Transformed by the renewing of your mind

It is a wonderful phrase from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” It complements Luke’s story of Jesus as a boy of twelve being “found in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and, and asking questions,” read in Chapel this week. These passages are traditionally read on The First Sunday after Epiphany and highlight the epiphany theme.

They reveal what belongs to the educational project, namely, the manifestation or making known of the things of God which complement, correct, perfect, and certainly challenge the things of our humanity; in short, epiphany (or education!) as transformative. Paul is suggesting the deeper meaning of the quest of the Magi-Kings who make the long hard journey to Bethlehem seeking the truth of God. They are transformed by what they see and adore, changed into something better we might say. As T.S. Eliot intuited, they are “no longer at ease” in their former places.

Being conformed to this world contrasts with being transformed by the renewing of our minds. The idea of renewal suggests something that has been lost and is to be recovered, a deeper sense of what belongs to the truth of our humanity. The Magi-Kings found Jesus in Bethlehem. Here, in the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the Scriptures, he is found in the Temple engaged with the doctors of the Law. What does it mean? What is the epiphany here for us that just might signal a change for us? As Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better” - in melius renovabimur. 

There is something universal in that sensibility. We seek for something more and better than what belongs to our worldly pursuits which ultimately cannot satisfy the restlessness of our hearts because the goods of this world pass away. “Our hearts are restless,” Augustine famously says, “until they find their rest in thee,” in our abiding in God’s eternal love. It launches his Confessions which is about the universal journey of the soul and its conversion to the abiding truth of God. But only because of two things that complement one another: our seeking or desiring and the epiphany of God to us.

The story of Jesus found in the Temple reveals Jesus as both student and teacher which means both man and God in the Christian understanding. It highlights the purpose of Christ’s coming; in short, our transformation by the renewing of our minds. This is shown in the dialogue between Mary and Jesus, in the to and fro of questions. She and Joseph had brought him to Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover but unbeknownst to them he tarried behind with the doctors. He is in the company of those who seek to know through the Torah, the law as the central part of the Hebrew Scriptures. All who heard him were “amazed at his understanding and answers.” But the greater amazement is in the exchange between Mary and Jesus. “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?” We “have sought thee sorrowing.” Jesus replies. “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not - Did you not know - that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Such ‘questions answering questions’ make known the divine purpose for our humanity revealed through the humanity of Christ. He comes with a purpose. He seeks the ultimate good of our humanity as found in the will of God. “I have come,” he says elsewhere, “to do the will of him who sent me” (Jn. 6. 38). The exchange speaks to what God wants us to know, namely, his will for our humanity which transforms us into something better.

Chapel is about the sharing of ideas that seek the good of our humanity as found in what is shown and made known about God and his will for our humanity. The story of Christ being found in the Temple is depicted in the stained-glass window in the center of the nave of the Chapel. There Jesus is imaged as the ‘carpenter’s son’ having gone down to Nazareth after being found in the temple, subject unto his parents. As Luke puts it in the words which accompany the image, “Jesus increased in wisdom, and stature, and in favour with God and man.” Known as the Buckle window after ‘Pa’ Buckle, a former house-master, it signifies the idea of an education that contributes to public service and labour. An education with a purpose that goes beyond self-interest.

But how do we know God and his will? There are several different ways of thinking God. We can come to the knowledge of God through our thinking upon the visible things of creation which, as Paul says, make known the invisible things of God as their cause and Creator. Or we can know God more inwardly in a form of a priori reasoning - reasoning from the idea of God to the necessary reality of God. This form of knowing is signalled in the window immediately opposite the Buckle window. It depicts Anselm, a great 12th century theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury, whose work Cur Deus Homo, ‘why God became man,’ addresses the very idea that Luke’s story shows. Anselm seeks an idea of God that is worthy of the transcendent mystery of God who is by definition beyond our thinking. To put it in modern terms, God is not a social construct of our minds. As Anselm tells us, the idea came to him - a kind of divine illumination - that “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” not in a comparative sense because God cannot be compared to anything in the created order, but as the superlative principle upon which all things depend.

Anselm offers in that treatise a profound theological reflection on God’s will in the creation of our humanity. “God,” he argues, “can make a human being in four ways: from man and woman, as constant experience shows; neither from man nor from woman, as he created Adam; from a man without a woman, as he made Eve; or from a woman without a man,” referring to Christ’s humanity from Mary. It is an intriguing form of theological thinking that embraces all the logical possibilities. In Luke’s story, Mary, we are told, “kept all these sayings in her heart.” It is a recurring theme. Mary embodies the vocation of our humanity in pondering the things of God. Such is the transformation of our humanity by the renewing of our minds on the things of God. Such is epiphany, the epiphany of Jesus being found in the temple and our being found in him. Such stories speak to the radical meaning of our seeking and our being found in the truth of what our seeking presupposes.