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The morning coffee break was all abuzz with conversation about Professor Wells's first Curry lecture this morning. I don't know why, but it's so easy for all of us to forget that who God is in God's very life is to be with. Sometimes when we think about the Trinity, we get into a kind of rut. We try to maybe diagram the right relationship between the Father, let's see the Son, the Holy Spirit.

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How are we going to order? Where do the arrows go? Who proceeds from whom? Who begets whom?

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Or maybe we give up on that, throw out the paper, and instead try to think of the perfect analogy for the Trinity. God is like a pie, one pie, three pieces. Or God is like H2O, water, steam, ice.

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Or God is like a family and so forth. I've even seen a book on how the Trinity is like an apple with flesh and skin and a core. Well, no analogy is possible. And in making these futile attempts to draw or to create analogies, we forget that the real point is just what Dr.

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Wells reminded us of, that to be with us isn't an afterthought on the part of God, because to be with is precisely who God is. We're looking forward to hearing more in this second lecture about how this God who is with God refuses to remain in God's own self-contained community. This God who is with God insists on sharing life with the likes of us.

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Please welcome again the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, our 2014 Curry Lecturer, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Wells. Well, thank you for that very thoughtful and kind introduction, and thanks for the stay-behinds who made it for this afternoon.

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I don't underestimate what it means to come to the 2:45 slot. We had a lecturer when I was an undergraduate called Callistos Ware, a great Orthodox theologian. And I remember him saying, I was in a lecture the other day, and I guess I must have fallen asleep.

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And I became aware that someone was speaking, and then I realized that it was me. So I don't underestimate what you're doing with me this afternoon. Having in my first lecture outlined what it means to describe God, the Holy Trinity, in the term being with, and having developed several dimensions of what being with involves, I now turn to the second aspect of being with, the relationship and presence of God to humankind and the creation. The lecture comes in three parts.

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First, a brief discussion of whom and what Jesus is with. Second, putting to work the dimensions set out in the previous lecture, a probing of how Jesus is with. And third, a brief account of the fruit of Jesus's being with us.

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And again, the handout that some of you picked up this morning should be helpful in getting you to navigate through this lecture. So first of all, whom Jesus is with. In simple terms, there are four answers, maybe 5, to the question of who Jesus is with. Jesus is with his own people, with the disciples, with the crowds, and with the authorities.

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We could also add with the good creation, but I haven't got time for the good creation today. I'm going to briefly investigate those four constituencies. So, first of all, the definitive experience in Nazareth with Jesus's own people. The definitive experience in Nazareth is the delivery of the so-called Nazareth Manifesto.

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The passage quoted from Isaiah 61 makes 5 proclamations. Jesus declares good news to the poor, Release to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the favour of the Lord. These all sound like...

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They sound like God acting on behalf of the people to release them from their chains to live in harmony and divine and human partnership. Jesus is talking about the social dimensions of the power of forgiveness. These are all areas where the poison of resentment and hard-heartedness and bitterness and cruelty has become encrusted in such a way as to leave whole swathes of people in prison, either literally or metaphorically.

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He's talking about jubilee, release from economic, legal, physical, and relational bondage. He's talking not just about resentment and guilt on an interpersonal level, but about prisons in which whole peoples put themselves, the paralysis of guilt felt by a whole race or a whole city or a whole gender. This is a comprehensive account of social bondage.

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Jesus is offering a personal, spiritual, social, political, psychological and physical vision. But what Jesus is not doing is outlining A4 programme to be carried out on behalf of the needy by those with a social conscience. So much is clear from his words, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. It's not talking about the future.

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It's talking about the fulfillment of something in the present. Jesus' presence fulfills all the promises of Isaiah. It's a call to each person and to the people of the occupied land of Israel to recognize that they are poor. They are

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in prison, that their body is in prison, that they are oppressed, that they cannot hide their lies and deceit from God. It's an invitation to each person and to the nation to be set free, to open their life to the most powerful force in the world, to receive forgiveness from God and one another, to enter the Jubilee year today. It's A proclamation of the hope that lies in the words, God is with us. Jesus' experience in Nazareth is a metaphor for the whole experience of his ministry.

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Nazareth is a symbol of Israel. But the conclusion of the story in which the people drive Jesus out of the town and lead him to the brow of the hill explicitly anticipates Jesus's final rejection. And thus Nazareth becomes a symbol of Jerusalem.

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The mysterious manner in which Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way evidently anticipates the resurrection and ascension. But in our terms, it can be read as affirmation that Jesus is committed to being with even people who find it disagreeable or intolerable to be with him. In such a way, Nazareth comes to represent not just the whole of Jesus' ministry, but the perpetual suffering presence of God before humankind.

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Nazareth is thus the template for all ways in which Jesus is with us, and discloses some of the complexity of what being with entails when it comes face to face with human sin. But there are three other contexts in which Jesus's ministry displays what it means for God to be with us. The first is Jesus's being with the disciples. Like Nazareth, the disciples dispel any assumption that regular, close, and sustained proximity to Jesus consolidates faith, eradicates discomfort, or removes misunderstanding.

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We can narrate the story of the disciples as their struggle to be with Jesus, to stay with him, most obviously in his passion, but more generally to keep pace with him in his vision, ethos and instructions. There is much here of working with. Jesus is like a community organiser, spending endless time in conversations, carefully correcting misinterpretations, testing out scenarios, upbraiding for inappropriate implementations.

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The disciples finally embody the paradox of God's being with us. The Old Testament is shaped around a lament that God is somehow not sufficiently with Israel, that the exile is not yet over, and Israel still cries out, how long? But when God is fully, utterly present to and with Israel, fully disclosed and in flesh and blood, somehow Israel finds it cannot fully be with God. The next constituency Jesus is with is the crowds.

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Despite their joy on Palm Sunday, the crowds turn against Jesus and demand that he be crucified. finally, taunting him on the cross. This amply demonstrates the dangers that lie in Jesus' being with us. Being with evokes not just rejection, but execution.

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Within the crowd, the Gospel writers isolate individuals who give texture and complexity to the crowds. Jesus is with the woman with haemorrhages, even though he is almost unaware of being so. Nonetheless, his being with her heals her. Jesus is approached among the crowds by penitents like Zacchaeus, demon-possessed figures like Legion, and chronically sick like the Ten Lepers.

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Each stranger that approaches Jesus in different ways challenges, affirms, or enriches the nature of the crowds and what it involves for Jesus to be with them. What these more personal encounters, particularly when taken together, suggest is that for members of the crowd, to be with Jesus is in some significant way to cease to be part of the crowd. The crowds are by no means always bad, and Jesus certainly has compassion for them, but Jesus never sweeps his hand over a great crowd and heals them all. To be with Jesus means an important detachment from the crowd,

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a forming of some kind of side channel. Being with Jesus seems to require some kind of face-to-face personal encounter. It's part of the healing, part of the conversion, that the person senses their uniqueness and is seen, touched, heard, recognised, accepted, forgiven, sent. With some, few exceptions, the authorities, the last group I'm going to look at,

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at the beginning of this lecture, the authorities, what John calls the Judeans, the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, the Herodians, together with their Roman masters, are hostile to Jesus. Here we discover what being with means when in the face of sustained antagonism. In his teaching, Jesus describes how to be with enemies. In his passion, he embodies it.

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He offers 7 actions that constitute what being with the enemy entails. From Luke chapter 6, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also. And from anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt.

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Give to everyone who begs from you, and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. What Jesus has just described is what is about to happen to him. Jesus went to the cross because he loved his enemies. As he went to the cross, he was hated, he was cursed, he was abused, he was struck, he was stripped of his clothes and humiliated.

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And yet at every step, he responded not with hatred, but with love. His sermon on the plain is a prediction of the passion. His passion is the embodiment of his teaching about being with the enemy.

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There's a lot more to say about that. You'll have to read the book. So I'm going to talk about the second area today, which is where I want to put together what I was offering this morning in terms of those 8 dimensions, and you've got them on your handout if you need to refer to them. If you get a little bit lost in what I'm going to be doing,

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for the next 10 minutes or so. I want to put what I did this morning together with what I've just done this afternoon and talk about in the second section how Jesus is with. I guess you could call this the performance of the life of the Trinity in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The purpose of the previous lecture was threefold, to examine how deeply the notion of being with is rooted in the life of the Trinity, to explore the dimensions of being with when unencumbered by sin, lack, deficit, scarcity, perversity or vice, and to enumerate eight of these dimensions, not exhaustively or definitively, but elusively and cumulatively.

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Having set out the contours of whom Jesus is with, and begun to see what happens to the notion of being with when it encounters oppression, cruelty and violence, it's time to discover how Jesus is with us by putting the 8 dimensions of being with to work. So #1, Jesus is with us first of all by being present to us. This is the principal and most significant element of the incarnation.

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God is with us. not far away, not simply for us, but near, here, tangibly with us. Surin Kierkegaard tells the story of a king who has everything, but who loves a lowly maiden, a person without fame or fortune or fine features or fair favor. How is the king to win this lowly maiden's love?

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He considers using his money, influence, and power. He could communicate to her, probably through an emissary, that she is his chosen one, and she would be lifted from obscurity and brought to him like a banquet on a platter. But he realises that this would provide him with her body, but not her soul, her will, or her heart.

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She would have no agency, no say in the question. He would remain A tyrant at worst, or a benefactor at best. So he has a second idea, to raise her to his social level and so overcome the distance between them. But he realizes all she would know of him is his wealth and grandeur.

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If she came to love him, he would never really know why. A third, much riskier plan emerges. He could remove the trappings of majesty and adopt the clothes of a poor man. Then she would truly be choosing him for the right reasons.

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how could real love begin with so giant a lie? Thus there is only one way to realise his desires. He must become like the one he loves. He must become poor.

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Thus God in Christ set aside the trappings of majesty, and while never ceasing to be a king, was voluntarily stripped of all the comforts and acclaim and protection we associate with the kingly picture of God. When he stood on trial before Pilate, when he hung naked on the cross, Christ had nothing left but his love of us. This is a parabolic rendering of the nature of being with, of God being with us. In Luke's description of the crucifixion, the leaders, the soldiers, and the first thief all goad Jesus into going back to being the king in his castle.

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The king who can remove the mask and snap his fingers and use power and influence to fix everything. Come down from the cross, they say. Save yourself and us. Only the second thief understands what almost everyone in the gospel's stories missed.

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Not only that this truly is the king, but also that this king has laid aside his majesty because of love for people just like these two between whom he's being crucified. Here, at the moment of greatest rejection and greatest sacrifice and greatest agony, finally Jesus sees the glory of being loved in return. Paradise breaks through.

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when for the first time someone looks at Jesus and sees not the opportunity of what Jesus can do for them, but the sheer joy of his being with them. The poignancy of that discovery, coming at the most utterly horrific moment in the history of the universe, is the heart of the mystery of God being with us. At this most precious, most painful, most intimate moment of loving and dying, finally the lowly maiden responds to the king and says, Jesus, remember me. It is the only moment in all four Gospels when anyone simply calls our Lord by his simple name, Jesus.

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With has done its work. In that simple, naked name, humanity has finally, in the form of this dying thief, realised what the whole story, the whole parable of the Bible was about. It is the epitome of with, a glimpse of paradise.

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Number 2, when it comes to attention, the passion offers positive and negative models of what being with means in the face of Jesus' male and female disciples. One negative model is the disciples in Gethsemane. When the 11 remaining disciples get to Gethsemane, 8 stay near the edge of the garden while Jesus takes 3 with him to the place where he is going to pray. Here we see more than a hint of two levels of discipleship, those who are with Jesus and those who are with Jesus to the end.

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Jesus gives Peter, James and John the privilege of being close to him at this most tortured moment of his life. in this most intimate exchange between him and his father, where he says, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. But Jesus also expects more of these three disciples than of the others. The fact that Peter, James and John fell asleep has been held against them and seen as a sign of the church's faithlessness for 2,000 years.

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By contrast, several women offer what the male disciples, it seems, cannot. The woman at Bethany came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head, thus anointing Jesus for his burial. She has been with Jesus in a way the regular disciples have not. Her attention has made her realise what the other disciples have missed.

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Thus, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her. Likewise, in Matthew's account, women were with... us in loving attention at three key moments of his passion. At his death, many women were also there looking on from a distance.

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At his burial, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there sitting opposite the tomb. And as soon as the Sabbath was over, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. Attention is not restricted to the intensity of the moment. It also means sustained engagement with detail, appropriateness, and fittingness.

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Thus, Jesus's post-resurrection conversation with Peter exhibits attention to precise details. Three times, Jesus says, Simon, son of John, do you love me? This threefold commission mirrors the threefold denial in the high priest's courtyard. Jesus precisely addresses the depth of Peter's betrayal through the manner of his restoration.

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Likewise, the Samaritan woman exclaims, he told me everything I have ever done. Attention includes attention to sin as well as attention to creative wonder. Turning to #3, mystery. The transfiguration discloses both positive and negative aspects of how mystery is integral to being with.

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The story begins as a statement about the degree to which Jesus is with Peter, James and John. Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. The disciples see the mystery within the reality of God's presence in Jesus. He was transfigured before them

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and his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white. The veil is removed and humanity comes face to face with the glory of God. But then a further element of with emerges. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah talking with him.

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Jesus is always understood in conversation with the law and the prophets. Jesus is always with Scripture, with Israel, with the liberation of the Exodus and with the struggle of the people to be faithful in settled times. But quickly, a negative aspect it surfaces.

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Peter said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will make 3 dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. Once again, the disciples cannot fully grasp what it means to be with Jesus. They see a problem and miss the mystery.

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But mystery is reasserted in what happens next. Suddenly, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, this is my son, the beloved, with him I am well pleased. Listen to him. Listening distills the essence of being with in the presence of mystery.

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Peter's response discloses an impulse toward working for. He is out of his depth and reverts to the safest mode of engagement. But the added mystery of the cloud and the voice is something that cannot be managed. It must simply be enjoyed.

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The disciples, however, do not enjoy it. They fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. It takes Jesus to be with them in a much more tangibly incarnate, reassuring way to make the mystery one they can truly enter. Jesus came and touched them, saying, get up,

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and do not be afraid. What the story has given us is a vivid portrayal of the mystery of Jesus's being with us, with the law and the prophets, and with God, all at the same time, and an invitation to us to enter that mystery. It demonstrates how much we resist doing so, and how Jesus finds a way to be with us regardless. The key features of #4, delight, are eschatological joy and reciprocal mutuality.

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The most widespread portrayals of these characteristics come in shared meals and in the parables. Once again, the examples are negative as well as positive. Thus, the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12 demonstrates the wrong kind of delight in its lack of mutuality. The rich man has a conversation with himself.

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He has no one to have a conversation with, no one whose wisdom he seeks out, no one for whom he feels responsible, no one to whom he regards himself as accountable. He's alone, surrounded by money and food and resources, but starved of people and of love. The rich man finds a way to cushion himself from contingency and thereby insulate himself from dependence on other people and dependence on God. Bigger barns.

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He talks about a party. Eat, drink and be merry, he says, but he has no one to attend the party but himself. It is a ghastly parody of heaven, with no God, no companions and no eternity. It is delight without eschatological joy and reciprocal mutuality.

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The rich man is a fool because he thinks he can obtain security by insulating himself from God and other people. It turns out that by doing so he's put himself in solitary confinement now and forever. Other parables demonstrate the delight of being with and the grief of not being so. The parable of the prodigal son

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articulates the joy of the restoration of with. Bring out a robe, the best one, and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, and get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.

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It also shows the agony of the elder sons not being with the father. Despite the latter's plaintive words, son, you are always with me. and all that is mine is yours. Telling of the delight of the shepherd at its found sheep and the woman at her found coin, Jesus exclaims, just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over 1 sinner who repents.

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Here is the camaraderie of the delight of being with, together with its eschatological anticipation. Perhaps the most vivid contrast of delight and despair is the story of Dives and Lazarus. By failing to be with Lazarus at a time when only the dogs were willing to be with Lazarus, indeed by erecting significant barriers to render it impossible to be with Lazarus, Dives makes it impossible to be with Lazarus eternally when Lazarus has the company and is with Abraham. By calling on Abraham to send Lazarus, first to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool Dive's tongue, and 2nd to warn Dive's brothers of the impending fate that awaits them, Dive shows how even in extremis he has no notion of a reality that contains any notion of being with, only of a social arrangement made-up of working for relationships in which Lazarus remains his slave.

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Jesus' meals are a tour through many features of delight in positive and negative aspects. One he shares with Zacchaeus, evoking considerable controversy, to which Jesus responds, today salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham, for the son of man came to seek out and to save the lost. We've already noted the contrast between his reception by the notorious woman and by Simon the Pharisee at dinner. The Last Supper is a poignant study in being with.

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Jesus immerses himself in the company of his disciples. I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. Here there may not be joy, but there is certainly eschatological anticipation. Yet there is also pain, but see, the one who betrays me is with me,

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and his hand is on the table. Thus being with brings out the complexity and the multidimensionality of what is taking place at the Last Supper. The most explicit account of #5, participation in the Gospels, is the temptation narrative. The question asked by Satan is, are you going to be with your people or not?

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Each of the temptations is a proposal for Jesus to work for Israel rather than be with Israel. And each offers a much more comfortable ride than the journey to which Jesus is called. Being with Israel is a rather greater challenge than working for Israel. Thus the first temptation is, if you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.

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This promises to give relief to Jesus in his desert hunger. It also promises to deliver Israel from its apparent scarcity. It's dependent on food and supplies and farming. Jesus chooses to be with, the real work of atonement does not take place between God and the devil, but in the inner Trinitarian relations.

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The inner life of God, Jesus' struggle, His being not with the Father at the crucial moment and yet still being with us, however firmly we rejected him before finally being with the Father again in the resurrection, this struggle is done on our behalf. It is an act, the act of working for, the paradigmatic moment of working for that enables, inaugurates all subsequent being with, on God's part and ours. God being with God, God being with us, and our being with one another.

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But working for should not have the last word. It's important to understand the telos of working for. Just as creation was a divine working for, making the universe that was wholly designed to bring about being with, God being with us, so cross and resurrection was similarly a divine working for, wholly designed to bring about being with. Salvation is not a problem for...

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fixed. Humanity is not left to continue as before, like a household whose drain is fixed by a plumber and can happily wash dishes and take a shower once again. Salvation is a mystery entered. Humanity may have thought its problem was mortality, but in Jesus it discovers its curse is isolation from God and one another.

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And through Jesus, humanity finds the way to overcome isolation and thus discover the gift of resurrection, being with God and one another forever. Such is the truth and the gift and the legacy of God's being with us. Thank you.