I love going to the theatre, and this has been a great year for plays in London. One of the best was the new David Hare drama, The Power of Yes, which explored the origins of the current financial crisis. The playwright appears as a character in his own play, interviewing many of the movers and shakers in the money markets and asking them naïve questions about how it all went so terribly wrong. Hare strongly suggests that the tendency of financiers to keep on saying yes when they should have said no, to non-creditworthy borrowers and all sorts of mad get-rich-quick ideas, was a big part of the problem.

Yes is a good word, a powerful word. We like to hear it. One famous financial institution used to claim in its advertising that it is the bank that likes to say yes. But saying yes thoughtlessly, without regard to the consequences, seems to have caused a lot of trouble.
Words are powerful. Toddlers discover this early. They can win smiles and applause by uttering Mama and Dada, even if they apply them to the wrong people. A little later they discover they can use the magic word No to assert themselves and their independence of action. And then Please and Thank you become important ways of entering into social interactions.

As we grow up we learn that other words can be agents of real change in our lives. I promise. I’m sorry. Welcome. I love you.
Some words actually create new realities. I baptize you. I forgive you. I take you to be my wedded husband (or wife). The very act of saying such words is creative of something new that didn’t exist before: Church membership, reconciliation, the state of matrimony.
Behind all these active and powerful words is the Word itself, the creative utterance of God that John’s gospel speaks about. The passage tells us that this Word is Jesus Christ, and it says three important things about him. He is divine, in intimate relationship with God the Father from before all time. He is the agent of creation, the Word that God spoke to bring everything into being. And at a certain point in earth’s history he became incarnate as a human being to share the divine life with us.

Those three important things about Jesus Christ could also be described as three kinds of Yes. The first is that the Son eternally and freely returns the love of the Father. He is the perfect mirror of the Father’s infinite love because he is absolutely at one with him. That is the first Yes, from God to God, a word that is so mysteriously present in the very heart of God that we cannot begin to comprehend it in human language.

The second Yes concerns creation. The Hebrew scriptures are very clear that the creation of the world was not a sort of cosmic childbirth, as many of their pagan neighbours assumed. The universe did not just emerge from a divine parent. Rather it was a free act of God’s will: the Word spoke and said Let it be and it was so. God didn’t have to make creation. It wasn’t a necessary part of God’s nature. God chose to make something that was not-God, something that would emerge into conscious life with the freedom to respond or not to the divine Creator. The Word that was uttered at the very beginning was a divine Yes. That Word brought about the existence of all that is, affirms its otherness, and states that it is good. So the second Yes is God’s yes to creation.

The third Yes is perhaps the hardest of all for us to grasp and believe. God loves and affirms God – that’s a mystery but we’ll take it on board and not worry about it. God loves and affirms the universe – perhaps we can believe that.

But now we are getting down to particulars. The Yes of the incarnation says that God loves and affirms the human race. This seems pretty parochial. Out of all the vastness of interstellar space and the countless stars that swirl through that incomprehensible emptiness, we are talking about a briefly existing carbon-based life form on the third planet out from a rather insignificant star.
And is this where we are to hear the divine Word saying Yes once again? To a species that has spent the whole of its short history struggling for survival and exploiting each other?

I think the hardest thing of all is to believe that God says Yes into this situation. A global climate change summit has just ended in failure because of the greed of societies that do not want to live simply so that others may simply live. God doesn’t affirm greed: but God does speak love to the greedy.

God says Yes into a world in which the past hundred years have seen world wars, genocide, religion-inspired terrorism, and the mass displacement of people. God doesn’t affirm violence: but God does speak love to the violent.

Into our own lives God’s Yes penetrates to the heart of each of us. He doesn’t affirm our selfishness, pride and unkindness: but He does speak love to the sinner.

David Hare’s play demonstrates that Yes can be an easy, lazy word, a word that doesn’t bear responsibility, but God’s Yes is a word that carries an infinite weight. It is not just a casual agreement or empty promise, but an eternal covenant: a commitment to be in relationship with us and to bring about the fulfilment that is his loving purpose for us. God’s Yes carries the weight of the cross, the consequence of all that has gone wrong in creation.

Because God’s will is sovereign and sure, that Yes can be relied on. However bad things look, we can count on the Word that brings light out of darkness. That is why Dante called his great poem The Divine Comedy. The ancient Greeks and Romans looked at the world, decided it was pretty grim, and made their own peace with the tragedy of human life. They went for different approaches: the heroic, the stoic, the live-for-today-for-tomorrow-we-die.

The same philosophies have re-emerged in the last couple of centuries. Some say that life is meaningless and all we can do is embrace its absurdity. Others put the whole thing out of their minds and shop until they drop. Still others make the bleak and brave attempt to create meaning in lives that can only end in the failure of death.
But Christmas celebrates the comedy, not the tragedy, of human life on our battered little planet. We are not very loveable, but God loves us. That love is so profound and committed that it identifies itself completely with us. It is so vulnerable that it appears among us as a human infant. It is so powerful that the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

God’s love is expressed in God’s Word, and that word to us is Yes. There is now, on this feast of Christmas, a pause in the conversation, to allow us to choose what word we will utter in return.

Amen