But the Jews were astonished at it, saying, “how does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?”
Questions like this one, when they appear in the Gospels, strike me as very interesting questions, because they probe into the more complex dimensions of the doctrine that, despite being at the heart of our faith, we very rarely think through; and that is the incarnation. Perhaps the problem is that the time of year when we think about the incarnation is, of course, Christmas when the focus is on the birth of a baby. That may move and inspire us as all babies do, but it does not immediately present us with very challenging questions about what precisely God is doing in this very special human life. It is as that baby gets older, as he teaches, forms of relationships, performs miracles, makes claims about himself and about the nature of the world, that the sheer extraordinariness of the whole idea of God incarnate becomes apparent and these kind of difficult questions really emerge:
How can the God who exists outside of time take on the vulnerabilities of the temporal body, as liable to illness and fatigue as our own?
How can the God who loves all things be contained within someone who loves particular people in particular ways and, even more than that, loves God the Father in a perfect way?
And then there is the question, posed in this passage from John’s Gospel, of how can the wisdom of God in all its fullness can dwell in the mind of a human being such that he can teach without being taught? How can those conjunctions of knowledge and insight be so precisely aligned in one human mind as to constitute the full apprehension of truth?
These are big question and, as I have said, ones that we in the church do not often pose. A strong argument could be made that, in fact, the church has difficulty enough dealing with our own humanity and the complicated realities of it to even begin to consider how God might grace that humanity with the fullness of God’s own life. So most of the time when we think about the incarnation, we settle for what I call the “hit and run” incarnation theology. God kind of drop down into our world, does what he needs to do and then goes back to where he belongs, as if on a bungee rope. And this goes hand-in-hand with what I also call “up/down theology”: God belongs “up there” where things are really holy and we’re all stuck down here where things are basically pretty bleak. In this view the incarnation was for God a kind of journey into a foreign land in the hope that one day we too might journey into the foreign land of heaven. That kind of language pervades our hymnody in particular. As one Christmas Carol puts it, “The Great God of heaven is come down to earth… to save us poor sinners He came from above”. Something like a “smash and grab” for souls.
But I think St John has a rather different view of the incarnation which is the lens through which we need to consider passages like this one about the wise teaching of Jesus. For John, Jesus is the Word of God, described rather like the wisdom of God in the old Testament as a presence in the world from its very creation. It seems to me that the famous opening passage of John’s Gospel is trying to state to Jewish and Greek readers alike that this Jesus Christ is not a stranger but the logos, the meaning of the world, present to us since the beginning of time. Before the verse where John states that “the word became flesh”, he already asserts “he was in the world, and the world came into being through him”. So it seems that John’s incarnation theology is not a hit-and-run incident, but something more like the emergence within the created world of the eternal Word that has been its heart and its meaning from the very beginning.
That has important implications both for how we understand this particular question that the Jews pose and for how we think more widely about what is natural and supernatural in God’s relationship with the world. The temptation is to interpret the story of Jesus’ preaching in the temple as a supernatural act: God, in the incarnation, made it miraculously possible for this human being to contain in his brain the kind of wisdom that could not be possible otherwise in this world. But what if we think about it another way? What if we say that the wisdom which Jesus shares in the temple is the wisdom at the very heart of created nature, revealed by Christ in his divinity, but accessible to all in their humanity? Notice that Jesus’ response to this question is one that turns the table on us: “anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own… the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him.” Jesus seems to be saying that there’s nothing magic in what these people are hearing, they just need to open their eyes and their hearts to what the world is all about and to where God is active within it.
To put what I’m saying in some context, the recent centuries that we sometimes call the modern era have created a very stark division between the natural and supernatural. The natural we have come to define as processes that are explicable without the need to resort to religious language or belief in God and the supernatural are those ever decreasing gaps where we want to put God’s magic actions and keep as the proofs of God’s existence. To give a very common example I find that people often see the healing activity of God in the times where sick people make a recovery that doctors had not predicted. And that may be so. But to talk of the healing activity of God through medical science and the care of others seems to many people to be something of a copout. Doctors cure people naturally. God cured people supernaturally.
And the church itself often buys into that distinction. In order to be canonised as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church there must be proof of a person’s miraculous healings. Mother Teresa, for example, cannot be made a saint simply because she founded an order that ministers to thousands of poor people around the world(!), it is necessary that there must be evidence that she healed people miraculously, so we can have proof of her supernatural endorsement. It’s not possible, it seems, for us to be content with an understanding of God working through processes we consider to be natural.
That, I think, is hugely problematic. It makes the church look very “other-worldly” and even superstitious and it greatly impoverishes our understanding of God’s activity in the world and our imagination in participating in that activity. We need a fundamental rethink about how we understand God to act and that has to begin with the incarnation. What if the incarnation was not a supernatural event, but the making manifest of what is most natural in our world? What if Jesus was not a superhuman person, but the most human person? If we just challenge this distinction that has emerged between the natural and the supernatural then God’s action in becoming incarnate was very far from hit-and-run incident; it was the revelation within the world of what the world was created for and what the world itself could be, a world which lives by God’s purposes for justice and reconciliation and mutual flourishing.
So where is God’s activity in the world today? Don’t be tempted to believe that it is only in the supernatural (though I’m not seeking to denigrate the inexplicable). But remember that in the life of Jesus Christ, God works through the transformation of the ordinary, the natural. And that is the on-going story of the Church, Christ’s new body on earth. It’s the story of the coming together of people in faith to offer their ordinary lives for God’s transformation whether they are doctors or barristers or cleaners or full-time mothers. As our lives become more attuned to God’s purposes to bring about goodness in the world, God acts through us, through the natural.
And because, as John also tells us, the Spirit of God moves where it will, God acts outside of the Church too, inspiring people to speak up for the poor and oppressed as has happened, for example, in Burma this weekend in the courageous demonstration by Buddhist monks against the military regime.
Harvest festival has a lot to do with all this too. “How naive”, the atheist scientist might say, “that Christians still feel the need to thank God for making the grain rise out of the ground! Haven’t we moved on from that sort of supernatural understanding of the world?” Yes, we respond. But if this is the world at whose heart is the wisdom of God, revealed most fully in the incarnation of Christ, then this is a world whose nature we must bring into line with God’s purposes. And given that thousands die each week of hunger and lack of the resources which we have in abundance, God has much to say to us about how he wishes to act in the distribution of the gifts of the natural world.
Wherever charity and love are found, God is there, making incarnate again his wisdom for the world, as we bring about the Kingdom of justice, peace and joy.