Readings – John 1: 10–18, Ephesians 1: 3–14
And the Word became flesh and lived among us.
One of my favourite activities when off work in the dark depths of midwinter is to go onto YouTube to watch television advertisements from commercial breaks of decades long past. I have a particular fondness for 1970s adverts for pipe tobacco; they really get across how much society has changed in the last half a century or so. Not so much because they showed men smoking their pipes on the telly, but because of how plain and sometimes even ugly the men in them were. Bald men in late middle-age, often a little tubby, sometimes with wrinkly foreheads or even unmanageable hair. In adverts for DIY superstores, these plain middle-aged men inevitably had plain middle-aged wives that they sat with in the ordinary kitchens of ordinary homes.
Watch a TV advertising break today and it is a different story. Everyone is beautiful; everyone has perfect hair and perfect teeth; nearly everyone is young. Where young people aren’t really appropriate for advertising the product in question – if it’s for a funeral plan, let’s say, or incontinence medicine – the few elderly people allowed to appear in advertising look like they’re just about to pop out for a 10 mile walk, just to wind down from the skiing holiday they’ve just jetted home from.
The beautiful people used to advertise to us in the ’70s.
Half a century ago, advertising executives thought we were most likely to purchase a product if we associated it with people we identified with, with people who were like we were ourselves. Now the theory is that we are more likely to buy products associated with the sort of people we aspire to becoming, or at least have idle fantasies about becoming, in the hope that some of their success will rub off on us in a sort of high-tech cargo cult.
It sounds like a minor change, but it goes to the heart of some of the most damaging social trends of today’s world. We are constantly encouraged to compare ourselves, negatively, with people who are prettier, richer, and more successful than we are – or who seem to be prettier, richer, and more successful than we are.
An internal meeting of the management of the Instagram social network admitted in 2019 that – and I quote – “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Some of you will already be familiar with Instagram. For those of you who aren’t, let me briefly explain – it is the world’s second largest social network, with around 1.4 billion users worldwide, exceeded only by Facebook, which owns it. Its content consists almost entirely of photographs and other graphics. Some users find themselves following the sort of people they think they’d like to be, people who seem to be living perfect lives, with all their teeth perfect and not a hair out of place. Their photos are usually not far short of being outright fakes – a pose held for a few seconds, assisted by plastic surgery and a digital photo filter. Here are some of the roots of the crisis of alienation from our bodies that sees us with epidemic levels of eating disorders and self-cutting, especially among adolescent girls and young women.
The constant pressure to see ourselves as inadequate does not just come from the commercial sector, either. How often do you feel hectored for having the wrong Body Mass Index or a car that runs on plain old-fashioned petrol? The message is that you are inadequate – but you don’t need to be. Just wear the right (expensive) outfit when you drive your (expensive) car to your regular sessions at the gym and you can be one of the good-living people too. Although even then, you’ll be constantly reminded that humanity is dangerously out-of-control about to make the planet uninhabitable for itself and other species. And that was before we spent two years of a pandemic learning to see one another as potential disease carriers, as dirty, and only communicating with one another via screens for months on end.
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
Our Gospel reading this morning tells the truth about us human beings. That although we have the capacity to do wicked things, we are ultimately a beautiful species and each of us is a beautiful creation of God. We are made in the image and likeness of God, not only in a spiritual sense but in our very bodies – because God became a human being in the form of Jesus Christ. God became a human being not as the son of a king but as the son of a carpenter. The Gospels do not tell us that Jesus was handsome or athletically built or with a beautiful voice or anything about his physical characteristics. God became a very ordinary human in a very ordinary place. We all bear the mark of the divine stamped in us even, perhaps especially, those not judged to be attractive by the shallow standards of today’s world.
Over the last sixty years, Christianity has been replaced as the mental and moral framework of Western civilisation by a materialistic rationalism. That new godless religion claims to be human-centred and therefore more loving and caring than a Christianity that it lampoons as being a fable about placating an angry imaginary sky fairy. Yet since we abandoned Christianity, far from becoming more accepting of our human natures, we’ve become collectively much less comfortable in our own skins. It seems that being good enough for ourselves is a lot more difficult than being good enough for God.
And you are good enough for God. That is why He became one of us, to save each of us and the whole created order from death and sin and open the way to eternal life. Humanity is underrated – but not by God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us for your sake in Palestine two thousand years ago, and will do so again at the altar in a few minutes’ time.
And now to our wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, to Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and to the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, be glory in the highest, until the end of all ages. Amen.
