The Church of the Incarnation

THE CHURCH OF THE INCARNATION A hundred years ago, in the early 20th century, it seemed inevitable that William Temple would one day become Archbishop of Canterbury. Everybody said so. He was generally thought to have the finest mind of his generation, and (though it’s no sort of qualification) he was … the son of a previous Archbishop. But to become Archbishop of Canterbury you have, first, to become a priest, and young William Temple found it uncommon hard to find a bishop who would ordain him. When he was 25, already an Oxford don, he applied to the Bishop of Oxford, who turned him down flat – on grounds that Temple had told him (a) that he didn’t believe in the Virgin Birth, and (b) that his belief in the bodily (that is, the physical) Resurrection of Jesus was shaky at best. Now you may well be thinking that the Bishop of Oxford was right. Aren’t those two rather essential doctrines of Christianity? Well, I’m not so sure. You can certainly make a case for saying that Mary did not have to be a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus (indeed, many of my confirmands have argued that case most vigorously, though I don’t personally subscribe to it). And as to the Resurrection, Temple certainly believed in the Resurrection. What he wasn’t so sure about was whether it had been a physical bodily resurrection or just a spiritual resurrection – the sort of thing you and I hope for after our deaths. At all events, William Temple (and we’ll come back to him later, because he did, indeed, become Archbishop of Canterbury) … young William Temple believed these were arguable matters for Christians – interesting and highly debatable, but paling into insignificance beside the supreme doctrine of Christianity, which is the Incarnation. Temple’s belief in the Incarnation was absolute and passionate. He believed (as St. John puts it in the very first verses of his gospel) “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … … And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”. In carno – the Latin words for in the flesh. Hence incarnation. It’s why we are Christians; it’s why we are here this morning. It’s what is unique to Christianity – a God who takes the initiative to become human in order to redeem humanity. 1 Jesus’ life, his ministry, his death, and his resurrection, follow from that. C.S. Lewis expressed it simply and beautifully: “The Son of God became a man / to enable men to become the sons of God”. These two natures of Christ – God and man … they are not separate: the human is never without the divine, nor the divine without the human. Yet Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man – one in substance with the Father in regard to his divine nature, one in substance with us in regard to his human nature. And this is what enables us – as human beings – to encounter God in real, personal and tangible ways. We do so through Jesus Christ, who is God, but who took our nature and became human as well as God. That’s why we can approach so close to him. It’s also why the Incarnation is so essential to our faith. We can know many things about God through what you might call general revelation (through observing creation around us; through the ordering of history; through human conscience, perhaps), but without the Incarnation, talking about God is purely speculative, and knowing God personally is impossible. You cannot be a Christian – you haven’t been able to be a Christian for the past 2,000 years – unless you believe in the Incarnation. You can argue the ins and outs of the Jesus narrative (as young William Temple did), but if you cannot believe in the Incarnation, you cannot be a Christian. And yet, you may say to me … “Well, that’s funny, because no one seems to talk about the Incarnation very much, do they?” And you’d be right. They don’t. And I, too, wonder why. So Question One: What is it about Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church that makes (or should make) the Incarnation so important to us? Like most stories of this ilk, it begins with Thomas Cranmer, King Henry’s Archbishop, the architect and designer of the Church of England, and the author of the Book of Common Prayer. 2 * * * Cranmer was much more Protestant than his master the King. Yes, Henry had thrown off the Pope’s authority and all things Roman, but only because he had no other way of getting a divorce. In matters of religion he was instinctively conservative – a Catholic, but not a Roman Catholic. He knew that many of his subjects had Protestant sympathies, including a lot of scholars and university people, and even some powerful courtiers and bishops. But not Henry – the older he got, the more conservative he became in matters of religion. And yet, first and always, Henry was a politician – a very accomplished one. He’d ruled for a long time (going on 35 years), and to him religion was an element of politics, and politics was a matter of balance. He didn’t want either the religious conservatives (that’s the Catholic party) or the reformers (that’s the Protestant sympathizers) to become dominant. He played one against the other, and always with the object of keeping them in balance – whilst retaining his own personal supremacy, of course. Please don’t think this had anything to do with freedom of religion. It didn’t. Henry was prepared to allow talk – conversation, discussion – about some aspects of religion, but he wasn’t prepared to offer one inch of leeway on the most important issue of all, which was the nature of the Mass. It was treason – and it remained treason until the last day of Henry’s life – for anyone to write, or to say, or to be suspected even of thinking, that the elements of bread and wine served at the Eucharist were anything other than the actual, physical flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. In other words, Henry required his subjects – by law – to believe in the doctrine of Transubstantiation. If anyone wrote or spoke otherwise, if they denied that the actual Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Host at Mass, they could be burned at the stake. And some were. This doctrine of transubstantiation had been formally adopted by the Catholic Church more than 300 years earlier, in 1215. And, to put it frankly, it was what made the church such a dark place. 3 In most countries of Europe, including England, it was compulsory to go to Mass on Sunday. So people did. But there was no law that made them take part, and in most places, they didn’t really have to. It had become the custom that the only person who actually received communion was the priest himself, and he generally didn’t even say the words of the Eucharistic Prayer out loud: he said them silently, to himself. The congregation – many of whom found the idea of eating Christ’s actual flesh not just distasteful, but extremely frightening … … the congregation stood at the back of the church, as far away from the altar as possible, dutifully in attendance but not participating. This was a sacrificial mass, a Eucharist in which the focus was almost entirely on Christ’s death and his atonement thereby for our sins. It hadn’t always been so. In the Early Church, the focus had been on the Resurrection. For all its suffering and frequent persecution, it was a joyful church: it had Good News – the Resurrection, redemption, life everlasting. But somewhere around the 10th or 11th century, that had changed. Jesus’ suffering and dying had become the focus, the Resurrection was neglected. In fact, the Easter Vigil, which had been the most important ritual of the entire liturgical year, was dropped altogether. The focus of the Eucharist became that transformation of the bread and wine into the Real (physical) Presence of the crucified Christ. Transubstantiation. A very frightening concept, the more so in a world where sorcery and superstition were rampant. And this is what Cranmer saved us from. The core of the Eucharistic liturgy he adapted for his new prayer book came from the Sarum Rite, a form of the Mass first written, I think, at Lyon in France, but already, in the 15th and 16th centuries, widely used in the south of England. The Sarum Rite was not a sacrificial mass. On the contrary, it was rooted in those first fourteen verses of John’s gospel – “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”. And it’s that passage that underlies Cranmer’s Eucharistic Prayer of 1549, when the celebrant asks God the Father “with thy Holy Spirit and Word vouchsafe to bless and sanctify these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine, that they may be unto us the body and blood of thy most dearly beloved Son 4 Jesus Christ”. So Cranmer still believed in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, but it is “real” as in spiritual presence, not physical presence. The Spirit and Word transform the Bread and Wine into a remembrance – a memorial – of what Christ did for us. And Cranmer confirmed that meaning very directly in 1552, in the revision of his Prayer Book, when he had the priest say to each individual communicant: “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart, by faith, with thanksgiving”.

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