Our kinde Lord

Some of the earliest writings in the English language come from a number of contemplatives, who lived in the fourteenth century: there is the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. There is Richard Rolle, a hermit who lived in South Yorkshire. There is Julian of Norwich, an anchoress who lived in one of the parish churches in Norwich and who was one of the first women to write in English. Margery Kempe, a contemporary of Julian, wrote the first autobiography in English. These contemplatives bear witness to a rich and vibrant tradition in English Spirituality – a tradition which we have largely forgotten. 

It is to Julian of Norwich that we owe a series of revelations of divine love. In one of these Shewings, Julian uses an extraordinary phrase to describe the way in which God takes on human flesh in the mystery of Christmas, the doctrine of the incarnation. She refers to ‘that blessed kynde, that he toke of the maiden’, the humanity which he took from his mother Mary. Christ is ‘our kind’, a human being like us, and by extension ‘our kin’. When Julian refers to Christ as ‘our kinde Lord’, we assume that she means that Jesus is gentle and tender, meek and mild, but she is saying much more than that. She is saying that ‘Christ is our kin – our kind’. This is the mystery of the Word made flesh, of God incarnate. This is the revelation of divine love.

It is the same insight, that accent on the incarnation, that inspired Desmond Tutu in the latter years of the twentieth century to oppose apartheid with every fibre of his being. I remember Tutu preaching in this church. Confronted by the evil of apartheid, he saw that not only was our common humanity at stake, but also two essential elements of Christian orthodoxy were also at stake, the doctrine of the incarnation, and the insight that in every single person we see the unique and unrepeatable image of God. We should not underestimate the significance of this insight in the genealogy of Western thought, It is one of the elements which has sustained our understanding of human dignity, and our conception of human rights.

But we live in a society in which we are so easily seduced by the compulsion to hold people apart, and to use the rhetoric of identity to diminish and threaten the humanity of others. We see this in our own defensiveness in the face of unpredecented migration, a consequence of conflict and environmental change and economic instability. We see it in the strident and sometimes unedifying voices of social media. We see it in the many conflicts taking place in the world today. 

The good news announced by the angels in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus is not simply there to comfort and console us. It should challenge us - to reflect not only on the moral resources, but also the theological resources, we need to confront the challenges of conflict, division and violence in the world today, whether it is on the streets of Gaza, or the oblasts of Ukraine. 

In the Christmas story, we hear the faint echo of Isaiah’s prophecy: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.’ That accent on peace we find again in Luke’s account of the angels, who sing to the shepherds, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.’ Luke reminds us that at the heart of the Christian faith is a vision of peace, which begins not by seeking the protection of a strong man, or by barricading ourselves from one another, but by acknowledging the vulnerability of a tiny defenceless child. He invites us to confront our shared fragility, recognizing our need of one another – instead of falling back on our fearful attempts to be safe at the expense of the other.

As we gaze upon the child in the manger, we receive an intimation of what peace might mean for us. As we contemplate the face of ‘our kinde Lord’, our kin, perhaps we may hear again the message of the angels, and discover again the profound challenge at the heart of the mystery of the incarnation, that God invites us to be kind.