New Year message: Rev Jeremy Taylor, rector of Henley with Remenham

IT is surely as good a time as it has been for a while to be pessimistic about human nature.

Our capacity for turning our amazing talents and ingenuity to malign purposes is extraordinary; extraordinary too is that with all our knowledge and technological prowess we seem so unable to resolve the problems we have created.

And yet the claim of the Christian church, celebrated at Christmas, is that the God who created heaven and earth chose to become incarnate as a human being, and to unite the perfect divine nature with human nature, with all its limits and weaknesses.

It is an extraordinary claim and one that is related to that other Christian claim that human beings are made in the image of God.

These lofty claims might seem far removed from the world around us, with its fake news, its Novichok and its grave environmental crises.

And yet the Christian claim is not only that God chose to become a human being because God loved us, but also that God chose to become a human being specifically to save us. And who can doubt that we need saving?

The church asserts both the dignity of human beings, and also our weakness and our tendency to evil, and our consequent need for salvation.

Moving from the global to the domestic, Christmas seems to bring out the two aspects of human nature perhaps more than any other time of year, brought together as we often are with those we love, but reminded also as we often are of the wounds and feuds and resentments that can afflict our family life.

The turn of the year is a traditional time for taking stock, for reflecting on our lives and for making changes to the way we live for the coming year. This can be a useful exercise, especially if our resolutions are outward-looking and have something to do with the ways in which we relate to other people and the world around us.

Let us pray that with God’s grace, the dignity of our human nature, and the beauty of the divine image in which we are made, will shine through strongly in 2019, in our lives, in our families and in the world.

I wish you all a happy New Year!