Identifying as human has deadly implications

The incarnation and an execution impacts humanity.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Head and shoulders image of a man with closed eyes, on his forehead is an ashen cross.

Josh Applegate on Unsplash.

Christmas makes no sense without Easter.

In Jesus of Nazareth, the Creator himself entered his creation to live among us. This is what Christians call the Incarnation. But why? What was the point of this identification with humanity? You might have expected these sorts of answers: he came to found the Christian religion, to teach us how to live and to gather a community of followers. These are true enough but look inside any church building or read any part of the New Testament, and you’ll find that another thing is the focus, something that makes Jesus different to any other founder of a religion. He came to die.

Jesus’ death is the climax of all four gospel stories. It is evident that the point of the narrative is there. The rest of the Bible’s New Testament spends more time describing the machinations that led to Jesus’ death than outlining what he taught. Does that mean it doesn’t matter what Jesus taught? Of course not: Jesus’ teachings matter tremendously to Christians. But his death matters still more.

No doubt you knew that. The first thing anyone learns about Christianity is its symbol, the cross on which Jesus was executed. One of the cruellest forms of capital punishment that has ever been legal, those executed on the cross were called ‘crucified’ – a word which still has its shuddering power even today. Crucifixion was a death reserved for the lowest of the low: common thieves, runaway slaves, rebels, and lawbreakers. Yet this particular death was the ultimate goal of Jesus’ life.

Why? What’s it all about? For Christians, Jesus’ crucifixion strikes at the very root of all that is wrong with the world. To understand it, first we have to understand what Christians believe about that.

If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out.

Everyone agrees the world in its current state is, to put it mildly, less than ideal. Most put it down to a lack of education, or to the stubborn foolishness of a few isolated individuals.

If you believe that people behave badly because they are ill-informed, then you might think the solution is to teach people what is right. You will put great faith in education: give people the information they need and they will change their ways.

Alternatively, if you believe ‘other’ people are the problem, you can focus your attention on opposing them, imprisoning them, or stripping them of power somehow. But Christians believe that the root of the problem is far deeper, such that these efforts only scratch the surface and will never be effective in the long run.

Christians believe that the whole of humanity has been damaged, cut off from its relationship to what matters by a primordial catastrophe that we call ‘the Fall’. Human beings are not simply ignorant, and the problem does not lie in lack of information, or education. The problem lies in our will, the part of us that chooses what is wrong even when we know full-well that it is wrong. And the problem is not just some people ‘over there’, conveniently set apart from me. Every single human being has been impacted. Including you. And me. Every one of us is part of the problem, which is why no one of us, however smart or well-informed we are, can be the solution. If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out. You need someone outside the pit who can reach down and grab hold of you.

That is why Christianity is more than a moral programme for self-improvement, or a set of spiritual practices comparable to those of other religions. According to Christians, the human race does not need another set of rules about how to live, or a formula to cultivate mindfulness and inner peace. We need a saviour: someone who does not share our fallen condition, but who can reach down and lift us to safety.

How far down did Jesus have to go? All the way to the bottom, which means death. Even the worst kind of death.

How did Jesus’ death save us? Christians have various theories about that. You may have heard the most common which uses law court imagery: we were guilty and sentenced capital punishment, but Jesus was punished instead so we don’t have to. Some people love this theory and live by it; others find it morally problematic and offensive. But the point is not the theory: the point is the reality to which it points. One way or another, by dying Jesus reconnected us to God and restored the broken relationship.

But it’s stranger still than that, because Jesus’ death is not the end. It was only the preliminary to something far more wonderful and transformative, a sign of a promise beyond our wildest hopes. By dying, Jesus defeated death itself and came back to life. If Christmas makes no sense without the cross, then the cross makes no sense without the resurrection. But more on that in my next article.

Article

Belief

Creed

Weirdness

30 June 2025

4 min read

The angels called Melanie or Dave that dwell among us

The metaphysical is very much present in our mundane

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A station concourse with a light well above.

Waiting for an angel at London Bridge station.

Network Rail.

There’s either too much or too little written about angels. There’s the serious hermeneutical stuff of divine messengers from scripture. Then there’s the Hallmark sentimentality about guardians, watching over us as nannies may watch their children playing in the park, picking up and comforting them when knees are grazed.

They’re supernatural, but appear in human form. It’s incarnational in its way. But there’s plenty to notice of angelic manifestation in regular human beings – that nurses are routinely dubbed angels is both exasperating and earned.

This is the via media, a third way, for angels: They’re called Melanie or Dave, have mortgages, and dwell among us. It’s just that sometimes they’re angels. These thoughts come after an incident I just experienced at London Bridge station.

We’d just returned from an extended train tour of southern Europe, celebrating a fortieth wedding anniversary and my seventieth birthday. We’d stopped for a bit of lunch between St Pancras and London Bridge and ran late for our Sussex connection. For the first time in three weeks a huge station elevator was out, with no lift in sight.

A young woman, maybe 23, appeared from nowhere and offered to take the larger-but-lighter case, striding up with it in her glorious white trousers with gold stripes. Then, a second and a half later, a young man of similar age grabbed my smaller-but-heavier bag and carried it up like a small briefcase.

“Are you two together?” I gasped in his wake. “No,” he said. “You will be at the top,” I replied. It was a crass thing to say. In the movie they would have been. But this was real life. Two commuters offering random acts of kindness, leaving me marvelling at how wonderful young people are.

And we can leave it there. Two fit (in both senses) strangers noticing a couple, more than old enough to be their parents, struggling. It’s a facet of ageing to which I’m adjusting; I was shocked and surprised a couple of years ago when a young woman offered me her seat on the Underground. It seems so little time since it was the other way around.

But there it is again. Ordinary people, transcendent behaviour. And, in a metaphysical sense, our young friends at London Bridge really would be together at the top, supported on angels’ wings, though they would laugh that off and the moment would be quickly forgotten.

These are trivial moments of angelic intervention in ordinary life. But they can be scaled up. When Martine Wright lay mortally wounded with her legs beyond rescue in a bombed carriage of a tube train under Aldgate on 7th July 2005, in her trance of trauma she saw off-duty policewoman Elizabeth Kenworthy picking her way through the wreckage towards her, unquestionably saving her life. She has since described it as like an angel coming to collect her. And who would gainsay that?

Again, these are flesh-and-blood people, not winged and shining-white seraphs. But they are possessed of the spirit of angels. Who can doubt the presence of angels in the darkest hell that was 7/7? Clearly not Ms Wright.

These are instances of the human agency of angels. They possess their own reality. But then there are those who experience, as it were, the real thing. I recently encountered a woman and her son after a church service, who described her very recent conversion experience.

In a moment of darkest despair (which I’m unable to relate), she called out for someone, anything. A figure appeared at her side and she fell into his/her arms. A dream, maybe? But so what if it was? Her life is renewed, as her affirms.

For my own part, when my father died in 2000, I went to St Bride’s Church, nearby my office in London’s Fleet Street, and asked my friend there if he’d join me in lighting a candle and saying a prayer. Afterwards, as we stood at the little side altar, the figure of a homeless man strode purposefully up the narrow aisle, matted hair and beard, ragged clothes.

He deliberately walked between us, lit another candle and placed it in the stand next to ours and stood for a moment looking at it. Then he simply walked out again. We knew the local homeless well – we ministered to them. But we’d never seen him before nor seen him since. And here’s another thing: we were intimately familiar with homeless hygiene, but this one had no smell.

Are there angels? Yes, absolutely. They have no hierarchy. They’re just ever-present servants, from the company of heaven. As apparent to a young woman called Mary, who stuck her head into an empty tomb some time ago and was told the person she sought had gone before her, as to me just a day or two ago as white and gold trousers went before me, taking two steps at a time.

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