Sermon preached at the Ninth Sunday after Trinity 2024

What does it mean to be a living human being? It’s a question that has occupied philosophers since we began to think about ourselves. But until the present generation it was not something that occupied most people’s minds. For much of human history, the majority of us have had to spend such time and energy living, to think too much about life.

Technology has changed that. Man’s apparent mastery of the physical world has brought to pass a moment where there is the possibility, if not the reality, for all to do more than simply survive. And the rapid advance of computer technology has pressed that question to us all which was the preserve of professional thinkers: What does it mean to be a human being?

We often describe computers as ‘thinking’ and their sophisticated operations as ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ Yet this language proposes that human consciousness is reducible to a set of (highly elaborate) instructions. This is a very narrow view of a person; one which will only serve those organisations, corporations and people whose aim and purpose it is to instrumentalise and control others for their own gain. In other words, to pretend that machines can be human we end up pretending that humans are machines.

The Christian response must begin with a proper understanding of what a person is, and our lesson from the book of Job is an excellent place to start. In these verses (so memorably set by Handel in his Messiah) he declares his faith in God’s power and will to redeem humanity: For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God.

These words prophetically tell of the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; both in his first coming of redemption through his Death and Resurrection and his second coming of Judgement in glory. Look back through the chapters of Job that lead up to this point and you will learn that he has lost all his extensive property and his children have all died. Yet he can begin at this point to look forward with confidence to future divine redemption. This is based on something that he already fully knows: that he exists not alone – even though he is experiencing profound loss and isolation – but in relationship.

Relationship is essential to our being and flourishing and highlights for us other aspects of what it is to be human. We know and can be known, we both think and feel – we can seek to understand ourselves, and we can try to understand others. A moments reflection will confirm to us that this is all true; and it is true because of a fundamental spiritual fact: that we exist in relationship with God, whose very being is relational, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The restoration of the right relationship between ourselves and the One who has always existed and will always exist – God – is the purpose of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews expounds on this at length, fleshing out, as it were, the prophetic words of Job: For I know that my Redeemer lives. It is because God has chosen to be born, live and die as a human being that the way to truly know God is made open to us. It is God himself who opens his arms both literally, and metaphorically, on the Cross, so that All shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest.

To know and be known: to exist in relationship with one another and God – this is what makes us ‘human beings’ made in the image and likeness of the Creator of all. As technology continues to advance, it will get better and better at faking it: producing simulated outputs that trick us into thinking we are speaking to or looking at a human person. There are already plenty of unpleasant and evil examples of this.

We must remind the world that to be a person is to be more than a sum of our outputs, a collection of phrases or images, a bank balance, a badge or a flag. We live, we think, we feel – and we know and are known, by each other and by God. Who, in his own self has both effected the restoration of our relationship with him and made good on that which Job knew to be true: For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God. To whom be all honour, glory, power and dominion, for ever and ever. Amen.