Delivered on Sunday 31 December 2006 in St George's Chapel

Christmas 1

The first Sunday after Christmas is slightly odd. A kind of calm has descended after the bedlam of the festive preparations. The excitement, the preparation, and the anticipation had all combined to create an atmosphere of chaos - we were, as I say, in a state of bedlam. Now, all that has passed and there is calm and consequently more time for reflection. As we reflect this morning I want to set out from 'bedlam' itself. Thus far, I have used the word to describe a state of uproar, confusion, chaos but, of course, the word is also associated with the asylum. That association comes about because of London's Bedlam, which in the eighteenth century was an enclosed asylum for the mentally ill. The unhappy inmates were, in those days, chained and caged and offered up for public viewing and ridicule. Dr Jonathan Swift had once been a governor of Bedlam, a post which would have greatly interested him and which clearly affected him deeply; he would later leave the vast majority of his estate for the founding of St Patrick's hospital in Dublin, a hospital that still sits at the heart of Irish psychiatric care and training. This generous act was grounded in Swift's own understanding of madness. He thought that, in way or another, we are all mad. He once wrote: 'if the wisest man would, at any time, utter his thoughts in the crude indigested manner as they come to him in his head, he would be looked upon as raving mad'. Why? Because, as Swift understood it, madness was a matter of an unorthodox association of ideas.

Deciding on what constitutes an orthodox or unorthodox association of ideas must be a subject for psychologists and psychiatrists, but in very broad terms I suspect that some previously cherished convictions are no longer considered orthodox. For example, I have a hunch that there will be many people in twenty-first century Britain who would be most unhappy if the Church's teaching was to be considered the orthodox view. And yet, within its own walls the Church steadfastly continues to proclaim the gift of orthodox faith. As part of that faith the Church, at Christmas time, wants to celebrate and to reflect on the birth of Jesus and to help us do that it provides a kind of grammar or at least brief notes that serve as a norm for the faithful and adequate reading of scripture. Those brief notes took many years to compose but were finally agreed in the great Church Councils of the first five centuries. And week by week we recite these notes in the form of one or other of the Creeds. In the Nicene Creed we state that Jesus 'came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man'. In a nutshell this is what we celebrate at Christmas: the fact that Jesus came down from heaven, was incarnate, was made man. But at this point the sceptic will be bouncing off the walls, decrying us as holding an orthodox association of ideas. Who in their right mind can make sense of all that? What does it mean to say that Jesus was incarnate? What sense can be made of the statement that Jesus was made man? And there are many other questions besides, because things get worse before they get better. For at Christmas we celebrate the fact that in Jesus, God took upon himself our flesh, we celebrate the fact that Jesus is both God and man, to be precise we celebrate the fact that Jesus is both fully God and fully man. Last year, when our eldest son was doing his R.E. homework this theological conundrum reared its head. 'So', he said, 'if Jesus was born then he was a man'. 'But, he was also God', I replied. 'I've got it', he nodded quickly working out the mathematics, 'Jesus was half-God and half-man'. It really does seem, on the face of it, to be an orthodox association of ideas; the claim that Jesus is fully God and fully man.

And yet, as I've already mentioned, that is exactly the orthodox teaching of the Church. Yet, these are but brief notes and theologians, philosophers and faithful believers have all, over time, added their own text to these aphorisms. You might say they have put flesh onto the bones of the teaching. And they have so, exactly because they want to be able to hold the orthodox faith, and yet be able to speak about it sensibly. This is a wise strategy provided the text remains faithful to the brief notes and to Holy Scripture. So what might such a text look like? A typical account would speak of the incarnation, the business of God becoming man, taking place on one single day in history, the first Christmas day. This account has the advantage of being clear and crisp but it does leave a few niggles open. If Jesus' humanity is perfected from the word go, then all the temptations and sufferings he endures are simply things he goes along with; he does not endure them in anything like the way that we have to face them. Another account - one told by Athanasius, by Gregory of Nyssa, by Hilary of Poitiers, and by John of Damascus - is that the incarnation, the business of God becoming man is not a single moment in time but a process. This account tells of Jesus overcoming temptation only when is tempted, of conquering sin only when he bears the sins of others, and of overcoming death only when he faces crucifixion. It is an account that speaks of a rolling out of the intermingling of humanity and divinity in the course of Jesus' earthly life.

No doubt, this account will be no more appealing to the sceptic than the traditional one; the sceptic will still say this is an unorthodox association of ideas. But for the believer, I think, it makes for a sensible and orthodox record of our faith in the one who was born at Christmas more than two millennia ago. In particular I like the notion of process. It seems to me that salvation history was been shot through with God's process. In the beginning God brought order out of chaos; he made sense of the bedlam. He would later, through the election and redemption of the Jewish people, create social stability where there had been nothing but bedlam. And for us, in our chaotic existence, in all our bedlam, he promises to order us, to perfect us.

It is no coincidence that the word bedlam takes its root in Bethlehem. For in Bethlehem, all those years ago, the business of God becoming man, the process of incarnation, began. In Bethlehem, there was then bedlam, in the sense that there was an unorthodox association of ideas - namely that process of God becoming man - but, as we well know the truth of the matter is strange, and what will look to some like unorthodox is actually orthodox.