Today’s readings for Evening Prayer include John’s Gospel 3:16-21 and Psalm 8. No better pericope of the Good News in Jesus Christ can be found than these words (rendered here from the Message translation so that their familiarity may not obscure impact). This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him. (John 3:16-18).
Deep currents of doubt pervade our society,
undercutting the wonderful hope these words contain – from two contradictory
but equally devastating directions. One is the denial of all human dignity by
insisting that life of any sort has equal value: ‘Animals (plants?) are people
too’; with constant badgering against all human significance. Undoubtedly the
source of so much agony, angst and distrust; guilt, fear; a deep, unsettling
questioning of all values and certainties. This haunts our every step, and the
more so when humanity’s very existence seems at threat from virile RNA vectors
like SARS-Cov-2. The other: coarse attempts to re-assert human dominance and
pre-eminence regardless of running rough-shod over our (weaker) neighbour. All in
desperation to retrieve seemingly lost significance. From either direction, how
can the Good News of the Saviour break through, challenged on the one side by a
refusal to contemplate any vestige of the right to salvation, and on the other
by overweening arrogance, incapable of receiving Grace?
What a joy, then, to re-read the wonderful eighth Psalm!
1 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour.
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
9 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth! (NRSV).
In its Hebraic context, the wonder of human significance is
so strongly attested, yet within the perspective of our littleness with respect
to both God’s Majesty and the vastness of His creation. Scholars note that in
the Jewish commentaries and literature, this Psalm is most often employed as ‘What
is man?’ in emphasis of the insignificance of human beings. Interesting. But
surely it is the dual emphasis that sets so much right – we are mere
specs, grains of sand on the beaches of the Universe. We are threatened
by pestilence, famine, fire and flood – it is estimated that about 8 percent of
the human genome originated from viruses that have inserted themselves right
into our DNA – testimony to the constant fight life has sustained from just
this one kind of danger. And yet we have the dignity by creation of a relationship
with the Creator! Given a pre-eminent role, crowned with glory and
honour, with dominion over the work of [His] hands. The ennui of contemporary
society results from a loss of understanding, of memory, that this
contradiction between humanity’s promise and status with its evident distress
and desecration is only resolved in Christ and his Incarnation.
So, to follow this thread to its conclusion, remember that
Psalm 8 is appropriated by the author of Hebrews, in Heb 2:5-9.
6 But someone has testified somewhere,
‘What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
or mortals, that you care for them?
7 You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned them with glory and honour,
8 subjecting all things under their
feet.’
Now in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their
control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, 9 but
we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now
crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, so that by the
grace of God he might taste death for everyone. (NRSV)
“[This passage] provides a concrete expression of ‘the way
of the Son’, by which the Son of God leaves heaven, adds humanity to his deity
and walks among us, suffers, and is raised and exalted to the right hand of
God.” [G.H. Guthrie in Commentary on the NT use of the OT.] That is Advent!
We appreciate once again a reminder of Christmas and all that the
incarnation initiated, but above all we rejoice in His Glory and anticipate
His coming.