Where do Christian moral standards come from? We have the Ten Commandments and something that Jesus said was a more fundamental and all-embracing law: to love your neighbour as yourself. I don’t think anyone would quibble about the Ten Commandments. But the rest of the Jewish law books, the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, they are heavy going. There are hundreds of rules and regulations. But let’s be clear: for Jews, unlike Christian fundamentalists, they are a living text. The meaning is not fixed. The Torah is constantly being interpreted by Jewish scholars in the context of contemporary living.

A special church obsession at present is sexual orientation. The seventh commandment in the Deuteronomy version of the Ten Commandments (5:6-21) says we must not commit adultery, which presumably includes fornication; and sodomy is a form of fornication. For modern Jews, however, homosexual orientation seems to be a grey area. The famous London Rabbi, Lionel Blue, freely admits he is gay, and it doesn’t seem to dent his reputation as a wise and articulate ambassador for Judaism. Of course, as always in the Jewish community, there is rich diversity of opinion.

I wish we were focussed on more important things than this issue, but it has been made so central recently. So how do we Christians shape our moral judgments about sexual orientation? Is there a standard Christian set of rules? In spite of the fundamentalists, I think the answer is ‘no’. The Anglican Church authorities have agreed on a moratorium on gay weddings and said that the consecration of an openly gay bishop was insensitive and divisive, but there is no consensus regarding sexual orientation in itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury personally takes a liberal view, but hard-line fundamentalists insist that homosexuality is an abomination to the LORD and the Archbishop loyally supports the bishop’s majority opinion about gay weddings.

Jesus said something about judging other people that he says three times altogether. He said it to Peter after he had declared his belief that Jesus was the Son of God: “I will give you the keys of heaven: what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  (Mt. 16:19) Then, again in Matthew’s Gospel (18:19), he said the same thing to the disciples as a group. Finally, he said similar words to some disciples when he bestowed on them the Holy Spirit on the evening of his resurrection: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of anyone, they are retained.” (John 20:22-23)

This was revolutionary. No longer were people to be bound by a book of rules and have to offer expensive sin offerings from which the priests and moneychangers made a comfortable profit. People were to depend upon the Holy Spirit on a case-by-case basis. What a responsibility! No book of immutable rules but dependence, to some extent at least, on fallible human feelings and human reason.

I began by referring to the present obsession in church circles with sexual orientation. If you really feel the need to form a judgment about that, the guiding example should come from Jesus. Jesus never referred to homosexuals and, maybe, that is in itself an example for us. Twentieth century studies showed that sexual orientation varies a lot between individuals (homosexuals being about 7% of the population) and that was unlikely to be much different in Jesus’ time. In the New Testament homosexuality is only mentioned by Paul and that was in relation to the appalling promiscuity of the Roman upper classes

With homosexuality, we are not dealing with a matter of conscientious choice; we are dealing with a deep-seated and involuntary psychological condition, and with people who are trying to make the best of the cards they have been dealt. They may make good decisions or bad decisions, but we should not be over-hasty in judging what is a good or bad decision for someone else. For most of us no judgment on the matter is necessary: another person’s sexuality is none of our business; it is the way people live and the way they love and serve the community that matters.

There are much more important issues to address. What should we be doing about Muslim terrorists? Al Qaeda and the Taliban sincerely believe that Western society is decadent and immoral and that we are spoiling the world, physically and morally. Can we say that there is not a trace of justification for that? I’m not sure we can. All orthodox Moslems believe that Islam offers a better basis for world government than Christianity. That is a valid opinion but not if it means the punitive, violent and sexist kind of religion that is enforced by the Taliban. Moderate Islam, as it is more generally understood, is another matter; I can happily live alongside that. However, we are entitled to defend ourselves against violent fundamentalists. The consensus of ‘Christian’ nations is that the radical pacifism of Jesus is not really an option.

What about the environment? Surely there are moral issues there. Is our materialistic, money-obsessed, indulgent, lazy, ignorant, careless, individualistic and selfish society spoiling the world physically? The evidence is very strong indeed that we are doing a lot of harm, and public opinion is coming round to this view. More people are beginning to take their responsibilities seriously and do what little bit they can as individuals to lessen the damage we are doing. Even governments and big businesses are moving in response to the prophetic voice of science and the pressure of popular opinion. A picture of right and wrong in this area is rapidly taking shape, and I believe the Holy Spirit is behind this.

And what about birth control, abortion, genetic engineering, euthanasia, drug addiction, global poverty? New moral issues are emerging.

Jesus’ revolutionary shift of attention from scriptural statutes to a contextual morality of the conscience, both individual and social, applies not only to Christians; it applies to everyone, religious or not. Public attitudes determine the way the world is moving – towards perfection or perdition, and our secular legal system is not adequate as it stands. The law needs to be constantly reviewed, debated and improved. Ancient and venerated scriptures are not sufficient either unless they are sensibly interpreted for the times.

You might like to:

Ask the Holy Spirit to grant you greater wisdom in making judgments about some of the most pressing contemporary issues today.

There’s a story in Matthew’s Gospel (15:21-28) that raises the question. Jesus and some disciples were hiking through the region of Tyre and Sidon. It was a cosmopolitan region – people from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. On their way a Canaanite woman accosted Jesus, pleading with him to heal her mentally disturbed daughter. The disciples were embarrassed and they urged Jesus to get rid of her. Jesus seems to have felt the same way. “I am only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he said, and added, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” It was not only racist; it was rather offensive. Was the woman to be regarded as a lower form of animal life because she was not Jewish? However, the woman was too concerned about her daughter to take offence. Picking up Jesus’ own metaphor she replied, “Yes Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

A change of heart 

That brought Jesus up short. He stopped walking, I think, and I imagine him turning and looking at the woman with surprise and dawning respect. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And, Matthew says, her daughter was instantly healed.

What was really happening?

I would hate to think that Jesus was only making a single exception for this individual. I would like to think that he was beginning to realise that he was not only to be the saviour of Israel but the saviour of the whole world. Later he says, in John’s Gospel, “I, if I be lifted up, with draw all people to me.” (12:32)

This is not the only indication that Jesus’ understanding of his identity and vocation grew on him in stages. The most striking occasion occurred when he was baptised by John. Mark tells us that a voice from heaven said: “You are my Son, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” (1:11) (Son of God was a title for Messiah.)

Mark goes on to say that “the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness.” (1:12) It is as though he was quite shocked and was rushing off to be alone where he could think through the implications of this startling experience. He had known for a long time, from childhood probably (Luke 2:49) that he had an important vocation from God, and John had realised that too, but the voice from heaven was quite specific: Jesus was the Son of God, Messiah. While Jesus was in the desert he was tempted by several very bad ideas about how to go about being Messiah (Matt. 4:1-11). There was some serious thinking through to be done. It sounds like a learning experience, but also indicates a thorough knowledge of the Torah.

It also seems likely that his destiny to go to Jerusalem, where murderous enemies would hound him down and have him killed, became clear only on Horeb, the mount of transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8). The evidence of such a fate was to be found in the Law and the prophets if you knew where to look (this is indicated by the appearance of Moses and Elijah) but it would be natural if Jesus had, up to then, been reluctant to grasp the significance of such gloomy prophecies as Isaiah’s suffering servant (Is.53) and the evidence of Israel’s history of persecuting the prophets. Also, the Law contained a catch 22: to claim to be Messiah was blasphemy, so even the true Messiah would be sentenced to death (John 19:7).

I don’t think we have to believe that Jesus had known all this from infancy, even before he could talk. It seems quite reasonable to think that his understanding of what the Law and his vocation as the Son of God demanded developed in stages. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus “learned obedience through the things he suffered.” (Heb. 4:8)

So what?

What’s all that got to do with me? Paul refers to Christians as the body of Christ in numerous places, so we share in Jesus’ Messianic vocation.

When I was a boy I was taught how lucky I was to be a Christian, brought up in a Christian country, educated at the “religious, royal and ancient foundation” of Christ’s Hospital. I was instructed about various mysterious advantages like the gift of the Holy Spirit and everlasting life. Being a Christian seemed all pluses.

But, like everyone else, I discovered as a child that life has its ups and downs. Often the example of Jesus was extremely difficult to follow, and I failed all the time. I gradually realised that being a Christian demanded a different set of values from those of the general public, even the public school!

Like Jesus, I have learned obedience through the things I have suffered. It has been through failures, disappointments and personal mishaps more often than through success that I have made my most important discoveries.

I am still learning where my personal vocation is leading me. It will not be to the same horrible end that Jesus suffered, but it will contain similar ingredients. The loss of physical strength and other faculties leads to humiliating and sometimes painful situations. In my mid-eighties, I speak with some experience.

I am not a special person. What I have said of myself will find an echo (I hope) in most people of any age. We are all discovering in stages who we truly are and what our vocation in Christ is. When I think of Jesus losing his racist beliefs I feel quite complacent: I don’t have any Hansonish hang-ups. But when I think of the end of Jesus’ earthly life I am strongly challenged. In spite of constant challenges from the pulpit, I don’t think most church people regard the crucifixion as having much real relevance to their own lives. That was Jesus’ thing. But it can still be a challenge. Pain and humiliations occur at every stage of life, but a Christian understanding of them, and that they are, sometimes at least, part of the Messianic vocation, can make life seem more reasonable, more coherent, more meaningful.

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Read Isaiah 53

Reflect on your own experience and see if it has ever been in this sense “messianic”.

Pray to understand your life and vocation more clearly, and to find joy and hope in any growth of insight.

Robinson believed that the problem was, basically, the Church’s tendency to talk of God as a being that exists alongside other beings (the universe), and that he is somehow “out there” in a place called heaven beyond the bright blue sky, beyond the universe.

In the 1960s quite a lot of people still went to church, though the number was smaller than during World War Two, and shrinking. Robinson attributed this loss of belief mainly to a reified, “out there” kind of theism: seeing God as a discrete entity in the midst of nothingness. He was also concerned about the popular idea of Jesus as not quite human but only partly divine – a sort of theological mixture. His experience told him that, while churchgoers were still content with those notions, increasing numbers of people found them incompatible with reason and modern-day thinking. Atheists were having a field day.

However, Robinson thought there was hope for a “new reformation”. He cited the writings of radical and controversial theologians like Dietrich Bonhöffer, who made an enigmatic reference to what he called “religionless Christianity” in one of his letters from a Nazi prison, Paul Tillich with his notion that we should see God as the “ground of our being” rather than someone up in heaven, and Rudolf Bultmann, who stressed the mythological nature of much Biblical writing.

The book raised a storm of protest from conservative church people, clerical and lay. Some even accused Robinson of being an atheist and demanded his resignation. I believe that, today, such a book would cause less outrage; it would probably attract little interest in fact. Numbers in the pew have continued to fall and the average age to rise. People mostly don’t actively deny Church doctrine; they simply see it as irrelevant to real life. Apathy is a greater threat to faith than atheism, which is an act of faith anyway. In 1963, Bishop Wand was able to say that the word ‘religion’ still stood for the highest values in life. I doubt if that could be said today.

The ongoing decline of church attendance has been attended by other significant cultural and social changes over the years. One has been the emergence of a popular hunger for spirituality, often expressed in so-called “new age” cults, usually focussed on our relationship with the natural world. Many people today say they are interested in spirituality but not in institutional religion. Even those who are respectful of religion still feel no desire to be involved. Conservative Christians are hostile toward new age spirituality and sceptical about spirituality focussed in nature. They tend to see the environment as something separate: something to conquer and control. They are sceptical about climate change and the need for environmental care. (Cardinal Pell is a prominent local example of this attitude.)

Another development has been a growing interest in other religions and in interfaith dialogue. There might be as many people interested in religion now as there were in the 1960s, but there is more diversity.

The rising average standard of living has also had an impact. With more money, people have more ways to enjoy themselves at weekends. Young people have cars. Even retirees can afford to do more interesting things than going to church.

Of course, the simplest answer to all this is to say that all these people ought to go to church like I do and my ancestors before me, but wrapping oneself up in a warm blanket of self-righteousness (relieved that we’re not gay or lesbian) doesn’t really help. Jesus told his disciples (not just clergy, because there weren’t any) to go out and proclaim the Good News.

Jesus did this himself, not by issuing a new set of dogma, but by telling made-up stories about daily life with a challenging twist to them. We need to be able to communicate the Good News in terms of modern life and modern thinking in this affluent, materialistic, sceptical, scientific age rather than trying to sell them theological dogma or, even less, tell them what their sexual inclinations must not be.

There has been one significant development during the last hundred years: the radical change in scientific thinking. Relativity and quantum theory have revolutionised nearly all scientists’ view of reality. It is much less materialistic. The more physicists learn about the fundamental nature of matter, the less material it seems to be. They explore four ubiquitous fields of energy and the intricate dance that goes on in them that create the illusion of solids, liquids and gases. They talk like mystics at times. This has led to a new burst of dialogue between academic scientists and theologians, and they are finding an astonishing degree of resonance between the two fields of study. Palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, was a pioneer in this process, writing about the same time as Robinson. He had a mystic’s understanding of the material world. Mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme, says that we should see the universe as a spiritual event rather than as a material object. If this were to flow down to ordinary church people or even to the clergy, it would open a new channel of communication with scientifically minded society. More importantly it could open up for us Western Christians a new vision of God for ourselves in the material world around us. This is something that has always been essential in other religions and in earlier European Christianity, but was lost during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

Generally, the Good News is most effectively communicated, not through theology or dogma, but by opening people’s eyes to God around them. This is what Jesus’ parables did. The Nicene Creed is a useful tool for certain occasions, but I’ve never heard of anyone being converted by it. Even more effective is action: acts of love, compassion, forgiveness, understanding and tolerance.

There is much debate these days among the clergy about how to “be church” in new ways. Perhaps there is now more general agreement about the need for a “new reformation”. Perhaps we still need to be more honest to God.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not intended to mystify us with an arithmetical riddle; it is intended to give clarity and precision to our thinking. The Nicene Creed is a brilliant summary of many centuries of Jewish religious experience, and the Christ event in particular. It is immensely helpful in any attempt to put our own experience of God into some order. But the danger of fragmenting or partitioning our image of God is ever present. Athanasius and the church fathers of Nicea and Chalcedon were at pains to affirm the absolute unity of God. Any devotional or dialectic use of the doctrine of the Trinity that compromises or confuses us about God’s absolute unity is bad theology.

The council of Nicea was called by the emperor Constantine, primarily to settle the hotly debated question of Jesus’ fundamental nature: was he, the Jews’ Messiah, holy but simply human, or was he divine, the God-man? The council finally voted to affirm the latter opinion: Jesus was divine.

The form of their statement reflects classical philosophical thinking. The Creed states that Jesus was “of one substance with the Father”. The word substance (Greek ousios) is used in the sense that Plato used it, meaning the essential nature of something. On the religious level also, the notion of a divine human being is Hellenistic. Though entirely foreign to Jewish tradition, human gods and goddesses were a familiar part of Greco-Roman culture.

There is no doubt that the intention of the Council was to affirm something much more than that Jesus was merely one of the Greek gods, but their idea was more acceptable in the predominantly gentile fourth century church than it could have been earlier in a predominantly Jewish one. (We recall that Jesus had been condemned to death by the Sanhedrin because they deliberately interpreted his answer to their question as to whether he was the Messiah as a claim to be equal with God.)

However, against the background of the earliest Christian writings, the Creed tells us about much more than the nature and status of one man. In Paul’s letters and in the prologue of John’s Gospel there are clear statements that Christ is an eternal and cosmic being – infinitely more than one individual man. The whole of creation is in Christ and comes into being through him. If then, as the Nicene fathers affirm, Christ is divine and co-equal with God, it follows that everything is part of the material embodiment or incarnation of God. This fits in with the belief of creation from nothing (ex nihilo). There is nothing from which God can create the universe except himself

Jesus referred to God as “our Father”. Bear in mind that, at that time, it was believed that a woman was merely an incubator for a complete potential human being, generated and delivered by the man. Paul saw creation as female to God, “in labour” like a woman in childbirth. And Saint Francis saw that our divine kinship extends to the whole of creation.

The really new idea that emerges from the Nicene Creed, and the early Christian writings I referred to, is that physical reality – matter and energy, space and time – is divine. The fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said, “God is everything, but everything is not God”. No single entity, not even Jesus the Messiah, is all that we mean by God; God is the totality of all existence. God is the very essence of existence, the source of all being. And this includes material nature.

Importantly, we need not regard material nature as a finite entity. Our range of observation will always be limited, but many cosmologists believe that the universe, the totality of physical existence, is infinite, though all but a small part is beyond any possible observation.

The work of scientists of many disciplines over the last century has revealed that the universe is not just a collection of inanimate things with a tiny amount of biological matter here and maybe elsewhere also. The whole universe is a living, growing, evolving organism. Some philosophers of science also argue that the universe is also a psychic entity – it has mind. In animals, mind and matter meet. Cosmic mind is materially manifest in brains. But our thoughts and imagination are not spatially located in our skulls; to some extent they are a globally shared experience. Physicist, Brian Swimme, says we should see the universe as a spiritual event, not a material entity. We should notice that this contemporary thinking originates in some of the earliest Christian writings and was codified in classical philosophical terms in the fourth century.

The doctrine of the Trinity gives us a way of ordering our experience of God. It suggests that we experience God at three levels. Firstly, with our faculty for abstract thought, we define God as the very essence of existence and source of all being – the “Father” of creation. Secondly, with our spiritual sensibility we perceive God as goodness. Paul specified the qualities of goodness to the Galatians: love, joy, serenity, faithfulness, gentleness and so on. And thirdly, though we see these qualities only in people, God shows himself also through the beauty and wonder of all of nature.

We also experience what we think of as not God. If we only ever experienced pleasure, the idea of a good God in a flawed world would not enter our minds. But we know both the warmth of the summer sun and the cruel winds of winter, the fertility of the earth, watered from the heavens, and the dire experience of drought and famine, kindness and wisdom in some people but viciousness and stupidity in others. Finally, with our analytical faculty, we think about God in abstract terms: pure being, both immanent in and transcendent to everything.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not about three gods in one God; it is about three ways in which we experience the Holy One, the un-nameable LORD, the ultimate mystery.

Since Einstein’s theories of relativity were generally accepted, we no longer think of time as separate from space. Scientists and mathematicians see the universe as a four-dimensional continuum that they call space-time. The reason we separate space and time is because we perceive those dimensions with different physical and mental faculties. We measure space and time in very different ways. But, like time, the whole of infinite space simply is. When I talk about time, I am really talking about space-time: both the “where” and “when” of things.

The universe – the totality of existence in God – is, I believe, infinite, but we observe only a limited amount of it. By looking deep into space with the Hubble telescope astronomers can see about ten billion light-years. That is a measurement that combines space and time, and it’s the distance light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second in a year. That’s a long way.

When they look into distant space, astronomers are looking into the past because the light from what they see has taken time to get here. Even when we look at the sun we see it where it was about eight and a half minutes ago. So looking into space astronomers can see bits of the whole history of the universe for ten billion years. They see the most distant visible galaxies as they were ten billion years ago.

Einstein pointed out that it makes no sense to ask what those distant universes are like now. We can only say that their now is different from ours. There is no universal now. That ten billion-year-old universe is part of our now, so, in a sense, it still exists. The past continues to exist. We are, in fact, part of the Big Bang in extended time. The glowing embers are still visible to astronomers. They’re called the cosmic microwave background.

The dinosaurs are also still with us in the form of fossils. But that is not their past; it is their future! By deduction, we can also know something of our own future, and some of us may one day be dug up as fossils in someone else’s now.

But what about God? People often ask, “Does God know the future?” But, for God, there is no past, present and future; that is a human perception. For God there is the eternal, dynamic now. “But,” you will object, “If God knows our future then it is all fixed.” Not so. Nothing in the eternal now is fixed. It is a work in progress. It is God’s work: nurturing and bringing to perfection the eternal now.

God is working on what we call our future, but we need to say something about God’s way of working. The world we know seems at times so out of control, so dangerous and, at times, brutal. No human parent is as permissive as God. God has given the children he has born a quite terrifying degree of freedom.

I don’t only mean human free will. Last century scientists became increasingly interested in the subatomic world, and they discovered a disconcerting weirdness. The most basic ingredients of matter did not obey the normal rules of cause and effect. Things happened spontaneously, without any discoverable cause. They could only estimate the probability of some particle being at a particular place or having a certain motion. Quantum mechanics was invented as a branch of statistical mathematics that makes possible the creation of things like computers and mobile phones where things like electrons and photons have to be organized.

God knows the future, but he does not directly create it. He creates, gives birth to a self-creating universe. Like a loving and generous father, God gives his Son, in whom and through whom all things exist, complete freedom. In spite of the thousands of legends and experiences that suggest otherwise, I believe God is non-interventionist.

God’s passivity in the face of human disasters is often shocking and confusing to us, and the unexpected benevolence of nature is sometimes amazing. God does nothing to stop the carnage of war across the world, but a cancer unexpectedly and spontaneously goes into remission. God suffers in all such situations because everything is in God, but the power of his love is exercised at a deeper level than natural law. It is an influence to perfection, imperceptible in the short term, recognizable in the process of evolution and social development. I believe things can be loved into goodness and truth, and that that is what God is doing.

The dimension of time is essential in God’s chosen way of working. Loving his incarnate self, the Son, the cosmic Christ, happens in time. But we shouldn’t imagine God acting or reacting moment by moment as we do. God feels and loves the whole of time. He feels all the events of eternity. And we freely and voluntarily contribute our own little bit to those events.

We are helping to build what we think of as the future. In this mortal state we move through a small segment of the universal and eternal here and now. What we do generates joy and pain in a social and material environment – our small segment of space-time. And this is all in God and in God’s all-embracing and loving nature.

Paul told the Ephesians and the Colossians to live wisely, making the most of the time. In this life we are given a small section of eternity to care for and tend. In relative terms it is a very tiny segment, but it matters to God what we do with it, and the prophets and Jesus have all warned that it matters to us also. In this life we seem able to isolate ourselves from God’s feelings, even though we are in and of God. In eternity we will not, I suspect, be able to do that. And time is of the essence.

Jesus is often spoken of as God incarnate but the incarnation of God is infinitely more than that. St Paul, in his Letter to the Colossians, declares that, in Christ, “All things in heaven and earth were created, things visible and invisible . . . . All things have been created in him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” St John, in the prologue to his Gospel, refers to Jesus as the Word (Logos) of God. He wrote: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being.” In his address to the crowd in the Aereopagus Paul said that the “unknown God” (his God) was the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Today we would call Paul a panentheist, one who believes that everything is in God.

The Nicene Creed refers to the Son as being “begotten by the Father before all worlds.” God did not manufacture the world that is his incarnate body; he gave birth to it. And creation (we should say procreation) did not end after six days’ labour several thousand years ago; it goes on still. God gives birth to everything, continuously until the end of time.

St Augustine taught that God created the world from nothing, ‘ex nihilo’. We cannot conceive of nothingness as a region in which even God is excluded. Nothing means nothing-except-God. This means that, in giving birth to the world, God had no raw material except himself. The world is not only in God; as Paul said, it is also of God.

All this contributes to my belief in the sacredness of the physical world of matter and energy, time and space. And I see this belief as being very powerfully expressed in the Eucharist. In declaring the basic elements of food and drink as being his body and blood, Jesus makes a powerful theological statement.

I don’t think his intention was to create a tightly focussed local presence through a kind of magical spell cast by authenticated magicians. I hope there is no such caricature in anyone’s mind. Though I may be wrong, I suggest that Jesus saw the food and drink at the last supper as a typical example and a universal symbol of all matter, especially that with which we have the most intimate relationship possible. Paul and John affirmed that Christ or the Word is in everything but this has a particularly powerful impact when we think of it as referring to what we eat and drink.

In the earliest account of the last supper (in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians), when Jesus gives the disciples the wine he says, “Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.” Rather than an instruction for a religious ritual, it sounds more like a general reference to drinking. If the words “as often as” apply to the bread as well, it implies that we should think of God incarnate in everything we eat and drink.

There are many occasions in the New Testament, including Jesus’ own quoted words, that suggest that Christ is present everywhere and in everything. This does not only apply to the world after Jesus’ birth. In John’s prologue, already quoted, he states that God was incarnate in the Word “in the beginning”. Paul goes further, saying Christ was “before all things”.

However, we must not underestimate the central significance of Christ’s incarnation in Jesus. Our relationship to the rest of creation is epitomised in the relationship of the people of his own time to Jesus. There were some who treated him with great reverence, a few who even recognised him as the Christ, the Son of God. But they were in a minority. The bulk of society were apathetic except insofar as he could be of benefit to themselves. The religious and political leaders even saw him as an enemy to be conquered.

These three responses reflect today’s attitude to the people and things around us – our environment. A few, regarded often as tiresome eccentrics, have a real reverence for humankind and nature. The majority are interested in people and things principally for their usefulness. A few see other people and nature as enemies to be conquered and controlled. Much scientific endeavour is channelled towards the conquest and exploitation of nature and natural resources. Much of business and politics is directed to the same aim with regard to people. It is not too much to say that, at times, huge numbers of people are, metaphorically speaking, crucified in the interests of expedience or ideological fervour. The same can be said of nature. The ideology of growth and consumption is killing our natural environment.

Why do I talk about the sacredness of matter, whether living or inanimate when so many people don’t recognise the sacredness of anything? Even where the need for discretion is recognised in order to maximise the benefit, there is nothing that could be called a sense of reverence. Yet, everything has an inner reality, a quality and value simply by being, regardless of its usefulness. Many people recognise this innate worth in regard to human beings, but very few go beyond that. Worship means the recognition of worth. It doesn’t mean fearful and superstitious grovelling. That is not worship; it is idolatry. We need to worship the divine universe, to recognise its inherent worth, the glory of its simply being. Perhaps astronomers know best what I mean. Except for the Sun, the bodies in outer space have no conceivable usefulness. Yet, to the astronomer and cosmologist, they are a constant source of delight, wonder and inspiration. We must learn to worship, to recognise intrinsic worth, whether or not it includes anything

There are regions of the universe where matter is very sparse: about one molecule in a cubic meter, but there is no region where there is no radiation. Light and other particles of electromagnetic energy are whizzing around every part of outer space at 300,000 kilometres a second. We can see the emissions from luminous bodies, stars and so forth, but even in the darkest regions there is a faint background radiation, left over from the fiery beginning of our universe.

Although it is impossible to create, or even to detect the total vacuum in our universe, some of our greatest minds have studied what it must be like. Today they call it the ‘zero point field’ or ‘quantum vacuum’ and they believe it exists everywhere, both within our universe and beyond space and time. Far from being nothing in the absolute, philosophical sense the quantum vacuum is intensely energetic, though it does not contain actual things – particles of energy such as atoms, electrons and photons (light). Nevertheless, it has the potential to form them. Bear in mind that matter is a dynamic formation of energy and can be converted back into energy (hence atomic power and the famous equation, e = mc2 ).

Theoretical physicists believe that the quantum vacuum is full of intense energy and seethes with activity, producing particles and their partners, antiparticles, continuously. But the particles and antiparticles mutually annihilate each other instantly, before real particles can establish themselves, so they are called ‘virtual particles’. The quantum vacuum or zero point field is described crudely as a kind of foam of virtual particles and antiparticles within which real particles can exist in space and time, and evidently do.

The quantum vacuum is not a finite quantity, nor does it have a boundary in space or a beginning or end in time. Within it virtually anything can happen in terms of physical phenomena. The probability of a universe of such complexity as ours, containing living organisms that have consciousness and feeling, is incalculably small, yet it has happened. Actually, it has been argued that, where there are no boundaries of space or time, as in the case of the quantum vacuum, anything that can possibly happen must eventually happen. A somewhat mind-blowing thought! Nevertheless, the question remains: why should anything at all happen in the quantum vacuum. It is, after all, a state of potentiality, not, in itself, a state of actuality.

You have already, I hope, begun to think more deeply about what we mean by “nothing”. I will now turn to what the Church means by it. Here too we need to think carefully. If we take the strict philosophical meaning of the word nothing, we would have to say that even God is excluded. That debases our concept of God; it makes Him a finite, limited being. I think we have to say that “nothing” means “nothing except God.” We could say then that the universe was created by God, not out of absolutely nothing, in the philosophical sense, but out of God’s own infinite being.

This agrees with Paul and John, writing in the New Testament, and with the later doctrine of the Holy Trinity and Christ as the only begotten Son of God. To the Colossians Paul wrote that, in Christ, “all things in heaven and on earth are created” and, “In him all things hold together.” In the prologue of John’s Gospel he calls Christ “the Word” (Logos) of God: “The Word was God,” and, “All things came into being through him.” In the liturgical doxology God is commonly referred to as the “Source of all Being, Eternal Word and Holy Spirit”. Christ is often referred to as the Cosmic Christ as distinct from the historical man, Jesus. Rather than saying that God created, in the sense of crafting or manufacturing, it makes better sense to say that God gave birth to everything.

So, to sum up: contemporary scientific theory calls “nothing” the quantum vacuum or zero point field, an infinite sea of seething energy. The universe is not the quantum vacuum but, in and through the vacuum, everything has come, is coming and will come into being. The vacuum is, so to speak, alongside, permeating everything in the universe: the universe is of the vacuum and in it, yet distinct from it. The vacuum is both transcendent to the universe and immanent in it.

The philosophical notion of nothingness where even God is not is contrary to Christian belief in God’s universal immanence. As the Psalmist sang, “If I climb up to heaven you are there, and if I plunge down to hell you are there also.” So traditional Christian theology declares that God created the universe when there was absolutely nothing except Himself. God is incarnate, embodied in physical nature, the universe, but He is also transcendent and distinct from it. None of the things in the universe is God, yet God is everywhere, even in things.

The Christian doctrine of God is immeasurably richer than the scientific theory of the zero point field, which is basically abstract mathematics. Yet there is a remarkable similarity (and theology can be very abstract too). Contemporary scientific theory creates a resonance between our knowledge of the world we know through observation and our knowledge of God through Christian revelation and theology. While the agenda of science is certainly different from the agenda of theology, they are profoundly compatible in their thinking. Nowhere is this more evident than when we reflect in depth about what we mean by “nothing”.

Where does it stop? Some philosophical scientists today believe it doesn’t stop. They believe that what we call mind, as distinct from brain, is an inherent element of the universe. Conscious animals and insects are not a freak phenomenon, strictly localised on a very rare type of planet; they are a natural outcome of an evolutionary process that began some 13.8 billion years ago in a universe in which consciousness, mind and feeling are of its nature. It is interesting that the most basic assumption upon which science is based is that nature is rational.

The one who brought the idea that matter is mental to life, early in the last century, was the famous philosopher, mathematician and physicist, Alfred North Whitehead. Charles Birch, is a more recent pioneer in this branch of thinking. He was recently interviewed on the ABC program Encounter. He believes that everything feels, even quarks. Quarks are related by the strong nuclear force to other quarks. They relate together organically in threes. Neutrons, protons and electrons also have an organic relationship, “feeling” each other through the electro-weak nuclear force. In the macro world, gravity is a “messenger” between all material objects. The stars and galaxies “feel” the gravitational pull of each other and move in an elegantly rational manner in response.

Of course, Birch is not saying that atoms have brains, but he is saying that they have a “feeling” for other atoms and a complex rational way of relating to each other. That is what chemistry is about. Brains are a rarity in the cosmos, but mind is universal.

Whitehead’s view is anathema among conservative scientists, notably among biologists, who tend to be very mechanistic in their thinking. They hold that the appearance of mind – a non-material element – in matter requires some kind of change in nature. In other words, mind is an extra, added to the universe in the last split second of the cosmic ‘day’. Geneticist, Dobjansky even refers to it as a miracle. This notion appeals to religious people, of course. But if you believe that no intervention was needed: that God gave birth to the universe already equipped to produce intelligent and sensitive creatures, you can still be just as religious.

Paradoxically, the ‘miracle’ theory is held by people who believe in a mechanical universe with no place at all for God. Personally, I don’t believe in an interventionist God; I believe in an indwelling God who works within nature, not outside it. I also believe that God is both physical (incarnate) and spiritual (mental). One doesn’t need religion to believe in an intelligent universe, but religion is no impediment to such a belief either. You don’t have to believe that nature began in a faulty state and had to be fixed up by God as time went by. It makes perfectly good sense to believe that the Big Bang singularity emerged with the potential and everything needed to evolve to what it is now, and to continue to evolve to a fuller state of consciousness and perfection for incalculable billions of years in the future.

A few decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul began to think of Christ in a metaphysical way. To the Colossians he wrote that he was “the image of the invisible God . . . for in him all things in heaven and earth were created.” (1:15,16) Everything, the universe, is in Christ, and we now know that that is a living process, not just a past event.

Some decades later, John moves from metaphysics into theology by saying that Christ is the “Word” of God. “Word” renders the Greek word Logos. In both the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) the word logos has a bafflingly rich and varied meaning in different places. As John uses it is seems to mean the mind or thought of God. Like Paul, John declares that, in and through the Word, everything comes into being. Once again, Christ is a cosmic being, the embodiment of the mind of God in the totality of all things, the whole of existence.

The universe then, the cosmic Christ, is not just thoughtful; it is the embodiment or incarnation of divine thought. To avoid any suspicion of pantheism I must point out the distinction between the thought and the thinker. God is the Thinker, both physical and spiritual, and not to be thought of as just the thought or just the embodiment of the thought. And the Whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In Christ we see with unique clarity how God is thinking, but for all its clarity it is a profound mystery. In the universe there is constant death and rebirth going on; there is violence and destruction and nurture and creativity. The universe, it has been said, is in the process of becoming what it truly is. The abiding mystery is why God should go to so much trouble in space-time and physical process.

I think we have to say that God is not a thing, a discrete entity; God is an eternal event, a life that expresses love. Love is also a profound mystery involving both ecstasy and agony. Saint Paul said to the Romans that the whole of creation is groaning in labour pains in bringing Christ to birth. But it is a labour of love.

So the universe is not only thoughtful; it thinks loving thoughts, facing very real problems in the search for perfection. But, as a Christian optimist, I believe in the ultimate wisdom of the universe because I believe in the wisdom of God. Though it may not seem that way to us because we are not all that wise, cosmic evolution is a wisely guided process,

The central role of the star in the story suggests that Matthew’s “magi” were astrologers. In most societies in the Middle East of that time astrologers were important people. Not so for the Jews. They regarded them as idolatrous heathens. Herod was impressed and deeply disturbed by the information these men brought, but he was a neurotic and superstitious ratbag. The first people to recognise the infant Jesus as a king were not only gentiles, they were a particularly despised kind of gentile. And they were years ahead of any respectable Jews. (I don’t count Luke’s shepherds because they were social outcasts.) They were not guided by any knowledge of Jewish prophetic writings or motivated by nationalistic aspirations; they were guided by what they saw in the here and now. They studied natural phenomena. They were, you might say, the scientists of their day.

Astrologers believe that distant bodies in the universe directly influence our lives. Modern cosmologists don’t believe that, but nor do they believe that the rest of the universe is entirely separate and irrelevant to us. They now see the universe as a single, living, evolving organism. We humans are products of cosmic energies and cosmic process; we are made of the dust of ancient, long-dead stars.

Some of today’s leading scientists are also Christian theologians. But many more, less formally religious, are moving in their thinking and writing towards something very similar to religious belief, suggestive of the cosmic Christ or Brahma, a Source of all Being, a non-material (ie, spiritual) cosmic guide, though they use scientific, not religious language.

Many people are most comfortable resting in the certainties of a simple, unquestioning faith, based on a fairly literal interpretation of Scripture but, although Matthew refers often to Scripture, he points beyond that in today’s story. These days he might be into inter-faith dialogue. Isaiah, Micah and other prophets had also expressed universalist ideals: when Messiah comes all peoples will come “to worship on Zion, God’s holy mountain.” The messianic age would offer something beyond the ethnic and nationalistic tradition of the Jews. (Of course, religious people are still nationalistic, Christians as much as any others; and many are racist as well.)

So people of different cultures, different ethnic roots and different religious traditions must find the true and living God by their own pathways. Although membership of the Anglican Communion commits us to a certain consensus of doctrine, we have a great deal of freedom to find our own way. This can lead to stress and tension at times, as it does at present, but, if we hold on with tolerance, respect and charity, it is a creative tension, a struggle that can lead us into greater truth.

No discussion of this story would be complete without some reference to the star. Astronomers today entertain several theories as to what that might have been. My personal favourite is a supernova in the constellation of Taurus, about 6,300 l/y away. As supernovae do, it quickly burned up its fuel and imploded, and the Hubble telesope provides a detailed picture of what now remains. Part of the star’s mass has imploded into what is called a neutron star, only a few kilometres in diameter, but about equal in mass to the Sun. Each cubic centimetre weighs several tons and it spins at 1800 rpm (a day is 1/30th of a second). It makes you dizzy just thinking about it! Its magnetic field also emits pulses of radio waves detectable with a radio telescope. (It is what is called a pulsar.) The rest of the remains of the star are scattered millions of kilometres into space in a glowing cloud of hot gas and dust. It is called the Crab Nebular because of its shape.

That’s all very interesting, perhaps, but what has a supernova to do with Messiah? Like the Messiah, the supernova was a product of nature; like a baby, it was also something new and exciting. To those who studied the sky the supernova was a wonderful event. To those, like John the Baptist and others who were looking for the coming of Messiah, Jesus was a wonderful event too.

I like the supernova theory because it suggests to me an allegory. After Jesus Christ, “Superstar”, what remains? An important feature, forming very quickly, is a clump of very dense text - the four Gospels - totalling only 135 pages in my Bible: half the size of a whodunit. But it weighs, in importance, as much as a whole theological college library. The Gospels form, so to speak, a literary neutron star, a pulsar, sending out a significant signal to those equipped to hear. And now, extended across time and space, there is what the author of the Letter to the Hebrews called a great cloud of witnesses. I would like to think that we are part of that cloud: not as intensely burning as its origin, but still hot enough to be visible in the darkness of our world.

But the Epiphany, the manifestation, the revelation we all yearn for is not an object in the sky; it is a certain kind of society, made up of a certain kind of person: the kingdom of heaven, manifest in kingdom people. They are here. Many of them are not Christians, but they are known by their works. They glow with the warmth of love and shine with the light of wisdom – God’s wisdom, which often seems to us foolish, shocking, even subversive.

Ordinary stars also shine in and through the Crab Nebula. In the midst of all the confusion and darkness of human history, there have been individuals who shone like stars, who showed exceptional love and compassion, who lived lives of heroic faith. Today we have not just individuals but organizations that manifest the kingdom: The Vincent de Paul Society, Amnesty International, Medicins Sans Frontiéres: there are hundreds of them striving for a better world. In the best societies, even public standards of decency are improving: new needs are being recognised and addressed; old injustices are being corrected.

The Epiphany is not finished; it is still going on.

The first new thing to emerge from the Big Bang was space and time. When time had stretched to a trillion trillionth of a second, the universe had grown to about 100cm. And then there was light: a ball of energy, blazing at a thousand, trillion, trillion degrees. This ball was not completely smooth; it had little lumps in it called protons, neutrons and electrons.

After a minute and a half the universe had grown to ten thousand trillion kilometres; the temperature was down to a billion degrees, and another new thing emerged: atoms of helium and hydrogen.

Events got slower as expansion and cooling continued. After 56,000 years, with the temperature at 9000ºK, there was enough space for light to begin to move freely between the atoms. After 380,000 years, the universe a balmy 3000º, the atoms began to clump together. Change is slowing down but after 100-200 million years the first stars began to form, like blazing snowballs, rapidly gathering more material from around them. These huge protostars soon became so big that gravity caused them to collapse inwards, to implode, scattering their helium and hydrogen into dark space.

Back to the drawing board! The universe had another try with smaller stars that would live longer. These became hot enough in the centre for nuclear fusion and bigger atoms were created, including carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and silicon. The largest of all was uranium. In time, however, these stars also either imploded or burned out and scattered their stuff into space again. The universe was still hot enough in places for chemical reactions to occur between elements, producing compounds like silicates (rock), water and long chain molecules with carbon (which can link with itself).

When the third generation of stars began to form, they gathered small, cold lumps of the heavier elements and compounds that orbited round them. The Sun and Solar System formed some 4.6 billion years ago. On the third planet from the Sun very special conditions existed. There was liquid water and some of those long carbon molecules. In a process still not well understood, super-molecules began to form a new kind of material entity: the living cell. Living organisms did new things. They grew and changed; they metabolised material from their environment and, with energy from the Sun, sustained themselves. Even more amazingly, they reproduced themselves, sometimes with slight modifications due to small errors in reproduction. So they evolved: they didn’t only grow and change during their lifetime; they changed from generation to generation.

Now, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, the temperature of dark space is less than three degrees above zero. The universe has expanded to some thousand, trillion, trillion kilometres in extent – further than it is possible to observe anything. It is still expanding, and now the expansion seems to be getting faster.

2000 years ago - a tick of the cosmic clock – in the species ‘homo sapiens’, a uniquely gifted individual appeared. His was a superior level of consciousness. He spoke of a new kind of human society: he called it the kingdom of heaven. He spoke of God, the Ultimate Totality and Essence of all Being, and called him his Father.

The development of the new society, the kingdom of heaven, seems terribly slow, but we celebrate the birth of him who inaugurated it every year. In the south it is high summer; in the north deep winter. Jesus was a new thing. He was a new kind of person whom no one had ever encountered before and whose wisdom and beauty very few people seemed ready for. But, though the process has seemed terribly slow, a new kind of person began to emerge. They leaven the dull, inertial lump of humankind. For all the stupidity, ignorance, blind prejudice, injustice and cruelty that goes on, human society gives hints of new wisdom and kindness down the centuries.

Not everyone can see it. Even the ability to recognise that a new thing is happening seems like a special gift. But it’s not just wishful thinking. In the end we will get what we want. And we will want better things as our understanding grows. Human consciousness is expanding and maturing, and Jesus, the new man, gave signs of the way it will go.