The Divine Universe

Forever and ever – endless time. But what is time? We all know what time feels like, but we can’t really define it. Poets have described it as flowing like a river, but many philosophers and scientists believe that this is an illusion: it’s just the way our brain works. Our mental apparatus and our senses combine to generate a sense of a present, memory of a past and expectation of a future. But suppose past, present and future are simply constructs of our brain and senses. Suppose that the whole of time simply is, a dimension of an infinite universe.

Since Einstein’s theories of relativity were generally accepted, we no longer think of time as separate from space. Scientists and mathematicians see the universe as a four-dimensional continuum that they call space-time. The reason we separate space and time is because we perceive those dimensions with different physical and mental faculties. We measure space and time in very different ways. But, like time, the whole of infinite space simply is. When I talk about time, I am really talking about space-time: both the “where” and “when” of things.

The universe – the totality of existence in God – is, I believe, infinite, but we observe only a limited amount of it. By looking deep into space with the Hubble telescope astronomers can see about ten billion light-years. That is a measurement that combines space and time, and it’s the distance light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second in a year. That’s a long way.

When they look into distant space, astronomers are looking into the past because the light from what they see has taken time to get here. Even when we look at the sun we see it where it was about eight and a half minutes ago. So looking into space astronomers can see bits of the whole history of the universe for ten billion years. They see the most distant visible galaxies as they were ten billion years ago.

Einstein pointed out that it makes no sense to ask what those distant universes are like now. We can only say that their now is different from ours. There is no universal now. That ten billion-year-old universe is part of our now, so, in a sense, it still exists. The past continues to exist. We are, in fact, part of the Big Bang in extended time. The glowing embers are still visible to astronomers. They’re called the cosmic microwave background.

The dinosaurs are also still with us in the form of fossils. But that is not their past; it is their future! By deduction, we can also know something of our own future, and some of us may one day be dug up as fossils in someone else’s now.

But what about God? People often ask, “Does God know the future?” But, for God, there is no past, present and future; that is a human perception. For God there is the eternal, dynamic now. “But,” you will object, “If God knows our future then it is all fixed.” Not so. Nothing in the eternal now is fixed. It is a work in progress. It is God’s work: nurturing and bringing to perfection the eternal now.

God is working on what we call our future, but we need to say something about God’s way of working. The world we know seems at times so out of control, so dangerous and, at times, brutal. No human parent is as permissive as God. God has given the children he has born a quite terrifying degree of freedom.

I don’t only mean human free will. Last century scientists became increasingly interested in the subatomic world, and they discovered a disconcerting weirdness. The most basic ingredients of matter did not obey the normal rules of cause and effect. Things happened spontaneously, without any discoverable cause. They could only estimate the probability of some particle being at a particular place or having a certain motion. Quantum mechanics was invented as a branch of statistical mathematics that makes possible the creation of things like computers and mobile phones where things like electrons and photons have to be organized.

God knows the future, but he does not directly create it. He creates, gives birth to a self-creating universe. Like a loving and generous father, God gives his Son, in whom and through whom all things exist, complete freedom. In spite of the thousands of legends and experiences that suggest otherwise, I believe God is non-interventionist.

God’s passivity in the face of human disasters is often shocking and confusing to us, and the unexpected benevolence of nature is sometimes amazing. God does nothing to stop the carnage of war across the world, but a cancer unexpectedly and spontaneously goes into remission. God suffers in all such situations because everything is in God, but the power of his love is exercised at a deeper level than natural law. It is an influence to perfection, imperceptible in the short term, recognizable in the process of evolution and social development. I believe things can be loved into goodness and truth, and that that is what God is doing.

The dimension of time is essential in God’s chosen way of working. Loving his incarnate self, the Son, the cosmic Christ, happens in time. But we shouldn’t imagine God acting or reacting moment by moment as we do. God feels and loves the whole of time. He feels all the events of eternity. And we freely and voluntarily contribute our own little bit to those events.

We are helping to build what we think of as the future. In this mortal state we move through a small segment of the universal and eternal here and now. What we do generates joy and pain in a social and material environment – our small segment of space-time. And this is all in God and in God’s all-embracing and loving nature.

Paul told the Ephesians and the Colossians to live wisely, making the most of the time. In this life we are given a small section of eternity to care for and tend. In relative terms it is a very tiny segment, but it matters to God what we do with it, and the prophets and Jesus have all warned that it matters to us also. In this life we seem able to isolate ourselves from God’s feelings, even though we are in and of God. In eternity we will not, I suspect, be able to do that. And time is of the essence.

The reason I have called this blog The Divine Universe is that I believe that matter, the physical world, is sacred. This is clearly implied in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, invented in the 3rd century by Tertullian and adopted as a universal dogma by the Council of Nicea in 325. Tertullian referred to three ‘persona’ of God: God in his essential and primordial being – the “Father”, God incarnate, embodied in the physical world – the “Son”, and God as the ubiquitous field of psychic energy, giving life and mind to the universe, the persuasive voice of God, leading everything towards ultimate perfection – the “Holy Spirit”.

Jesus is often spoken of as God incarnate but the incarnation of God is infinitely more than that. St Paul, in his Letter to the Colossians, declares that, in Christ, “All things in heaven and earth were created, things visible and invisible . . . . All things have been created in him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” St John, in the prologue to his Gospel, refers to Jesus as the Word (Logos) of God. He wrote: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being.” In his address to the crowd in the Aereopagus Paul said that the “unknown God” (his God) was the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Today we would call Paul a panentheist, one who believes that everything is in God.

The Nicene Creed refers to the Son as being “begotten by the Father before all worlds.” God did not manufacture the world that is his incarnate body; he gave birth to it. And creation (we should say procreation) did not end after six days’ labour several thousand years ago; it goes on still. God gives birth to everything, continuously until the end of time.

St Augustine taught that God created the world from nothing, ‘ex nihilo’. We cannot conceive of nothingness as a region in which even God is excluded. Nothing means nothing-except-God. This means that, in giving birth to the world, God had no raw material except himself. The world is not only in God; as Paul said, it is also of God.

All this contributes to my belief in the sacredness of the physical world of matter and energy, time and space. And I see this belief as being very powerfully expressed in the Eucharist. In declaring the basic elements of food and drink as being his body and blood, Jesus makes a powerful theological statement.

I don’t think his intention was to create a tightly focussed local presence through a kind of magical spell cast by authenticated magicians. I hope there is no such caricature in anyone’s mind. Though I may be wrong, I suggest that Jesus saw the food and drink at the last supper as a typical example and a universal symbol of all matter, especially that with which we have the most intimate relationship possible. Paul and John affirmed that Christ or the Word is in everything but this has a particularly powerful impact when we think of it as referring to what we eat and drink.

In the earliest account of the last supper (in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians), when Jesus gives the disciples the wine he says, “Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.” Rather than an instruction for a religious ritual, it sounds more like a general reference to drinking. If the words “as often as” apply to the bread as well, it implies that we should think of God incarnate in everything we eat and drink.

There are many occasions in the New Testament, including Jesus’ own quoted words, that suggest that Christ is present everywhere and in everything. This does not only apply to the world after Jesus’ birth. In John’s prologue, already quoted, he states that God was incarnate in the Word “in the beginning”. Paul goes further, saying Christ was “before all things”.

However, we must not underestimate the central significance of Christ’s incarnation in Jesus. Our relationship to the rest of creation is epitomised in the relationship of the people of his own time to Jesus. There were some who treated him with great reverence, a few who even recognised him as the Christ, the Son of God. But they were in a minority. The bulk of society were apathetic except insofar as he could be of benefit to themselves. The religious and political leaders even saw him as an enemy to be conquered.

These three responses reflect today’s attitude to the people and things around us – our environment. A few, regarded often as tiresome eccentrics, have a real reverence for humankind and nature. The majority are interested in people and things principally for their usefulness. A few see other people and nature as enemies to be conquered and controlled. Much scientific endeavour is channelled towards the conquest and exploitation of nature and natural resources. Much of business and politics is directed to the same aim with regard to people. It is not too much to say that, at times, huge numbers of people are, metaphorically speaking, crucified in the interests of expedience or ideological fervour. The same can be said of nature. The ideology of growth and consumption is killing our natural environment.

Why do I talk about the sacredness of matter, whether living or inanimate when so many people don’t recognise the sacredness of anything? Even where the need for discretion is recognised in order to maximise the benefit, there is nothing that could be called a sense of reverence. Yet, everything has an inner reality, a quality and value simply by being, regardless of its usefulness. Many people recognise this innate worth in regard to human beings, but very few go beyond that. Worship means the recognition of worth. It doesn’t mean fearful and superstitious grovelling. That is not worship; it is idolatry. We need to worship the divine universe, to recognise its inherent worth, the glory of its simply being. Perhaps astronomers know best what I mean. Except for the Sun, the bodies in outer space have no conceivable usefulness. Yet, to the astronomer and cosmologist, they are a constant source of delight, wonder and inspiration. We must learn to worship, to recognise intrinsic worth, whether or not it includes anything

Whether people think theologically or scientifically, they believe the universe emerged from nothing. Catholics use the Latin word nihilo; scientists use the word vacuum. For centuries scientists and philosophers have been pondering about the vacuum, a region in which there is no matter. In recent years they have gone further and explored a theoretical vacuum where there is not even radiation – light, heat and all the other manifestations of electromagnetic energy. It would be extremely difficult, but theoretically possible I suppose, to create something close to such a vacuum. But we cannot eliminate space and time, and space and time are not nothing, so the total vacuum would have to be outside space and time. (Space and time do not exist independently; they come into being with matter.) It is within this kind of nothingness, where there wasn’t even space or time, that our physical universe came into being. So say scientists and so, in effect, says the Church.

There are regions of the universe where matter is very sparse: about one molecule in a cubic meter, but there is no region where there is no radiation. Light and other particles of electromagnetic energy are whizzing around every part of outer space at 300,000 kilometres a second. We can see the emissions from luminous bodies, stars and so forth, but even in the darkest regions there is a faint background radiation, left over from the fiery beginning of our universe.

Although it is impossible to create, or even to detect the total vacuum in our universe, some of our greatest minds have studied what it must be like. Today they call it the ‘zero point field’ or ‘quantum vacuum’ and they believe it exists everywhere, both within our universe and beyond space and time. Far from being nothing in the absolute, philosophical sense the quantum vacuum is intensely energetic, though it does not contain actual things – particles of energy such as atoms, electrons and photons (light). Nevertheless, it has the potential to form them. Bear in mind that matter is a dynamic formation of energy and can be converted back into energy (hence atomic power and the famous equation, e = mc2 ).

Theoretical physicists believe that the quantum vacuum is full of intense energy and seethes with activity, producing particles and their partners, antiparticles, continuously. But the particles and antiparticles mutually annihilate each other instantly, before real particles can establish themselves, so they are called ‘virtual particles’. The quantum vacuum or zero point field is described crudely as a kind of foam of virtual particles and antiparticles within which real particles can exist in space and time, and evidently do.

The quantum vacuum is not a finite quantity, nor does it have a boundary in space or a beginning or end in time. Within it virtually anything can happen in terms of physical phenomena. The probability of a universe of such complexity as ours, containing living organisms that have consciousness and feeling, is incalculably small, yet it has happened. Actually, it has been argued that, where there are no boundaries of space or time, as in the case of the quantum vacuum, anything that can possibly happen must eventually happen. A somewhat mind-blowing thought! Nevertheless, the question remains: why should anything at all happen in the quantum vacuum. It is, after all, a state of potentiality, not, in itself, a state of actuality.

You have already, I hope, begun to think more deeply about what we mean by “nothing”. I will now turn to what the Church means by it. Here too we need to think carefully. If we take the strict philosophical meaning of the word nothing, we would have to say that even God is excluded. That debases our concept of God; it makes Him a finite, limited being. I think we have to say that “nothing” means “nothing except God.” We could say then that the universe was created by God, not out of absolutely nothing, in the philosophical sense, but out of God’s own infinite being.

This agrees with Paul and John, writing in the New Testament, and with the later doctrine of the Holy Trinity and Christ as the only begotten Son of God. To the Colossians Paul wrote that, in Christ, “all things in heaven and on earth are created” and, “In him all things hold together.” In the prologue of John’s Gospel he calls Christ “the Word” (Logos) of God: “The Word was God,” and, “All things came into being through him.” In the liturgical doxology God is commonly referred to as the “Source of all Being, Eternal Word and Holy Spirit”. Christ is often referred to as the Cosmic Christ as distinct from the historical man, Jesus. Rather than saying that God created, in the sense of crafting or manufacturing, it makes better sense to say that God gave birth to everything.

So, to sum up: contemporary scientific theory calls “nothing” the quantum vacuum or zero point field, an infinite sea of seething energy. The universe is not the quantum vacuum but, in and through the vacuum, everything has come, is coming and will come into being. The vacuum is, so to speak, alongside, permeating everything in the universe: the universe is of the vacuum and in it, yet distinct from it. The vacuum is both transcendent to the universe and immanent in it.

The philosophical notion of nothingness where even God is not is contrary to Christian belief in God’s universal immanence. As the Psalmist sang, “If I climb up to heaven you are there, and if I plunge down to hell you are there also.” So traditional Christian theology declares that God created the universe when there was absolutely nothing except Himself. God is incarnate, embodied in physical nature, the universe, but He is also transcendent and distinct from it. None of the things in the universe is God, yet God is everywhere, even in things.

The Christian doctrine of God is immeasurably richer than the scientific theory of the zero point field, which is basically abstract mathematics. Yet there is a remarkable similarity (and theology can be very abstract too). Contemporary scientific theory creates a resonance between our knowledge of the world we know through observation and our knowledge of God through Christian revelation and theology. While the agenda of science is certainly different from the agenda of theology, they are profoundly compatible in their thinking. Nowhere is this more evident than when we reflect in depth about what we mean by “nothing”.

Neurologists, molecular biologists and others in the field can tell us a lot about the electrical, molecular and chemical processes that take place when we think or feel with our senses, but such information seems remote from our subjective experience of consciousness. There is a huge gap between objective, scientific knowledge and our experience. Feeling and consciousness are not confined to human experience; other animals and even insects have sensory organs and brains, and they too have feelings and thoughts.

Where does it stop? Some philosophical scientists today believe it doesn’t stop. They believe that what we call mind, as distinct from brain, is an inherent element of the universe. Conscious animals and insects are not a freak phenomenon, strictly localised on a very rare type of planet; they are a natural outcome of an evolutionary process that began some 13.8 billion years ago in a universe in which consciousness, mind and feeling are of its nature. It is interesting that the most basic assumption upon which science is based is that nature is rational.

The one who brought the idea that matter is mental to life, early in the last century, was the famous philosopher, mathematician and physicist, Alfred North Whitehead. Charles Birch, is a more recent pioneer in this branch of thinking. He was recently interviewed on the ABC program Encounter. He believes that everything feels, even quarks. Quarks are related by the strong nuclear force to other quarks. They relate together organically in threes. Neutrons, protons and electrons also have an organic relationship, “feeling” each other through the electro-weak nuclear force. In the macro world, gravity is a “messenger” between all material objects. The stars and galaxies “feel” the gravitational pull of each other and move in an elegantly rational manner in response.

Of course, Birch is not saying that atoms have brains, but he is saying that they have a “feeling” for other atoms and a complex rational way of relating to each other. That is what chemistry is about. Brains are a rarity in the cosmos, but mind is universal.

Whitehead’s view is anathema among conservative scientists, notably among biologists, who tend to be very mechanistic in their thinking. They hold that the appearance of mind – a non-material element – in matter requires some kind of change in nature. In other words, mind is an extra, added to the universe in the last split second of the cosmic ‘day’. Geneticist, Dobjansky even refers to it as a miracle. This notion appeals to religious people, of course. But if you believe that no intervention was needed: that God gave birth to the universe already equipped to produce intelligent and sensitive creatures, you can still be just as religious.

Paradoxically, the ‘miracle’ theory is held by people who believe in a mechanical universe with no place at all for God. Personally, I don’t believe in an interventionist God; I believe in an indwelling God who works within nature, not outside it. I also believe that God is both physical (incarnate) and spiritual (mental). One doesn’t need religion to believe in an intelligent universe, but religion is no impediment to such a belief either. You don’t have to believe that nature began in a faulty state and had to be fixed up by God as time went by. It makes perfectly good sense to believe that the Big Bang singularity emerged with the potential and everything needed to evolve to what it is now, and to continue to evolve to a fuller state of consciousness and perfection for incalculable billions of years in the future.

A few decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul began to think of Christ in a metaphysical way. To the Colossians he wrote that he was “the image of the invisible God . . . for in him all things in heaven and earth were created.” (1:15,16) Everything, the universe, is in Christ, and we now know that that is a living process, not just a past event.

Some decades later, John moves from metaphysics into theology by saying that Christ is the “Word” of God. “Word” renders the Greek word Logos. In both the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) the word logos has a bafflingly rich and varied meaning in different places. As John uses it is seems to mean the mind or thought of God. Like Paul, John declares that, in and through the Word, everything comes into being. Once again, Christ is a cosmic being, the embodiment of the mind of God in the totality of all things, the whole of existence.

The universe then, the cosmic Christ, is not just thoughtful; it is the embodiment or incarnation of divine thought. To avoid any suspicion of pantheism I must point out the distinction between the thought and the thinker. God is the Thinker, both physical and spiritual, and not to be thought of as just the thought or just the embodiment of the thought. And the Whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In Christ we see with unique clarity how God is thinking, but for all its clarity it is a profound mystery. In the universe there is constant death and rebirth going on; there is violence and destruction and nurture and creativity. The universe, it has been said, is in the process of becoming what it truly is. The abiding mystery is why God should go to so much trouble in space-time and physical process.

I think we have to say that God is not a thing, a discrete entity; God is an eternal event, a life that expresses love. Love is also a profound mystery involving both ecstasy and agony. Saint Paul said to the Romans that the whole of creation is groaning in labour pains in bringing Christ to birth. But it is a labour of love.

So the universe is not only thoughtful; it thinks loving thoughts, facing very real problems in the search for perfection. But, as a Christian optimist, I believe in the ultimate wisdom of the universe because I believe in the wisdom of God. Though it may not seem that way to us because we are not all that wise, cosmic evolution is a wisely guided process,

Matthew has crafted what would have been, to his Jewish readers, a very confronting story. His message is that their Messiah is as important to the Gentiles as he is to the Jews. He has grasped Paul’s ongoing theme of the global impact of Christ: that Jesus is the world’s Messiah, not only the Jewish one.

The central role of the star in the story suggests that Matthew’s “magi” were astrologers. In most societies in the Middle East of that time astrologers were important people. Not so for the Jews. They regarded them as idolatrous heathens. Herod was impressed and deeply disturbed by the information these men brought, but he was a neurotic and superstitious ratbag. The first people to recognise the infant Jesus as a king were not only gentiles, they were a particularly despised kind of gentile. And they were years ahead of any respectable Jews. (I don’t count Luke’s shepherds because they were social outcasts.) They were not guided by any knowledge of Jewish prophetic writings or motivated by nationalistic aspirations; they were guided by what they saw in the here and now. They studied natural phenomena. They were, you might say, the scientists of their day.

Astrologers believe that distant bodies in the universe directly influence our lives. Modern cosmologists don’t believe that, but nor do they believe that the rest of the universe is entirely separate and irrelevant to us. They now see the universe as a single, living, evolving organism. We humans are products of cosmic energies and cosmic process; we are made of the dust of ancient, long-dead stars.

Some of today’s leading scientists are also Christian theologians. But many more, less formally religious, are moving in their thinking and writing towards something very similar to religious belief, suggestive of the cosmic Christ or Brahma, a Source of all Being, a non-material (ie, spiritual) cosmic guide, though they use scientific, not religious language.

Many people are most comfortable resting in the certainties of a simple, unquestioning faith, based on a fairly literal interpretation of Scripture but, although Matthew refers often to Scripture, he points beyond that in today’s story. These days he might be into inter-faith dialogue. Isaiah, Micah and other prophets had also expressed universalist ideals: when Messiah comes all peoples will come “to worship on Zion, God’s holy mountain.” The messianic age would offer something beyond the ethnic and nationalistic tradition of the Jews. (Of course, religious people are still nationalistic, Christians as much as any others; and many are racist as well.)

So people of different cultures, different ethnic roots and different religious traditions must find the true and living God by their own pathways. Although membership of the Anglican Communion commits us to a certain consensus of doctrine, we have a great deal of freedom to find our own way. This can lead to stress and tension at times, as it does at present, but, if we hold on with tolerance, respect and charity, it is a creative tension, a struggle that can lead us into greater truth.

No discussion of this story would be complete without some reference to the star. Astronomers today entertain several theories as to what that might have been. My personal favourite is a supernova in the constellation of Taurus, about 6,300 l/y away. As supernovae do, it quickly burned up its fuel and imploded, and the Hubble telesope provides a detailed picture of what now remains. Part of the star’s mass has imploded into what is called a neutron star, only a few kilometres in diameter, but about equal in mass to the Sun. Each cubic centimetre weighs several tons and it spins at 1800 rpm (a day is 1/30th of a second). It makes you dizzy just thinking about it! Its magnetic field also emits pulses of radio waves detectable with a radio telescope. (It is what is called a pulsar.) The rest of the remains of the star are scattered millions of kilometres into space in a glowing cloud of hot gas and dust. It is called the Crab Nebular because of its shape.

That’s all very interesting, perhaps, but what has a supernova to do with Messiah? Like the Messiah, the supernova was a product of nature; like a baby, it was also something new and exciting. To those who studied the sky the supernova was a wonderful event. To those, like John the Baptist and others who were looking for the coming of Messiah, Jesus was a wonderful event too.

I like the supernova theory because it suggests to me an allegory. After Jesus Christ, “Superstar”, what remains? An important feature, forming very quickly, is a clump of very dense text – the four Gospels – totalling only 135 pages in my Bible: half the size of a whodunit. But it weighs, in importance, as much as a whole theological college library. The Gospels form, so to speak, a literary neutron star, a pulsar, sending out a significant signal to those equipped to hear. And now, extended across time and space, there is what the author of the Letter to the Hebrews called a great cloud of witnesses. I would like to think that we are part of that cloud: not as intensely burning as its origin, but still hot enough to be visible in the darkness of our world.

But the Epiphany, the manifestation, the revelation we all yearn for is not an object in the sky; it is a certain kind of society, made up of a certain kind of person: the kingdom of heaven, manifest in kingdom people. They are here. Many of them are not Christians, but they are known by their works. They glow with the warmth of love and shine with the light of wisdom – God’s wisdom, which often seems to us foolish, shocking, even subversive.

Ordinary stars also shine in and through the Crab Nebula. In the midst of all the confusion and darkness of human history, there have been individuals who shone like stars, who showed exceptional love and compassion, who lived lives of heroic faith. Today we have not just individuals but organizations that manifest the kingdom: The Vincent de Paul Society, Amnesty International, Medicins Sans Frontiéres: there are hundreds of them striving for a better world. In the best societies, even public standards of decency are improving: new needs are being recognised and addressed; old injustices are being corrected.

The Epiphany is not finished; it is still going on.

The story of the universe is a story of new things. The current version, informed by post-modern science, begins with the Big Bang. From the initial “singularity”, as it is called, new things have continually emerged, and there is no sign that novelty will not continue to be the pattern of the future. New biological organisms are emerging even now, and humankind is part of an evolutionary process.

The first new thing to emerge from the Big Bang was space and time. When time had stretched to a trillion trillionth of a second, the universe had grown to about 100cm. And then there was light: a ball of energy, blazing at a thousand, trillion, trillion degrees. This ball was not completely smooth; it had little lumps in it called protons, neutrons and electrons.

After a minute and a half the universe had grown to ten thousand trillion kilometres; the temperature was down to a billion degrees, and another new thing emerged: atoms of helium and hydrogen.

Events got slower as expansion and cooling continued. After 56,000 years, with the temperature at 9000ºK, there was enough space for light to begin to move freely between the atoms. After 380,000 years, the universe a balmy 3000º, the atoms began to clump together. Change is slowing down but after 100-200 million years the first stars began to form, like blazing snowballs, rapidly gathering more material from around them. These huge protostars soon became so big that gravity caused them to collapse inwards, to implode, scattering their helium and hydrogen into dark space.

Back to the drawing board! The universe had another try with smaller stars that would live longer. These became hot enough in the centre for nuclear fusion and bigger atoms were created, including carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and silicon. The largest of all was uranium. In time, however, these stars also either imploded or burned out and scattered their stuff into space again. The universe was still hot enough in places for chemical reactions to occur between elements, producing compounds like silicates (rock), water and long chain molecules with carbon (which can link with itself).

When the third generation of stars began to form, they gathered small, cold lumps of the heavier elements and compounds that orbited round them. The Sun and Solar System formed some 4.6 billion years ago. On the third planet from the Sun very special conditions existed. There was liquid water and some of those long carbon molecules. In a process still not well understood, super-molecules began to form a new kind of material entity: the living cell. Living organisms did new things. They grew and changed; they metabolised material from their environment and, with energy from the Sun, sustained themselves. Even more amazingly, they reproduced themselves, sometimes with slight modifications due to small errors in reproduction. So they evolved: they didn’t only grow and change during their lifetime; they changed from generation to generation.

Now, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, the temperature of dark space is less than three degrees above zero. The universe has expanded to some thousand, trillion, trillion kilometres in extent – further than it is possible to observe anything. It is still expanding, and now the expansion seems to be getting faster.

2000 years ago – a tick of the cosmic clock – in the species ‘homo sapiens’, a uniquely gifted individual appeared. His was a superior level of consciousness. He spoke of a new kind of human society: he called it the kingdom of heaven. He spoke of God, the Ultimate Totality and Essence of all Being, and called him his Father.

The development of the new society, the kingdom of heaven, seems terribly slow, but we celebrate the birth of him who inaugurated it every year. In the south it is high summer; in the north deep winter. Jesus was a new thing. He was a new kind of person whom no one had ever encountered before and whose wisdom and beauty very few people seemed ready for. But, though the process has seemed terribly slow, a new kind of person began to emerge. They leaven the dull, inertial lump of humankind. For all the stupidity, ignorance, blind prejudice, injustice and cruelty that goes on, human society gives hints of new wisdom and kindness down the centuries.

Not everyone can see it. Even the ability to recognise that a new thing is happening seems like a special gift. But it’s not just wishful thinking. In the end we will get what we want. And we will want better things as our understanding grows. Human consciousness is expanding and maturing, and Jesus, the new man, gave signs of the way it will go.

Some of us have doubts about angels from the start. I confess that I am sceptical about good-looking, androgenous, extra-terrestrial humanoids with big wings, musical instruments and shiny halos. But the word angel simply means messenger. In the epic narratives of the Bible, individuals received messages of great significance from time to time in a variety of ways. Sometimes they seem to be from ordinary human beings, sometimes they are characters in a dream or vision and sometimes their exact nature is not defined, but they are all referred to as angels – messengers from God. We speak of “entertaining angels unawares”, we call the friend bringing us a cup of coffee when we’re tired an “angel of mercy”. In the Book of Revelation the bishops of the major cities of Asia Minor are called angels. The word angel has many connotations, some down to earth, others mysterious or mythical.

In the beautiful narrative by Luke that is the basis of much of our Christmas tradition, Gabriel is a mysterious figure, but he doesn’t have to be an extra-terrestrial from outer space. Luke may have sourced him from Jewish mythology; he may have been part of a vivid dream, or it is just possible he may have been a human being on this occasion. Gabriel was the messenger who told Mary of her pregnancy and that the child would be Messiah, Son of God. He may also have been the one who reassured Joseph that, although Mary was mysteriously pregnant, he should still marry her: it was of God’s doing. In passing it is well to note that Mary’s visitor was not Santa Claus under another name, bringing her a very special Christmas present. The popular “Coca Cola” Santa Claus has no connection with the Christmas events at all. The real Santa, Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra, lived some 250 years after the death of Jesus.

Some think that Gabriel may also have been around at the time of Jesus’ birth. Although he is not named, he may have been the angel who warned the three wise men of Herod’s murderous intentions. He could also have been associated with the angel choir that sang to the shepherds, giving them details of Jesus’ whereabouts.

The story of Gabriel and Mary was very helpful for early Christians because it seems to have been widely known that Joseph was not Jesus’ father. In a dispute with Jesus in Jerusalem, shortly before his death, some priests and lawyers taunted him with being illegitimate: “We were not born of fornication,” they said. Matthew on the other hand suggests that some people at least did think Joseph was Jesus’ father, and both Matthew and Luke make use of this belief. They both provide genealogies for Joseph and, although they differ greatly, they both trace his ancestry through David. One cannot help noticing however that, if Joseph was not Jesus’ father, there is a problem in saying Jesus was descended from David. But descent from David was a significant factor in the claim that Jesus was Messiah, and it could be argued that Jesus was a descendant of David by adoption.

Gabriel’s visit to Mary was not his first to Earth. He visited Daniel at the beginning of the 6th century to explain Nebuchadnezzar’s troubling vision of a horned ram. He also told Daniel that the Messiah would come after “seventy weeks” of years. And it was Gabriel who announced to Elizabeth – elderly, well past child bearing age and thought to be infertile – that she was to give birth to John the “Forerunner”. So Gabriel is especially associated with the coming of Messiah.

In Luke’s story, Gabriel shares the stage with Greek heroes. Luke was a Macedonian gentile and draws for his story on Greek as well as Jewish tradition. The birth to a human woman of a child sired by a male god occurs several times in the heroic legends of ancient Greece but, in spite of the mysterious “Nephilim” in Genesis 6, such a notion was and still is entirely alien to Jewish culture.

While Christians associate Gabriel with the Good News, Jews tend to see him as the messenger of judgment. Though he is not named, he is thought to be the angel responsible for the destruction of Sodom. But there is no contradiction here. The coming of Messiah was a judgmental as well as a saving event. Faith and virtue were revealed in Mary and others, and the moral bankruptcy of others was also revealed in all its horror. The dishonesty, the cynical abuse of power and the obscene cruelty that led to Jesus’ execution witness to endemic human traits that shame us all.

Salvation and judgement are not separate events; they occur simultaneously and are parallel threads throughout human history. Judgment is usually associated with the assignment of blame, but it also reveals virtue. In the judgments of history God is revealed. In Mary and Joseph we see the virtues of fortitude, gentleness, love and humility. The conception and birth of Jesus reveal, above all, the humility of God. It is a mystery why God chose to be conceived in an unmarried teenager, inviting scandal and scorn. (It is likely that, under our law, Mary would have been underage, in which case we would view her as a victim rather than a sinner.) The humiliating and inconvenient birth in a stable was, to some extent, accidental, but it wouldn’t have happened to a wealthy couple. It seems God deliberately chose simple, powerless and vulnerable people to be parents of the Messiah. In spite of Joseph’s royal lineage and his status as a tradesman they travelled exposed to the privations of poverty and returned home to the idle gossip and possibly the censure and contempt of the village.

But I digress. So to end with a final note about our subject, I should tell you that Gabriel still enters our living rooms at Christmas. Not everyone knows it, but he is the fairy on the top of our Christmas trees.

Jesus told a story about a rich man, sometimes called Dives, and a poor man named Lazarus, and, when they died, Lazarus went to heaven and the rich man went to hell.

There is anger in this story; the eternal fiery punishment of the rich man is horrible. Apart from being rich, we might wonder what he had done that was so wicked. Not everyone knows that, under Jewish law, every individual is required to care for the poor. The rich man’s conduct was not only thoughtless and selfish; it was a criminal offence.

Of course, as in virtually every society, if you are rich enough you can get away with murder. Between the rich and the poor there is a huge and extensive maze, guarded by clever and expensive legal thugs. So, since the rich man couldn’t be brought to book in this world, he was punished in the next. Significantly, in the story there is an impassable divide between heaven and hell too.

Obviously, we have not yet got the message. The gap between haves and have-nots is even greater today than it was then. The very rich don’t only buy expensive clothes and food; they buy capital assets and even whole companies worth millions of dollars: things that make them grow exponentially richer still. I have been told that 4% of the wealth of the richest 225 people in the world would feed, clothe, house and provide essential amenities to everyone in the world. If you are a multi-billionaire, what difference would the loss of 4% of your assets make to you? The situation makes no sense.

But it isn’t that simple. 4% of Bill Gates’ $49bn (about $2bn) would be the assets of a biggish company. Liquidating those assets to provide aid to starving Africans and others would traumatically affect a great many employees. The magic words, “job losses”, come to mind. So we are stumped. To get the world on an even keel, to establish some sort of international political stability and social justice, requires a complete rethink of our economic system. It means going back to the drawing board to design a system that actually works in this post-industrial age. As the rich get richer and ordinary people find themselves getting poorer, dry rot and white ants are appearing in the foundations of our capitalist system. But we have no alternative to offer.

In the end, people power is needed: some kind of people’s revolution. But it need not, it must not be a bloody revolution. Violent revolutions generally lead only to the substitution of one oligarchy by another. People who think they can solve the world’s problems by violence are terrorists, whether they are Al Queda or the American military coalition – fundamentalist Moslems and fundamentalist Christians differ mainly in their resources for destruction. There is a lot of money to be made in the war industry, so, once again, the rich get richer but the poor lose everything, often even their lives. In another startling statistic, it has been estimated that two weeks’ current worldwide military spending would provide comfortable living for everybody in the world for a year.

There has to be a better way. There has to be a worldwide change of heart, and then we need some very smart lateral thinking. I don’t know where we’ll find the smart thinkers, but the change in heart has to begin with you and me. We tend to think that money is the cure-all. Public opinion also tends to support violent solutions to violent problems. Our public law and order systems tend to be violent.

But our individual opinions are part of public opinion, and they can change. A year ago there was a sudden awakening of the public to climate change – a shift of attitude from blind indifference to realistic concern. Even our reluctant governments have had to make token gestures of response. Perhaps we will one day realise that being rich is not the answer to an individual’s problems, and violence is ineffective in solving the world’s problems. Maybe it may also dawn on us that the horrendous gap between the rich and the poor actually lowers the quality of our own lives in subtle but significant ways such as global health, economic and political stability and even personal safety.

One day, we must discover a genuinely better way to live. One day, cleverer people than us, people with the ability to be very rich if they wanted to, must work out and initiate ways that everyone can live better lives, even Africans. That’s positive thinking, and it can be positive praying too. Don’t underestimate the power of thinking and the even greater power of praying. The difference between thinking about something and praying about it is like the difference between a table lamp and a laser beam. One is useful and illuminating, but the other is powerful.

In Jesus’ religious language, his story implies that what we do in this life has an enduring effect on what happens in the afterlife. His image of a hell of burning fire comes from folk tradition. Jesus didn’t really believe in a cruel and merciless God; he was angry and frustrated. But we need to take his parable seriously. Even in this world, many business moguls and gamblers on the stock market are inflamed with greed and tormented by anxiety and fear. Their stomach ulcers and migraine headaches give them hell. There is a psychological dimension to all this, and Jesus’ parable suggests that there is a spiritual condition that physical death will not cure. These driven people may be so conditioned that they can’t even see, let alone accept God’s free forgiveness.

Don’t underestimate the difficulties. I don’t think we, the affluent, are going to give up our comforts willingly. We need to be reassured. We need to know that there is enough for everyone to live comfortably. It has been shown many times that the world’s resources are sufficient, if we use them right. Scientists confirm this, even in the face of global warming. What gets in the way is not only greed and lust for power; it is inertia. We are afraid of change. We fear that if the financial infrastructure and our energy industry have to be replaced the sky will fall in.

It will be difficult but it will not be the end of the world as we know it. And what a dream! Think of a world without weapons of war. Trillions of dollars freed for living rather than killing. Think of a world where we make money to live rather than live to make money. It is not impossible. As every child knows: where there’s a will there’s a way.

You know what an underdog is. Let’s think about the Christian God who offered himself as the Undergod. In every group, in every family, in every business and organisation there is a hierarchy or pecking order. Some individuals are more important than others; they carry more weight and have more influence and control. At home, parents have more status than their children; in clubs, committee members and office-holders have more status than ordinary members; in industry people in suits have a higher status than those in T-shirts; in the Church clergy have more status than laypeople. (Actually, the word hierarchy comes from the Greek word for priests: hieratikos.)

Are hierarchies a good thing or a bad thing? The historian, Arnold Toynbee, has argued that, in the absence of a clearly established structure of authority, the most neurotic individual takes control. Society needs structures. A nation needs a government, and even in the home there needs to be discipline.

There is a global hierarchy of nations; some are more powerful than others, but no acknowledged leader or viable structure has emerged. The United Nations has never established any real authority. The United States tries to rule the world through overwhelming military superiority, but its foreign policy is quite neurotic. What we see of world leadership today confirms Toynbee’s theory, and I’m not only thinking of America.

Most nations today have some sort of democratic system, however corrupt, but very neurotic people often get to the top. We live in a competitive society and the most ambitious and ruthless tend to do well. Among those kinds of people, paranoia, anxiety, phobias and obsessions are common.

During a dinner party at a senior Pharisee’s place everyone was jostling to get the best seats. Jesus noticed this and said it was wiser and safer to seek the lowest place, but in real life no one wants to do that. At the bottom of the pecking order you become the butt of everyone’s bad humour; you get put down all the time, or you are ignored; if you’re an employee you get exploited; if you’re different you get persecuted.

Jesus knew all about that. Conceived out of wedlock and dying in disgrace, he couldn’t have sunk lower. With his gift for leadership, his creative intellect and imagination and his aristocratic lineage he could have been a king. Many would have supported him, even by armed force. His claim to be Messiah was well founded and is argued from his genealogy by Matthew and Luke. Surely he would have created the ideal world government? But Jesus knew better what was possible and chose otherwise.

The gospels say a great deal about Jesus’ humiliations, hardships and sufferings but they don’t seem to say much about his enjoyment of life, the indications are there however. The beatitudes, with their repeated reference to blessedness (which means happiness), clearly reflect his joy of living. He enjoyed parties too. He was even accused of being a drunkard and of mixing in unsavoury company. His joy was not only spiritual; he enjoyed life in very ordinary ways too. Jesus was a happy person.

Even the involuntarily poor, those at the bottom of the world’s social heap, are not always miserable. I recall news pictures of black people in South Africa during Apartheid. All of them, especially the children, showed amazing resilience and fortitude; they seemed inexplicably happy. Pictures of children in Iraq and Palestine look the same, waving and clowning for the camera. Jesus certainly challenges us, but he doesn’t ask us to be miserable.

Nor does he specifically say that taking the lowest place will make us happy. He is not directly promising happiness as most people would think of it, but referring to a higher set of values: the opposite of those of ordinary society. It is difficult for us to see beyond our conventional values. Even religious people tend to share them. Money, success and fame still impress us, even if we pretend they don’t.

Jesus is not talking particularly about success or failure, about being rich or poor, about being a VIP or a nobody; he challenges our whole attitude to life and to other people, rich and poor. Do we show special interest in VIPs rather than ordinary people? The media think we do. Do we only socialise with people of our own social class or better? Do we cultivate friendships, exercise hospitality or do favours on the basis of the advantage it may be to us? And what is our attitude to people at the bottom of the socio-economic scale (we used to call them ‘the poor’)? During the month of Ramadan, Moslems go without food all day and then feed those in need in the evening.

Playing games of one-upmanship, name-dropping or having the right labels on our clothes, wearing the right brand of watch or driving the right car doesn’t define our real value. The ‘best’ people in Jesus’ society posses a very uncommon gift that doesn’t cost a cent: humility.

Humility is a difficult thing to define: it has so many layers. It is not a feeling of inferiority. It cannot be won by being deliberately modest, still less by cultivating a low opinion of yourself. If you feel you are humble, you have missed the point. True humility is unconscious, and it is very elusive, and very rare, but I believe it must be a state of extreme happiness and serenity if only we could find it.

Humility is not so much an attitude to ourselves but rather an attitude to others. God is in love with the world; Jesus was in love with the world. His intense love made him humble. I believe we will find true humility if we can share something of the mysterious love of the God who takes the lowest place, the Undergod.

Jesus revealed the humility of God, so the poor were powerfully attracted to him, but the clergy and rulers, the middle and upper classes, were offended. He was insulted and contradicted; vicious rumours were circulated about him, and he was eventually killed because he was seen as a deluded religious extremist, a terrorist suspect and a threat to national security. But, though totally humiliated, he never stopped loving.

Humility is not something we can achieve by a deliberate effort. It does not exist in itself; it is part of love. Loving automatically makes us humble. And love is a gift from the Undergod who is humble towards us and submits to us with perfect integrity and infinite wisdom because he loves us.

We humans are immensely impressed with ourselves. We think we are the last word in biological advance; many people believe we are God’s final masterpiece. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that there could be another, even more advanced species of primate yet to come, and another after that. Genesis says that God took a day off after making mankind, but it doesn’t say he stopped work altogether. The rest of the Bible continues the story and points to the future.

If you believe that mainstream science is on the right track, you accept that Homo sapiens emerged from a succession of earlier primates and hominids, each with larger brains and more complex behaviour than the previous one. The most significant difference between modern humans and Neanderthals is the quality of our consciousness. Human consciousness is of a higher order. We have a capacity for reflection and rational thought, an aesthetic sensitivity and a moral sense that seems to originate with humans. At some point a new dimension of consciousness emerged.

Are there signs of this process continuing? Can we say that, during the last few thousand years, we can see an increase in the number of gifted thinkers and artists? Even in high schools, accomplishments in music and artwork are markedly superior to those of my generation, and philosophy is becoming popular. But that is a tiny dot on the map of evolution.

Recent psychological development coincides with increasing educational opportunities, but which is the cause and which the effect is not clear. Higher education is not obviously linked to higher consciousness. The bulk of the increase in tertiary education is directed to technical training rather than liberal education, to expertise rather than sensitivity of feeling, subtlety of mind and breadth of interest. The faculties of law, dentistry, information technology and financial and business management are blooming while those of the humanities: art, literature, philosophy, pure science and theology, are withering. Most of the development in tertiary education is motivated by the desire to make money. Economic growth and individual wealth creation has been the driving force of the highly competitive tertiary education industry. Technical courses in lucrative skills fill the university prospectuses.

In the midst of this rapid and complex sociological development one could be confused about what real progress means. Some people express a rosy optimism while others are sceptical. But historical time, a few thousand years, is minute in relation to evolutionary change. My own feeling, intuitive rather than based on hard data, is that, over millennia, humankind has become more intensely self-conscious, aesthetically sensitive and intellectually active. I am less certain if we are morally more virtuous.

Throughout recorded history, there have been men and women of genius. We might compare the groundbreaking originality of Aristotle, Saint Paul, Michelangelo and Beethoven with Einstein, Hume, Picasso and Britten. But though the originality of the discoveries and theories of the ancient cultural pioneers is as impressive as that of today’s great intellectual pioneers, I think the subtlety and complexity of the debate is greater in this ‘post-modern’ age. Mysticism is also an important element in assessing psychological evolution. In the West, and where Classical tradition has dominated, mystics have been regarded as harmless but somewhat irrelevant eccentrics, but today they are beginning to make a significant contribution, not only to metaphysics and theology, but in the realm of art and pure science as well.

How influential is world population? Homo sapiens is a flourishing species. It has been increasing exponentially since the days of Socrates. In a world of nearly seven billion humans, what one might call the ‘layer of thought’ is denser. Teilhard de Chardin called it the “noosphere”. Alao, advances in transport and communication technology have facilitated the mingling of the more spiritual Eastern cultures with the materialistic and rationalistic West, creating a new intellectual landscape where interest in science is blossoming in the East while empirical spirituality flourishes in the West.

Another interesting perspective comes from anthropologists and palaeontologists. Biological evolution occurs only partly through environmental change. It used to be thought that drought and deforestation in equatorial Africa caused the tree-dwelling hominids to come down to the ground and adopt the upright posture. Recent research, however, shows that this change of behaviour occurred in other parts of the world simultaneously where no such conditions ocurred. Furthermore, a French palaeontologist has recently found evidence of spontaneous changes in cranial structure, unassociated with environmental changes, accommodating our swelling brains.

These discoveries suggest that there is something else driving evolution. Evolution is not simply the “survival of the fittest”, or rather the success of the best adapted. It seems as though there is a hidden cosmic energy that drives the universe in the direction of increasing complexity and sensitivity.

We have, in historical time, seen individuals with outstanding gifts of mind, including mystics such as Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Perhaps these are early forerunners of the next hominid species, emerging in our midst. One thinks of Einstein, Yehudi Menuhin and the Dalai Lama, but they are not isolated phenomena. We have a continuous range of intelligence from the intellectually handicapped to Nobel laureates and a range of spiritual awareness from blind materialists to inspired mystics. We seem these days to be growing more conscious of being conscious! We are highly introspective, and “self-realisation” is the flavour of the month.

But the story of evolution includes many setbacks. Humankind could become extinct through inability to adapt to the environment and the limitations of the resources it can provide. Mother Earth may prove incapable of meeting our demands, and we may not be capable of modifying them quickly enough. There is tremendous inertia in our massive industrial-military-commercial machine and it is accelerating terrifyingly at the present time.

Finally, Jesus did not say that God would make us perfect; he said, “Be perfect, like your heavenly Father is perfect.” We have a tiny influence on evolutionary development; our behaviour matters, but the journey towards perfection is more than a human endeavour. It is a cosmic project, a divine work: not outside intervention by a “deus ex machina”, but God living, glorying, suffering and dying in the universe. The universe is growing up in Christ. Influenced by Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews perhaps, we might see the process as part of the education and vocation of the cosmic Christ: God’s offspring, growing up, loved, nurtured and guided and even disciplined by the Father. Humankind is not growing up in isolation; we are part of God’s embodiment, becoming what it truly is – absolutely good.