon followed by verses also in our first reading (and also that appear in Messiah).

 

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

 

Today, on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, in our gospel reading, the glory of God is revealed: ‘the heavens were opened’ (Luke 3.21b); it’s visible to everyone - ‘the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove’ (Luke 3.22a); and the mouth of the LORD speaks - ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3.22b).

 

The Baptism of the Lord is what is known as a theophany, literally meaning a ‘God-showing’.

 

Last Sunday, this Sunday and next Sunday we celebrate three theophanies, showings of God, when the Magi come to the manger, his baptism and his first sign, the miraculous transformation of water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana.

 

All three events reveal God and demand human transformation.

 

Transformed by the divine encounter, the Magi eschew the well-trodden route and take a new road home; the crowds at the baptism glimpse the heavens opened and hear the voice of God; the guests see transformation in abundance at the wedding feast with Christ the Bridegroom.

 

It’s this call to transformation that is picked up in the letter of St Paul to Titus.

 

Titus, a companion of Paul on many journeys had oversight of the church on the island of Crete as their Bishop.

 

The letter to Titus is perhaps not the best known of his epistles, but it contains important guidance and encouragement to its first hearers.

 

And the letter to Titus has contemporary resonance too.

 

And it is a message of transformation that he is giving: Christians aren’t to wallow in the ways we see all around us, but the ways we see in Christ, with our sights fixed on him.

 

After he comes to baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire!

 

Paul urges Titus to remind the Cretan believers that while they live in a sinful culture and have a sinful past, they can be transformed into a new humanity by the same grace that Jesus demonstrated when he died to redeem them.

 

As a new humanity, they are called to live lives consistent with God's generous love.

 

So are we.

 

That’s what the first part of our second reading was describing.

 

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age. (Titus 2.11,12)

 

It is their baptism, and ours, that makes this transformation possible.

 

Baptism is the guarantee that Jesus Christ, who comes to baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire, calls us to a life that mirrors the kingdom of God and reflects the love of God and not the corruption of human society, by drawing us into his Body, the Church, which is a sign and foretaste of the Kingdom.

 

But do we live like that?

 

Elsewhere in writing to Titus, Paul pulls no punches about the way we can go off the rails, as he knows he and Titus, a former pagan, once did:

 

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. (Titus 3.3)

 

It’s not a pretty account!

 

‘But’, he goes on:

 

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. (Titus 3.4-7)

 

In the Creed that we proclaim Sunday by Sunday, we declare that ‘We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.’

 

What we’re saying is that being baptised, being a Christian, flows from the Baptism of the Lord.

 

It’s not down to us, there’s nothing we do to deserve redemption, it is sheer grace, pure mercy, and when we accept it, it is a new birth – regeneration – that makes us a new creation in Christ:

 

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5.17)

 

There’s transformation for you!

 

Baptism brings us into Christ’s life such that we have been transformed, we are in the process of being transformed now, by his mercy, and we will be transformed when the waiting is over and ‘our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (Titus 2.14) is fulfilled.

 

Thanks be to God, for ‘The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people’.

 

The manifest Saviour: an Epiphany Homily

The Epiphany of the Lord, 2025

 

Isaiah 60.1-6 ‘The glory of the Lord has risen upon you’

Ephesians 3.2-3a, 5-6 ‘It has now been revealed that the Gentiles are fellow heirs of the promise’

Matthew 2.1-12 ‘We have come from the east to worship the king’

 

 

‘For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship’

Matthew 2.2

 

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Today, the feast of the Epiphany, also has the title in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 – the definitive Anglican prayer book – of ‘The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles’.

 

Neither the word ‘epiphany’ or ‘manifestation’ is in the gospels, but we use both words to describe the showing of the new-born Christ to the Gentiles, that is people outside the Israelite nation, the nations of the world, who are represented by the Magi.

 

Epiphany literally means ‘to show’ or ‘show outwards’; and manifest literally means, ‘grabbed by the hand’, a vigorous way of saying something is being pointed out.

 

The feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, the Manifestation of Christ to the Nations, is all about human attention being caught by something beyond itself.

 

It’s a visual feast: light comes and shines. (Isaiah 60.1)

 

Light – in the form of a star - that draws and attracts, that grabs our attention and leads us to the mystery.

 

In the case of the Magi, their attention is grabbed by the shining star that appeared in the sky; and you cannot get much more beyond oneself than something appearing in the sky: the star signifies the call of God, maker of ‘the stars of night’, saying here is the Saviour.

 

But the use and meaning of the word manifest is changing, as words do, and changing in a somewhat disturbing way.

 

‘Manifest’ was actually the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year for 2024

 

And the new way it’s being used is practically the opposite to how we’re using it today, on the feast of the Epiphany.

 

The way it is being used is not about something outside oneself appearing, being revealed or shown, but is about picturing something in your mind to imagine what you want to achieve, in the belief that it is more likely to happen.

 

This use appeared last summer at the Olympics and Paralympics a number of gold medal winners attributed their achievement to ‘manifesting’: I visualised it and so I made it happen.

 

So ‘manifest’ in its new use means I picture a goal or target inwardly, in the hope and belief of making it real and I use specific practices to focus my mind on something I want, to try to make it become a reality.

 

You might say it sounds a bit like prayer; but that is to misread both ‘manifesting’ and prayer.

 

Prayer directs our inner life beyond self to God; whereas ‘manifesting’ is to become self-absorbed in the belief that picturing what you want to happen will happen, if you want it enough.

 

Sadly, it is a beguiling lie and falsehood to say that if you want something enough you can have it.

 

It is spiritually corrosive; the antidote is prayer to God.

 

Prayer is the soul’s whisper ‘be it unto me according to thy word’; ‘manifesting’ is ‘be it unto me according to what I want’.

 

To ‘manifest’ is a new version of an old illusion, that of chasing after idols of our own making; it is an idol is created within.

 

What we have are two alternative routes to navigate where we find truth and reality and where we locate ourselves in a big universe: my way or God’s way.

 

Without belief in God, we inevitably go inside to find meaning and hope: the individual becomes the beginning, the middle and end of the story.

 

Without God we try to generate life and hope and peace by ourselves.

 

Do that and we become rapidly exhausted.

 

After all, if you generate all the meaning in your own life but feel empty and hopeless, ambitions not realised, when you want something so much but don’t get it, the only person you can blame is yourself.

 

There are the roots of the spiritual and mental health crisis in the West.

 

What a relief and blessing is faith in that which lies beyond us, in God, whose good news revealed to the Magi is that there is a Saviour, not of our imagining or discovery, for all nations and peoples.

 

God is made manifest - in the original sense - revealing, showing, grabbing our attention to draw us out of the mire of self-delusion into the glorious liberty of being utterly dependent on Him.

 

The journey of the Magi, which reveals this truth, is an ancient quest with huge contemporary resonance.

 

In a world of seeking, that lapses into ‘manifesting’, what the Magi show us is that beyond ourselves lies true hope and the true satisfaction of human desire in the babe of Bethlehem, Jesus Christ.

 

The journey is Jesus Christ - the Way, the Truth and the Life - the destination is Jesus Christ: the star signifies the call of Christ by which we can orient and root our lives.

 

This calls us away from idols of our making, or, should I say of our own ‘manifesting’ and takes us to the heart of reality in the Creator of all things.

 

Ultimately it moves us to worship and adoration.

 

The tyrant Herod was a ‘manifester’ taken to its worst, destructive and ultimate conclusion: his request that ‘I too may come and worship him’ was really to take a chance to destroy a rival to his worship of himself, where he is his own god.

 

Herod wanted a world on his own terms, God on his own terms, based around his own gratification.

 

The Epiphany of the Lord, this Manifestation, reverses our inclination to self-worship and directs us out of self-interest to worship of God.

 

In this New Year, in this Eucharist, may we fix our sights on Christ, the Morning Star, and fall down before him in worship and adoration offering our gifts and talents back to the One who gave them to us in the first place.

 

‘For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship’