On my journey to Cairo my fellow passengers included a large party of British Muslims going on the haj, the great pilgrimage to the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina, and I found myself in an intensely interesting conversation with my Muslim neighbour. He told me of the spiritual significance of the haj to him personally, and described the sequence of events that would make up the pilgrimage. Questioning me about my own Christian faith, he reminded me of the Muslim veneration of Jesus as a prophet. He assured me that he had no problem with school Nativity plays, even though a nervous secular society all too often believed he might, and ought, to have. The most important thing, he said, was that we should live in acknowledgement of the God who had created the Universe, and that we should strive to love and serve that God.
Yes, I told him, that was my concern as well. But, he said, how difficult it was to love a God whom you had not seen. So I explained how for the Christian the unknown God, the source of all life and being, the creator of all, has chosen to reveal Himself, not just in words of prophecy and inspiration, but in going much farther than this. Although, as the Bible emphasises, God is awesome, holy and transcendent, yet that same God discloses Himself, chooses to make Himself known, in the end, in the amazing wonder of incarnation.
St Paul speaks of how we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. St John, in the prologue to his Gospel, writes of the Word ? the creative reason and wisdom of God ? becoming flesh, and in that becoming flesh, that incarnation, “we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. God comes down, as the 14th-century Christian mystic Lady Julian of Norwich reminds us, “to the lowest part of our need”.