Annunciatory thoughts on incarnation

On Wednesday last, it fell to me to give a homily on the Annunciation at a lunchtime communion service, it being 9 months before Christmas day. I had two possible tacks suggesting themselves to me. One was 'safer' -a line of thought about Mary as prototypical disciple: the first Christian; someone from whom we can learn something about following Jesus. The other tack could have been to ponder the nature of incarnation, time and space. I went with the former because I wasn't sure, in the end, whether I could manage to do the latter justice and be coherent about it in five minutes without having tried to put my thoughts in order more fully beforehand.

So... well I'm sure you could guess where this is going ... This is me trying to put those thoughts in some kind of order. I'm going to start where I had been thinking of starting with the homily in the midst of the Annunciation passage in the Gospel of Luke. (BTW, I tend to think a homily is a mini-sermon).

The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. [Luke 1:36]

That phrase "the power of the Most High will overshadow you" is evocative of Genesis 1:2. "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." It's not the words so much as the imagery. It makes an imaginal connection between creation and new creation. The conception of Jesus in Mary is being told in a way that alludes to the making of the cosmos. The creation of Jesus in her womb is presented in a way that invites us to think of it a bit like the creation of a world in the formless emptiness preceding the creative declaration "Let there be light": in the emptiness of a 'barren' womb the unformed is divided into form.

And yet, actually perhaps we should see the flow of analogy going the other way. We should rather see the creation in the light of the incarnation. This is built on the proposal that we should, with Barth and others, see God's intention from eternity to become part of creation, to be incarnate and share community with What God has made.
If this is so, and I have increasingly become convinced that it is, then we need to deliver ourselves from our instinctive ways of thinking about time. Because in this way of thinking about creation, incarnation is the first and primary 'cause'. In a sense, in the mind of God, the incarnation is the beginning of creation. This relativises time. We tend to think about time in terms of our experience of sequence: things follow on from one another and we tend to think about time as an absolute progress of sequence to which we are all subject and which is the same through all things. Sometimes we even think, in effect, that God too is subject to time, is within time.

Since Albert Einstein, over a century ago, we have understood that time is relative and not absolute. Time and space are dimensions of the same reality and are capable of affecting one another. In other words time is not some kind of absolute medium through which all else passes, it is itself a created 'thing' like (though not entirely like) space. So when we consider the creation of the world, we need to consider it being created with time rather than in time (I think that Augustine of Hippo said similarly). Time is a property of the created order, part of its way of being.

So we don't have to be committed to only thinking about the cosmos in terms of a sequentially-timely process flowing from big bang to whatever the end might be. We could consider a Beginning in the centre of spacetime (in as far as 'centre' means something in such a cosmos).
If we granted for the sake of argument and understanding for a moment, that the idea of multiple universes has something to it: that every time there is a decision or an 'it could go either way' moment, both/all possibilities are realised each in its own universe. The multiverse, then, would be a huge field of divergent possible-universes. If you imaiened them all laid out like a mosaic, and then traced a line over them to show/follow a particular storyline (timeline, perhaps) ... well that's what is being used in the plot of this Star Trek Voyager set of episodes, which has been edited into a synopsis here:

The plot of this group of episodes involves a particular race who have some ability to shift timelines. But they have to keep trying because different shifts may produce a relatively good outcome in their terms, but there are always downsides -sometimes catastrophic for their purposes. They aim to get a perfect outcome, but each time there is some 'fly in the ointment' and so they keep trying (and Voyager gets caught up in it). Watch for the screen on the ship showing a schematic of the timelines. What this race are doing, in effect, is starting with a teleology (aiming for a desired state of affairs [DSA] in the universe) and shifting timelines until it is achieved. In a sense this is a model of what I'm proposing in that the DSA becomes determinative, in a sense, of the storyline followed through the possible universes. It could be said that the desired state of affairs attracts the timeline to it

So we could start in what seems to us to be the middle. with the  incarnation and resurrection as the desired outcomes on God's part.Because, in this way of looking at things, God, who is outside of and determinative of spacetime, creates with the desired state of affairs at the heart of the creation, with the inflowing and outflowing time~ and storylines determined by that at-heart desired state of affairs. Of course, that DSA involves the creator becoming part of the storyline and inhabiting it, experiencing it from the 'inside', in an appropriate way. The historically tiny incarnation/resurrection timeline, although relatively short, actually has the effect of selecting the historical, evolutionary and archaeontological timelines that lead to itself.

I guess this comes out, philosophically, as some version of the best of all possible universes theory. It does, however, allow us to conceive of that theory in terms made possible and somewhat plausible by current scientific knowledge and theorising.

There are further avenues to explore on this. Among them are what this implies about agency and determinism and the eschatological implications if we are also seeing the incarnation/resurraction timelinette as in some way an inbreaking of God's future. I hope to return to these questions on this blog at a later date.