It’s always a risk recommending a novel, because what one person might find engaging and witty may appear to someone else as boring and dull. However, I’m going to take that risk today.

I have only recently come across the American Jewish writer Michael Chabon, but he writes like a dream. He is sharp, perplexing, sometimes a bit risqué and brilliant. His novel called ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’, is described by the New York Times as “a novel of towering achievement”. For once, the blurb is, in my view, accurate. It’s a novel which can be read on several levels: escapist fantasy, metaphor of American life, a study of adversity and tragedy, a quest for redemption.

This is how it’s opening chapter begins: “In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. “You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called ‘Metamorphosis’. It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation”.”

I shall return to this in a moment, but let me just read the next paragraph.

“Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money.”

That first paragraph about the nature of transformation, is also, as the second paragraph hints, about the nature of identity. Having given us a pert and lively description of one of the characters, Sam Clay, the writer leads us through the novel, giving us glimpses of the attempts that Sam Clay makes to achieve and discover his identity. We are taken through tragedy and love towards a final moment of redemption.

Well. This may seem an odd way to begin a final address to the Diocesan Synod – but I want to continue down this slightly eccentric path by moving from a 20th Century Jewish character in a New York novel to a 1st Century Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth, as he appears in the Gospel of Mark.

Mark opens his gospel with a fanfare of a statement: ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’. We take it so much for granted, but when Mark scratched those words on a vellum scroll (I’m guessing it was vellum), it was a momentous event. It announced Mark’s claim about Jesus of Nazareth that he was the Christ (Messiah), the son of God.

Mark follows that opening statement with a few sentences, which he says are from Isaiah, though in fact they are a composite. They combine Exodus 23:20, and Malachi 3:1 plus Isaiah 40:3. In using those verses from the Old Testament, Mark is claiming that Jesus, and his fore-runner, John the Baptist, are the fulfilment of the great sweep of the Old Covenant story.

Then, in case we the readers have not yet grasped Mark’s message about Jesus’ identity he gives us another fanfare verse, Mark 1:10-11:

‘And just as he [Jesus] was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn

apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven,

‘You are my Son, the Beloved: with you I am well pleased’.’

In just eleven verses then, Mark has made some remarkable statements about Jesus’ identity: he is Christ (Messiah); he is the fulfilment of the salvation-history of Israel, he is the Son of God. It’s no wonder that Mark describes the baptism of Jesus as involving the heavens being torn apart.

The rest of chapter 1 continues the theme of Jesus’ identity. In the synagogue at Capernaum a man ‘with an unclean spirit’, cries out: ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ (Mark 1:24).

This is cataclysmic stuff. We are taken into the realm of a universal battle: the Messiah versus the forces of chaos. We aren’t here just trying to understand the psychology of Jesus, as though he were a character in a novel, we are being encouraged by Mark to inhabit a thought-world where the forces of good and the forces of evil are engaged in a titanic struggle, and Jesus’ identity is to be discovered within it.

The question of the identity of Jesus continues to hammer like a drumbeat in the two chapters which follow: it’s implicit in the healing of the paralysed man, let down through the roof (Mark 2:3-12); it’s there in the debate with the Pharisees about the behaviour of wedding guests when they are with the bridegroom (Mark 2:18-20), it’s there in the debate about Sabbath rules and Sabbath behaviour (…the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath: Mark 2:27-28); it’s there in the appointment of the Twelve (Mark 3:13-19); it’s there when Jesus’ family try to restrain him, when people are saying ‘He has gone out of his mind’ (Mark 3:21).

In fact, the question of identity reaches a crescendo pitch in the final verses of chapter 3:31-35:

“Then his mother and brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and

called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother

and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ And he replied, ‘Who

are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’.”

The question of Jesus’ identity is absolutely central to those first three chapters, but then, in chapter four, a quieter, less clamorous and challenging mode is adopted by Mark. He takes us in to some of Jesus’ teachings about a Sower, about lights being put under bushels, about the kingdom of God being like a mustard seed.

I have argued thus far that in this great opening movement of Mark’s gospel, the theme is about Jesus’ identity. But there is also a hidden, and unspoken question being posed to the reader by Mark: ‘Dear reader, who do you think Jesus is?”. And the question is given a shocking, practical twist in Chapter 3 verses 31-35, the verses I read only a moment ago. The question of Jesus’ identity, it would seem, is not simply one for careful theological or literary debate: it’s the identity of the reader himself or herself which is called into question when he or she is brought face-to-face with Jesus:

‘Who are my brothers and my sisters? Whoever does the will of God is my

brother and sister and mother.’

It is our identity which is open to challenge – and, as Sam Clay says, the character in Michael Chabon’s novel; ‘It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation’. In trying to do God’s will we are re-defined. We become not just ‘ourselves’ but we become Christ’s sister, Christ’s brother, Christ’s mother. We are re-defined in relation to Christ and, therefore, re-defined in relation to each other.

I sometimes find myself at a Diocesan Synod or in a church asking myself a quiet question: ‘What was it about Jesus of Nazareth which touched the hearts and lives of the people I see in front of me?’. It is, of course, a deeply intrusive question and not one to ask lightly, because the call of Christ upon our lives is frequently at a level too deep for words, not susceptible of easy explanation. What is true for all of us, however, is that at some point in our lives the identity of Christ became a matter of great significance for us. And then, maybe at the same point or on another occasion, the question of our own identity in relation to Jesus began to haunt us, to shape our lives. (‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’).

I have been very conscious over the past thirteen years as bishop of this lovely diocese, that I have been in company with hundreds and thousands of people whose lives and whose identities have been shaped by Christ. That, of course, is what the Church is, baptised people whose identities have been shaped by Jesus Christ. The privilege of being in and of your company has been immense and I thank you for it.

But I have spoken as though the identity of Christ might be static, like the identity of a piece of furniture. Not so. My own experience has been and remains, that the identity of Christ continues to fascinate me and elude me and perplex me and delight me at one and the same time. And then what seems to happen is that Christ’s identity does not remain ‘out there’, it draws me closer and closer in. He calls me (and you) into a deeper and deeper relationship with him where attraction gives way to mystery, mystery to awe and awe to silent adoration and an increased desire to follow Him in the Way. And further, through prayer and through our relationship with Christ our identities become deeply shaped by Him and intertwined with Him. The prayer of Humble Access puts it much better than I can: “that we may evermore dwell in Him and he in us”.

It has been my experience that in that relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ my own transformation begins. It is, of course, a daily struggle. I, like all human beings am recalcitrant, a sinner. It is like being a piece of rough wood which the carpenter, with wounded hands, works gently and firmly so that he can bring out the grain, give it shape, and bring coherence. That transformation is, I pray, a process which will continue in the years that lie ahead, for we are all, as disciples, only disciples in the making; as human beings, we are only human beings in the making. Christ works constantly to transform us into who He would have us be. And, speaking for myself, I know that there is still a very, very long way to go.

Well. Let me say one more thing. I may have given the impression that the identity of Christ is, as it were, confined within the pages of a book or the walls of a church. What is, to me, beyond all doubt, is that the identity of Christ is not and cannot be confined in those ways. His identity is, if I can so put it, let loose in the world, it sings within the protons and neutrons of all that is and it sings through the unimaginable immensities of space. It sings in all creation. It sings in people. It sings in love and friendship, and in our relationships with each other.

Christ’s identity is, however, also generously and self-sacrificially expressed within our collective lives as Christians in the ‘Church’. In Word and Sacrament, in preaching and teaching, in fellowship, in prayer, in our service of one another and of the world, Christ both reveals and hides his own identity. He reveals as much as we need to know for the time being, and hides the rest, for the time being, because to encounter Him fully would be overwhelming. The revelation of His identity is slow, patient and filled with grace.

And, what is true of us as individuals, that we are human beings in the making, is also true of us as a Church; we are a Church in the making. We are not completed; we are Christ’s unfinished business, called collectively to be transformed into a people who do God’s will and of whom Christ says: ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’.

And what is true of us as individuals and as a church, that we are human beings and a church in the making, is also true of our world. Our world, through Christ, is still in the making – and, as individuals and as a Church, we are called to discern where Christ is at work and to share in that work with him. Our Lord Jesus Christ is in the deep heart of all things struggling to redeem and heal and make new and we, as his disciples and as His Church are invited to take part in that transformative process. It is all very beautiful and very, very humbling.

For a very brief moment of history, by the grace of God, I have been in company with you, working with you and learning from you how to discover more and more of the identity of Christ, in Scripture, in Sacraments, in prayer and in the world, and longing that together we might be transformed by Christ into the people, the Church and the world he would have us become.

That process of transformation because it comes from Christ, will continue in our individual lives in the years that lie ahead and it will continue in your collective life as the Church in this diocese into the future. Why? Let me repeat: transformation is a gift from Christ to us as individuals and to us as a Church. What matters for us as individuals and for us as a Church, is to know Christ and make him known and to allow ourselves through God’s grace to be transformed by Him.

I have had an amazing thirteen years here and I thank my closest colleagues, my fellow bishops, archdeacons, senior staff, clergy and laity of the diocese. I thank you with all my heart for your companionship and loyalty and love – and I commend you all to God’s care and keeping, knowing that, by God’s grace, the past is Christ’s, the present is Christ’s and the future is Christ’s. It is to Him that belongs glory, and to Him that belong His Church – and it is through Him that we all, individually, as a community, and as a world are being transformed from who we are into who He would have us be. And that, I am sure you will agree, is a very great and a very exciting and a very holy adventure.

© Christopher William Herbert, 2008