On Friday I witnessed a little incident on the High Street, involving two cars.  The driver of one reversed out from a parking place without considering the traffic flow and almost collided with another car coming along the High Street.  The driver of the other car sounded his horn as a warning – a perfectly legitimate use of the horn.  Immediately the driver of the reversing car hit his own horn and kept blasting it.  As the other car passed, and without any regard for the cars also coming along the High Street, the driver reversed out of the parking place with a dramatic screech of tyres. He then proceeded to tail-gate the other car, all the time sounding his horn angrily. How an accident was avoided was a matter of providence.  This was Neanderthal Man at his best. Mr Macho strutting his stuff and behaving in a thoroughly uncivilized way.  And it got me thinking that actually, as a race, in certain circumstances we can quickly regress to our primitive state.

At a time when we hear of continued violence in our inner cities – knifings, stabbings and only the other day a spray of bullets from an automatic weapon killing an innocent youth, the High street car driver joins the ranks of the violent. The car he was supposedly in charge of was, as all cars are, a lethal machine, and driven carelessly, is as dangerous to human life as the knife carried by an increasing number of young people in our cities.  Of course, this was polite and nice Epping so perhaps it was doubly shocking. I must admit I had a moment of despair.

We seem to have come a long way as a human race and believe that we are civilized and developed creatures but it takes very little to return us to what is described sometimes as our ‘animal’ state – the undeveloped primate who like other animals attacks aggressively, defends territory and struts and preens itself in the hope of being seen as impregnable and dominant.  This kind of aggression lies at the root of so many ills in our Society and in the world.  We see it at work in people like Robert Mugabe and in the Chinese oppression of Tibet; in the Taliban in Afghanistan – and actually anywhere where there is conflict. It is just as strong in localised disputes between neighbours, in school playgrounds and in the incident on the High street.  Whenever such behaviour surfaces we might call it a giving in to our baser instincts or in biblical theological terms, our Lower nature.

This pre-supposes that we have a Higher Nature – something within us which counteracts against the things that drag us down.  Christians believe that we have a spiritual nature and this acts in the opposite direction of our baser nature.  In Christianity we have tended to think in terms of our being both Body and Soul with a third element Mind connecting the two. Without anticipating Trinity Sunday we can be seen as Trinitarian beings.

The function of the mind can be seen as acting upon our Body which stimulates our instincts – including the defensive ones which result in working for our self-preservation, survival and ultimately turns us in on ourselves making us truly self-centred or selfish.  On the other hand, the mind can take us into the realm of the spiritual where we turn away from a self-centred approach to life towards a life of serving others and of working for the well-being of all and of seeking a higher vision. In religious terms this could be thought of as turning ourselves God-ward.

The division between the body and the soul has, at various times in church history, been quite pronounced so that there has been an emphasis on the distinction between flesh (body) and spirit.  This has led to all sorts of restrictive theologies based primarily on telling us that the flesh is bad and the spirit is good.  This was particularly fertile ground for reformation Protestantism and for Victorian Hell-fire preachers.  However, there is a danger in this because to divide flesh from spirit is actually a denial of the Incarnation. In the Christmas event Jesus became flesh – a human being with all the bodily needs that a human being has.  He did not have a dual nature which he switched between like a train moving across the points onto another track. He didn’t lead on the one hand a Physical life and on the other a spiritual one.

One of the important things about the Resurrection stories is that he was able to cook fish, eat it and be present with his disciples. We Christians believe in the resurrection of the Body. Yet we also know that the resurrection Body whilst the same was also different – he could walk through doors into locked rooms.  Even so, in his earthly life he was the same as we are – he cried, was sad; laughed, celebrated, even got angry: he ate, debated; touched others -He enjoyed life and lived it to the full.  Whilst we do not doubt his Divinity – that he is indeed God we also rightly claim that he was fully and totally human. One respected theologian of the early Church, Tertullian, went so far as to say:

If Christ’s being flesh is found to be a lie, then everything that he did was done falsely.

Christ was both flesh and spirit and his physical and spiritual natures acted in unison. He was everything that a human being should be.  The theology which asks us to deny our bodies is a very dangerous one because it ultimately asks us to deny our humanity.  Early and deeply respected Christian teachers knew nothing of this division. St Ignatius spoke of 'the Glory of God is human beings fully alive' and this view is echoed in teacher after teacher of his period.

The Unity of body and spirit was something the poet T S Eliot wrote about when he said, in his Choruses from the Rock:

For Man is joined spirit and body,
and therefore must serve as spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;
visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;
You must not deny the body.

There is a reminder here that the body is the temple of the Spirit of which St. Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 6:19.  However, what Paul is saying in this part of his letter is that we mustn’t give in to those things that desecrate both body and spirit and that, collectively, is sin.  To say that we must not deny the body is not to give us a licence to sin. Quite the opposite.  The car driver and all of us, at differing times, who behave selfishly and sinfully are not actually honouring the body. We are giving in to base instincts which disfigure the image of God within us. That was what caused my moment of despair on the High Street.  The excuse we often make when we behave in a bad way is to shrug our shoulders and say, 'Well, what do you expect, I’m only human'.  We make weakness our excuse because we assume that to be human is to be flawed, imperfect and excusable.   The truth is the opposite.

When we behave in that sort of way we are being less than human and to understand that we have to look again at Jesus who was truly human.  He was perfect, unflawed, humanity. He was what we must become and St Irenaeus got it right when he said:

'God became what we are that he might in the end make us what he is'.

True humanity requires us to be more human, not less and the more human we become the more like Christ we are. That is the potential we aspire to.  What makes this possible is what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel. It is Love.

God’s love for us is understood by those who try to love God in Jesus Christ. The perfect humanity of Jesus is shot through with Love.  It was this Love that ultimately paid the price of human unloving through giving himself in sacrifice on the Cross and what he offers us there, as in his earthly life and very much in his risen life, is Love.  God’s love, freely given, which when received burns out everything that is not love in our lives.

Those who behave aggressively towards others; those who act violently towards others; those who speak harshly of others; who use others to bolster their own inadequate personality; who score points off others; those who deny others freedom and human rights; those who bully or oppress others; and so and so on are all failing in love and are all failing to be human.  Measured against the perfect, loving humanity of Christ they are not fit to be called human beings at all!  What makes us human is not aggression and violence nor is it exploitation and self-centredness.  What makes us human is our capacity to love and to accept that love is costly and demands real effort.

In our Lord’s case it cost not less than everything to use another phrase of T S Eliot. His humanity was expressed in total love and total self-giving and it revealed His Divinity.  He was most Godly when he was most lovingly human – and that is a truth we all need to learn. 

Now, of course, I can collude with those who say that when they behave in an unloving way they are simply being human – I can collude with this because I, like all of you, am not always as loving as I ought to be or even, at times, as I want to be.  We’ve all been in situations where we’ve come away and kicked ourselves for saying or doing something to others which we instantly regret. We all know failure in human relationships whether it be with those we profess to care most about or whether it be a casual encounter – a traffic warden, say or a shop assistant who has been less than helpful.   Maybe the car driver who behaved aggressively regretted it later. One can but hope.

So we all have a distance to go if we are to become pure love and always act lovingly in some situation. What we mustn’t do is stop trying and we mustn’t allow ourselves to get away with excuses. Also, we mustn’t h wallow in guilt and believe that we are unredeemable. That is self-centred too and denies Christ’s ability and willingness to save us.  What we must do, therefore, is turn to Christ who was as human as we are yet, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it, was without sin. Even so, he is able to sympathize with our weaknesses and he deals gently with us.  In other words he will always show us love and as today’s Gospel tells us, it is in loving us that he reveals himself to us and within that revelation should come the knowledge that :

Being loved by God and striving to live lovingly in the strength of Jesus Christ is actually what makes us truly human.