KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 22 January
Who is this?
Yearning for miracles is not the same thing as learning from miracles. The readings in Chapel of late have been about what is learned about God and about his will for our humanity. The miracles are not something accidental to that interest but belong fundamentally to it. The miracles teach. They do so, in part, by way of questions.
“Who is this?” A great question wonderfully explored in the hymn sung in Chapel on Monday and Tuesday where the first phrase of each four verses is the question, “who is this?” and which is repeated in the third verse. Thus, five times the question is raised “who is this?” in relation to the Christian story of the significant moments in the life of Christ. In each of the four verses of the hymn, there is a response, an answer given at the beginning of the second quatrain of every verse: “‘Tis our God.”
The question is at once an Advent and an Epiphany question albeit in different ways. In Advent, the whole city of Jerusalem was moved at the spectacle of Christ’s triumphant entry into the city to ask this question, “Who is this?” It is raised in the context of the one who comes to our world. In the Epiphany we have the same question, “Who is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?” It is in the context of a story, a remarkable story about Christ rebuking the wind and calming the sea in the midst of a ship in a storm. The difference between the Advent question and the Epiphany question is that the latter is about an awakening that happens from within the conditions of our natural world, a world, too, of tempests and storms. There are not only the storms of nature but also the storms and tempests of the human heart and mind. What is so amazing about this story is the idea that God cares.