Towards Maturity '06

Texts: 1 Samuel 2: 18-20, 26; Colossians 3: 12-17; Luke 2:41-52

Those who were here on Christmas Day may remember that I had with me a small passage from Carl Gustav Jung’s interpretation of the Nativity scene, which I suggested was quite helpful. It was helpful in two senses; first, because it gave me something to say on Christmas Day that I hadn’t said before; and, I thought, it was helpful in itself.

Jung suggested that the stable was a symbol of human wholeness, of personal integrity in the strict sense of that word. He pointed to the union of the divine and the human, of the conscious and the instinctual, and so on; and as we might expect from that great man, there was a lot of thought and insight in what he had to say.

However, since then I have had an opportunity to spend more time reflecting on his whole approach, and I’m not sure I now agree with it. At least, I don’t think I now agree quite so much with what I said on Christmas Day. And my present doubts are underlined for me by today’s readings.

There is a danger that if we follow Jung we will convert Jesus from a human being into a mere symbol; and however powerful and helpful symbols can be for us, it would surely be a mistake to replace Jesus the Man by Jesus the Symbol. It is as a fellow human being that Jesus stands before us and challenges us to become what he is. A symbol could never do that. It could help us to understand something about Jesus – it could provide an interesting analogy – it could stir our intellects to greater thought. But it could never do for us what Jesus himself does for us, and that is to show us what is possible. To show us the complete human life. To show us our full potential as human beings.

What Jesus’ life on earth does for us is to show us what we are capable of as human beings if we allow God’s Spirit to become incarnate in us as he was in Jesus. Jesus is God in the flesh, not a symbol in the flesh. Jesus is Jesus, not a symbol of something or someone else.

I am reminded of one of the poets whose work I’ve become quite interested in recently. He was an American, called William Carlos Williams, and perhaps his most famous poem is one called The Red Wheelbarrow. The whole poem has just 16 words: so much depends upon/a red wheelbarrow/glazed with rain water/beside the white chickens. That’s it – that’s the whole poem!

I must confess, when I first read it I thought he must have been a bit of a con-artist to have got so many people admiring his great skill in writing such a trite poem! But what he was doing was trying to raise a flag against our human habit of turning everything into a symbol of something else. Readers of a poem like his almost inevitably start asking themselves, what dopes it mean? What does the wheelbarrow represent? And we can get so clever and engrossed in our intellectual games of that kind that we fail to see the obvious point that Williams is making. The thing exists as a thing – not as a symbol of something else. The wheelbarrow is just that – a wheelbarrow. It is red. It is wet with rainwater. It is beside the white chickens.

Of course, things that exist in their own right can be used as symbols of something else. Safe driving at intersections would not be enhanced if drivers observed a red light, remarked to themselves that it is a red light, wet with rain and just above two other lights, and kept going. The red light is a red light, but it also has a message for us that we need to interpret. Williams’ point is that we should not see the symbol only and lose sight of the thing itself.

And there, it seems to me, is the danger in Jung’s approach to the Nativity scene. It encourages us to see the symbol and not the scene itself. It encourages us to see human wholeness symbolised for us, rather than lived out for us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Today’s readings offer us a helpful corrective here. Symbols don’t start off as babys, grow through various stages, and reach maturity over a period of years. Human beings do that, and we will lose sight of the human being before us if we are too quick to ask ourselves what he represents, what he is a symbol of, rather than who and what he is in himself.

However we are to understand the traditional teaching that Jesus’ birth (or, more correctly, his conception) was virginal, there can be no doubt that we are to understand that to Mary a human baby was born after a normal gestation period. And today, St Luke picks up this lovely little story in the First Book of Samuel and uses it to tell a similar story about the boy, Jesus. And while it appears on its surface to be a sort of boy-wonder story, what comes through to me anyway is St Luke’s subtle hint that Jesus wasn’t born as a complete package ready to go – a sort of compute program ready for installation.

Like every other baby he was born weak and vulnerable, and had a lot of growing up to do. By the age of twelve he had a startling knowledge of the Scriptures, but he still had a lot to learn. Unlike Samuel’s story, St Luke mentions that Jesus grew “in wisdom”, as well as physically, spiritually and socially. And perhaps even more radically, St Luke shows us that one of the things Jesus had to learn at the age of twelve was obedience to his parents. Like many a child before and since, Jesus had just scared his parents witless by going off on his own without telling them first. And compounding his error (at least, in my view) by giving his mother a rather cheeky reply.

St Luke, we remember, is the only one of the four gospel writers to give us this story. St Mark and St John shows no interest in Jesus’ birth and youth, and St Matthew tells us only of the flight into Egypt and the return of the family when the immediate danger had passed. He then leaps to John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism as a thirty-year old. The implication in each case is that Jesus did not become interesting until he began his public ministry – that he is interesting as teacher, healer, holy man, etc.

We need St Luke to remind us that people exist as people before they exist in terms of their roles, occupations, or whatever. St Luke is interested in Jesus as a complete human being – one who is carried by his mother in her womb for a full term, one who is born as we are, one who is nurtured and looked after, one who learns to walk and talk, and how to become a mature human being. It takes him 30 years. That’s because he is a real human being, not a symbol of one.

The same thing is shown of Samuel, one of the greatest men of faith in the Old Testament. And St Paul is giving a similar message to the infant church at Colossae . Grow up in godliness, he is saying to them. Clothe yourselves, and go on clothing yourselves, with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear, and go on bearing, with each other; forgive, and go on forgiving. Put on, and go on putting on, love. It all takes time, a lot of time.

In other words, we too, like Samuel and like Jesus, are called to grow in wisdom as well as stature, and in favour with God and people. As we do that so we become, not symbols of wholeness, but real, whole human beings.

May we continue to grow towards that maturity in 2007. Amen.