Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?
It is an epiphany story. The only story of the boyhood of Christ speaks directly to our being a school, a place where a culture of learning is respected and sought. Jesus at the age of twelve is “found … in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions.” We are in the presence of mysteries. How do we think God?
Only by being in a place of learning. From the classical and orthodox perspective, this story is about Jesus as the Divine Teacher and the human student. Something about God is revealed to us through the humanity of Jesus, the Divine Son. His reply to Mary reveals his mission. I love the King James translation here following Tyndale. “Wist ye not?” Did you not know? Wist reflects the Germanic influence on English going back to Anglo-Saxon or Old English, to a form of the German verb wissen, to know. Jesus is emphatic that he has come for a purpose that has to do with his heavenly Father; in short, with God. He is, in every sense, teaching us about his purpose and in turn about who God is in himself and who he is for us. Powerful lessons that carry over into the other story read this week, the miracle story at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee.
It is the “beginning of signs”, John tells us, the first of the miracles which reveals the real purpose and meaning of the miracle stories, all our skepticisms notwithstanding. The miracles are really about the good which God seeks for our humanity, a good which is not just about the healing of infirmities but about what we are healed for. And what is that? God seeks our social joys. Our good is ultimately found in our fellowship with God and with one another. The things of the world are used to open us out to the things of God. We participate in God sacramentally and intellectually. But only by being taught and by acting upon what we learn.
There is always the sense in which what we are taught carries over into our lives of service. One of the windows in the Chapel nave is the Buckle window, dedicated to Pa Buckle after whom Buckle House is named. That window depicts one aspect of the story of Christ being found in the temple in Jerusalem and then going down to Nazareth with Joseph and Mary; Mary “keeping in her heart” what Jesus said about his purpose. As Luke puts it “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature”, humanly speaking. But something else is being signalled, namely the things that belong to our knowledge of God.
Another window in the Chapel speaks to that educational aspect. It is the Anselm window which depicts a late eleventh, early twelfth century figure, Anselm of Canterbury, ‘the Father of Scholasticism’. Under his figure are his famous words, a kind of version of Plato’s thinking, fides quaerens intellectum which means faith seeking understanding. Opinion or faith is not ignorance but neither is it completely knowledge. We are always on this path from opinion to knowledge, from faith to understanding, learning how to think God.
Common to Jews, Christians and Muslims is the idea that “there is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts and passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things, both visible and invisible” (Art. 1, 39 Articles). It is a way of thinking about God that draws upon the intellectual traditions that arise out of ancient Greece. It is a profoundly intellectual way of thinking about the reality of God as altogether other than us and our world and yet intimately connected to our world which depends entirely upon God as its principle. The distinctive Christian understanding builds on this: “and in unity of this Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Such a viewpoint derives explicitly from God’s intimate engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ, the one who “must be about my father’s business”.
We are bidden to think God. But how? One way is negative theology which distinguishes God from us and everything else in the created order. God is more rightly said to be nothing, meaning no thing as that upon which all other things depend. The other way is through positive theology, noting the analogies of being: God is like this and that. Important ways that need to be kept in tension and in balance in a kind of dance, the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology (negative and positive respectively). Anselm points out that one way to think God’s existence is through the exercise of human reason in its highest potentiality of thinking on things that are above our reason. Looking for an idea of God’s existence worthy of the otherness of God, he says that the logic came to him, meaning that it is not something which he simply invented. God, he says, in his famous (or infamous) ‘ontological argument’ (linking being and knowing) is that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” because “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” cannot not exist otherwise it would not be “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” If your head is spinning, it should be!
Others, like Averroes and Aquinas, argue from nature to that upon which the contingent world necessarily depends and without which there would be nothing. Contingent things have no necessity to their being; they could be otherwise than they are or not at all; hence, if all there is is contingency, then there would be nothing. Contingent existences depend upon a necessary existent principle, God. For Aquinas, largely following Aristotle, one can reason from the world to a divine principle. The existence of God is self-evident in itself, he says, alluding to Anselm’s argument, but not to us.
These are all examples of what it means to think God in the ways in which the scholastic traditions have passed on to us. They require our attention, our being willing to hear and ask questions, the very things that belong to the life of an intellectual community, a school. A learning too which is ethical in terms of our commitment to the service and good of others, captured in the School’s motto: Deo Legi Regi Gregi – for God, for the Law, for the King and for the People.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy