The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

How lucky we have been this past week to see the bare branches of our wintry trees and lawns transformed into a snowy wonderland.  A veritable army of snowmen grew up almost overnight.  And did you see that magnificent snow sphinx brooding over the lawns at Kenwood?  As parents and grandparents our role is mainly to encourage and facilitate, but we share the children’s delight, as they don boots and scarves and rush outside.  And of course it’s not only the snow that triggers that delight in the world about them – it may be anything from the splash you can make in a muddy puddle, or the shiny hardness of a special pebble to a fascination with birdsong or plants, postage stamps or steam engines that may grow into a lifelong hobby or even a professional vocation.  Young or old, as we look and learn, there is sometimes an exciting moment when we suddenly get it.  It may be anything from solving a difficult crossword clue, to understanding why the stars twinkle, why the tide goes in and out, how to recognise a googlie, or what is meant by the square root of minus one.  We sometimes refer to these moments of discovery, these flashes of insight, as little epiphanies. 
Our reading from the book of Proverbs this morning encapsulates just such a flash of insight or understanding about the nature of God’s activity in creation.  The Wisdom tradition, that special strand of religious insight to which the book of Proverbs belongs, perceives that the spirit of wisdom and understanding was present at God’s side even before the process of creation got under way.  At the very first, before the beginning of the earth, when he established the heavens, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, I [wisdom] was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race (Proverbs 8.23-31).  Whatever science may eventually be able to tell us about the extraordinary process of creation, we learn from this work of deep poetic and religious insight that God took delight in what his spirit of wisdom and understanding had so skilfully made with him and for him, even rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.  In the words of another great Biblical poet, the author of the book of Genesis, God saw what He had made and it was very good.
The word ‘epiphany’ has to do with showing forth, revealing things, so that we can see what they really mean.  We may have lots of little epiphanies, but it’s our experience as Christians that the biggest Epiphany of them all is the life of Jesus, from his birth in the stable to his death on the cross, because it’s this life which reveals to us, as nothing else could ever do, what God is really like.  The special insight – the dazzling Epiphany – which we owe to John’s prologue is the identification of Jesus with the spirit of wisdom and understanding that we encounter in parts of the Old Testament.
Our reading from Proverbs assures us that the spirit of wisdom does not delight only in the beautiful things that he (or more often she) has made.  It gets a whole lot better than that.  Much more wonderfully, the spirit of wisdom and understanding rejoices in the inhabited world and delights in the human race.  Yet we know that we are by no means always delightful.  We don’t look out for one another as we should.  On the contrary, we are all too often self-centred, thoughtless and uncaring, both as individuals and as societies.  I don’t need to labour the point.  The grosser violations are continually before us in the courts and the newspapers, and if most of us don’t behave quite like that, we are nevertheless pretty good at hurting one another.  We began this morning by reminding ourselves of the delight we experience as we follow the development of the children and young people that we know, and they are not always delightful either.  But because we love them, we don’t give up on them.  Whether consciously or unconsciously – instinctively – we look for ways to help them to put things right, both for their own sakes, and for our own delight in them.  Jesus said: if you who are evil know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him (Matt 7.11).   In sending Jesus to be our Saviour, God reacted in just that way.
John does not tell us about the birth of Jesus.  Instead he tells us why he had to be born.  God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3.16).  The only way to put things right was for God’s own Son, the unique expression of his own wisdom and understanding, to be born into the world of delights that he had made. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  Sharing our humanity, he would experience in his own crucified body how we have spoiled that world of delight.  Bearing in himself the consequences of the worst that we can do to one another, he shows how a life of selfless love, in obedience to God’s will, is able to overcome the power of evil and death. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1.5). As his love reaches out to us, uniting our spirits with his spirit through the sacramental offering of his body and blood, we are invited to share in his victory, which opens the way for us to realise ultimately that full potential as children of God that will be his delight as well as ours. 
Paul draws the threads together for us in the passage which we read from his letter to the Colossians.  Like John, Paul identifies Jesus with the spirit active in creation from the very beginning, not only in the structures of physical creation so beautifully sketched in the book of Proverbs, but also in the structures of human society – the thrones and dominions, rulers and powers that have been created through him and for him (Col 1.16).  By the power of his divinity and humanity Jesus facilitates the reconciliation of all things within the love of God – the longed for restoration of that delight which God has always had in the human race.  In Him all things hold together (Col 1.17) – or as we might say more colloquially: In Him everything makes sense.  By his death and resurrection, Jesus shows how the power of the love of God, which he expressed in every fibre of his being, is stronger than any imaginable combination of evil, even the evil of death itself.  The many different strands of theological reflection that we encounter in the Bible, not least in the Wisdom literature we have been exploring to-day, point us towards a God of love, a God who delights in the world that he has made, even in people like you and me, weak and flawed as we are.  But we don’t really have to get our heads around it.   The one thing we have to do – as John repeatedly insists in his gospel – is to look at the figure of Jesus, to respond to the love which he has for each one of us, and to put our trust in that love.  Sadly there are still people who can’t bring themselves to do that.  But, as John says, to all who do put their trust in him, he gives the power to become children of God.