Sermon for Kings College Chapel, 15 February 2015
‘Learning’
1 Corinthians 13, Luke 2: 42-52
Revd Dr Rowan Williams
Anglican Chaplain, University of York
The reason I’ve been asked to preach on Learning is that it is enshrined in the College
statutes. Alongside education, religion and research, learning is the College’s purpose. This
is to recognise that learning is about far more than what we know, or even how we apply
what we know. Learning, in its fullest sense, is about how we live; the process which
transforms our perception of the world and our place in it. As the poet Emily Dickinson put
it: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." For me,
that feeling is clearly associated with certain pieces of music which opened up the world to
me in new ways. For you, it may perhaps be a book, a work of art, an idea, even an equation;
something which stretches what you thought you knew about the world, finds a way to
express something which until then you didn’t realise existed- and then becomes a part of
you.
When Henry VI placed learning at the heart of the College’s identity, what he meant by
learning was unquestionably shaped by the Christian faith. The process of learning how to
become a complete human being, in the Christian sense, was and is bound up with what it
means to be made in the image of God. I believe we do current and future members of the
College a disservice if we forget to look at learning within that same framework. Learning to
be human takes a lifetime. It requires a careful balancing act between the parts of us which
are gifted or which work well- the parts which probably got us here in the first place- and
the parts which may have had less chance to develop. In a place like this, devoted as it is to
academic and musical excellence, that emphasis on balanced learning is particularly
important. It’s all too easy for those of us who have been encouraged and nurtured to
perform at very high levels to grow up lopsided: if we put so much time and energy into
excelling in one area, we risk not growing at all, or not enough, in other parts of ourselves.
The pressure to achieve, to succeed, may indeed produce excellent results on one level; but
the human costs can be great. Nor does that kind of learning truly honour Henry’s original
vision. His poor scholars were to form a community of learning, whose life together was
intended not just to develop skilled individuals, but to mirror the life of heaven itself. Its
members were called not just to become whole themselves, but to draw out the wholeness in
others.
Today’s Gospel picture of Jesus in the temple embodies both these essential purposes of the
College: the pursuit of academic excellence and the process of learning what it is to be fully
human. The extent to which Jesus can be said to learn and grow as a human being is, of
course, theologically controversial, and one to which different Gospels suggest different
answers. Luke’s picture of the twelve-year-old Jesus is the only canonical reference to his life
between infancy and public ministry. Luke presents us with a multi-layered story, which
hints that there’s more to Jesus than to other Jewish twelve-year-olds preparing for bar or
bat mitzvah. The truth of his identity, as you would expect with any adolescent, is not yet
fully understood but is beginning to make itself felt, both to him and to those around him.
In this light, ‘Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?’ is a profoundly
loaded question. This is not just pre-teenage stroppiness. It presupposes that Jesus is already
making the transition towards understanding himself as Son of God, rather than merely son
of Joseph and Mary. It’s worth noting, however, that Jesus’ humanity remains at the heart of
this story, even as it becomes evident that it is not the whole of his identity. Just as he needs
to learn what ‘being about my Father’s business’ really means, the young Jesus also has
something to learn from Mary and Joseph about the sacrifices and choices implicit in human
being.
Importantly for our context, Jesus is also portrayed in this episode as a learner in the
academic sense; as he disputes with scholars in the Temple, he is both claiming his new
identity as a Jewish adult, and impressing them with what he knows and what he can do.
Again, Luke allows us to read into this more than just academic precocity: he wants us to see
something special which is already apparent in the young Jesus, someone whose answers do
not come merely from engaging with the sacred texts of Judaism, but from a lived
relationship with the God he calls Father.
Jesus goes back home with his family, and goes on growing, ‘in wisdom and in stature’. As
we all must, he goes on learning more about himself; but he does so within the framework
available to every good Jew- study of the Scriptures, prayer, attendance at the synagogue.
And the security which that gives him, you could argue, becomes a resource in the
encounters which are so prominent later in Luke’s Gospel: with those whose own identity
and place in the world is insecure. Jesus the man, about his Father’s business, makes it his
concern to help such vulnerable individuals to learn that they too have a value, that they too
are made in the image of God and called to be citizens of the kingdom, to grow into full
humanity.
When I graduated from King’s, painfully aware of how much growing I still needed to do, I
found myself working among people for whom a Cambridge degree was meaningless;
people with severe learning disabilities, for whom even learning to walk, or speak, or feed
themselves, was a challenge. Living alongside them, I learned very differently from the way
I had learned at King’s. As Jesus teaches the most vulnerable in his own society that they
have worth because they too are made in his Father’s image, so the most vulnerable in our
society taught it to me. I had lots of unspoken questions about my identity, my journey
towards full humanity. And I was amazed at their answers.
As St Paul suggests in today’s epistle, the journey towards full humanity is one we will not
complete in this life. Now, we see only through a glass, darkly: then, we shall see face to
face. Now, we know only in part: then, we shall know fully, even as we are fully known. The
facts we learn here, the theories we develop, have their uses not just in advancing the sum of
human knowledge and, hopefully, improving the sum of human experience. But learning
cannot be reduced to facts, nor even to scholarship. Learning implies an openness to more,
an admission that there is always something new to discover, that we are as yet imperfect
and incomplete. Learning to become a full human being made in the image of God is to
yearn for that perfection, to balance our existing gifts and skills with new insights and new
relationships, to come to terms with the occasional failures that come with the willingness to
take risks. Learning in the Christian sense, the sense which inspired Henry VI more than 500
years ago, is about growing in wisdom and stature, as Jesus did. That’s often a more difficult
and demanding process even than the attainment of academic or musical excellence- but it is
precisely that learning to be human in Jesus’ image that Henry most wanted for his scholars,
as for himself. And its willingness to engage creatively with that learning remains the
Chapel’s greatest gift to the College today.
Amen.