What Matters Most Incarnation: A Poem by and a Conversation with Rev. Dr. Rob James
Welcome to Episode 19 of Season 4! In this episode I speak with (and listen to) the Rev. Dr. Rob James. This episode focuses on the Christian understanding of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and what that means theologically for Christianity, but what it means for followers of Jesus to reflect on this reality for our human lives.
This is Rob’s third appearance on What Matters Most. Rob is currently priest in charge at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Vancouver. He has several degrees in Theology, including a PhD from SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. His book The Spiral Gospel: Intratextuality in Luke’s Narrative was published in September 2022 by Cambridge-based publishers James Clarke. Rob has also written and published a book of stories from the Bible designed for storytellers to use with children in children’s homilies or Sunday School or church camps. The first book is on stories from the NT, but there is a second coming on stories from the OT. The illustrator for both is the Reverend Amanda Ruston. The book is called Fifty New Testament Stories for Storytellers.
Today's podcast is about Incarnation, which begins with Rob's poem of the same name:
Incarnation, by Rob James
Incarnation –
He came with a cry
that awakened the Universe, not in the thunder of a coronation,
but in the hush of a barn, where hands make straw into a cradle,
and a name is given the
Nameless.
The Word, whose syllables shaped galaxies,
now shapes hands in infant fists. Here is God in full circumference,
the circle of glory that holds stars
in their orbit;
here too, a mother's sigh, a bed of straw,
a lantern guttering against winter's teeth. Majesty has stooped,
and in stooping is not lessened but made strange, veiled,
a blazing sun learning to walk
under the humble skin of
ordinary things.
Most eyes would not see.
There is a carpenter and his wife,
and a baby, cause enough for joy.
But, they note the birthplace: insignificant, smelling of hay,
of travellers’ boots; nothing more than a peculiar
human birth,
if peculiar at all. But the light that wove the cosmos is
here.
Some have worked on their sight.
Others have been gifted it.
The shepherds, startled by angels,
are the first of the seeing;
then some foreigners come
to see and to give outlandish gifts;
later, fishermen will fish in the dark,
and land a glory
that amazes their nets.
A startling rule of incarnation:
the fullness of God most easily concealed.
For God does not
clothe glory in gold so emperors will bow;
but chooses a manger,
where lice and lullaby mix,
where a mother's breath
keeps time with the stars
the Word cast into space.
He must learn the geography of our skin,
and the dialect of our temptations.
God risks being unknown. To teach us how to be human,
God becomes human: not as an image
of what we might dream to be, but as the figure who bears our clay,
and our laughter.
Look at his childhood.
Physical learning of
saw, plane, lathe, hammer, nails, sweat.
Carpentry apprentice,
he learns the fashioning of wood
and of people,
as they come and go,
family, neighbours, customers. He grows in wisdom
measured in days of doing. If Heaven had taught him
by decree,
thin would the lesson have been.
God would not have learned it. Instead, the curriculum of human life, breaking bread with hands
that would be pierced. Scandal and the consolation:
God learns human craft the only way humans can learn it,
by living.
Perfection is not
in being less tempted,
less wounded. It is in being more human:
more obedient to mercy
than to appetite, more given to the poor
than to prestige,
more tender to broken things than to the pleasant, safe authorities of the world. Where the first Adam hardened
his will into an instrument for taking,
the second Adam bends
his will into a conduit
for living. First Adam learned to hide,
to cover his shame.
Second Adam walks toward shame
as toward a kind of school, not for humiliation but for education in love.
To be truly human
is to be drawn into this life, to let the Word
teach in our wounds,
to let divine steadiness be the language
we begin speaking,
even in our unsteady hearts.
And yet we are not
invited to become copies
of something unreachable, but forgiven forms of ourselves,
the selves for which we were
called into being.
Ourselves, repaired, redirected. Incarnation is pedagogy:
God showing with flesh and face what humanness looks like
when fear bows to faith, when power is veiled by service,
and the loudest voice is mercy.
This peculiar birth
lets Easter open. If the Word had never
taken on the manger, if God remained an untouchable brightness
beyond eyes and tongues, there could be no tomb
turned inside out with new light. Resurrection
is not rescue from distance;
it is the vindication of the Word's risk
of being bound in time
and blood. Christmas and Easter are but a single movement:
chords of one long song.
Alleluiah, Alleluiah, Alleluiah,
and even at the grave,
shall we make our song,
Alleluiah! Alleluiah! Alleluiah!
The road from cradle
to grave
twists beyond imagining.
Silence waits upon Golgotha, where the Word,
who spoke galaxies,
is muted by nails.
The Logos enwrapped
in the shroud of dust and derision. Pilate's questions,
soldiers' jeers,
the crowd's litany.
The Word is measured not in syllables
but in the heavy business of dying. ‘It is finished’.
A last syllable. A hush, as the Word is swallowed.
This is the horror and the heart.
Speech that created worlds is silenced.
Silent man,
silent God,
speaking in ways no rhetoric can.
The Word who once spoke ‘Let there be’,
is absent, yet
a seed sleeps;
the seed of an answering voice that will not be raised
by brute force but by
a different gravity, the pull of love that gathers
what violence scatters. When the stone rolls away,
it is not an escape,
but revolution, and revelation
that silence was pregnant with speech. The Word speaks again,
enwrapped in the love
that would not let abandonment
have the last note.
No idea was raised,
but a person. The same hands that
made infant fists,
smoothed rough carpenter's wood, felt the nails, are the hands
taking and eating fish,
for all to see.
Without the night of manger
there is no morning.
And he is the second Adam,
for he reenacts humanity
from the bottom up.
The second Adam comes not to erase but to recapitulate,
to take the story again, to bear the weight of temptation. Fully human,
not an actor wearing the mask of flesh, but humanity perfected, deepened, sharpened into the image of God, ‘in the beginning’.
The incarnation:
so bright it hurts.
It illumines ourselves,
finite and glorious, sinful and beloved. The true human does not deny limits,
but lets them be the raw material
for grace.
Where we break, the second Adam places his hands and heals.
Where we hide,
he dares to enter. We are apprenticed to a life
that begins at the manger and climbs to heights and depths of Golgotha.
And beyond. Every glimpse of him a threshold
to the mystery that remakes us,
a painful light we must look upon,
in a Universe reverberating
with his cry.
Dare we live such an incarnate life?
This podcast emerges from the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC, a centre that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, other religious traditions, and those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation.
What Matters Most is produced by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. The CCE is a centre at St. Mark’s College that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, members of other religious traditions, and from those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation. Our goal, then, is to talk to a lot of people, to learn from them, to listen to them, and to find out what motivates them, what gives them hope, what gives them peace, and what allows them to go out into the world to love their neighbors.
A few thanks are in order. To Martin Strong, to Kevin Eng, and to Fang Fang Chandra, the team who helps me bring this podcast to you, but also makes the CCE run so much more smoothly.
I also want to thank our donors to the Centre, whose generosity enables this work to take place at all: Peter Bull, Angus Reid, and Andy Szocs. We are thankful to their commitment to the life of the academic world and of the work of the Church in the world by funding the work of the CCE. I am also thankful to the Cullen family, Mark and Barbara, for their support of the ongoing work of the CCE through financial donations that allow us to bring speakers to the local and international arenas.
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Thanks again for listening and remember what matters most.
Director, Centre for Christian Engagement