These days it is very cheap to communicate. It costs hardly anything to send emails or to call someone in the same country. Even international phone calls are significantly cheaper than in previous decades. That should enable us to communicate quickly and effectively with many people. But sometimes it seems that communication has become too cheap. Our email inboxes are now so full, often with advertising or updates, that it is hard to spot the messages that actually mean something to us. This year one school sent us daily messages, the other weekly messages in addition to individual notices. One teacher realised that parents could not manage the email flood and returned to sending paper notes with the children in their homework.

In our email inbox we get advertisements from shops we signed up to to get discounts. I get a general news briefing; I get notices from substacks; I get archaeology and mission and church and city council and … newsletters. Now and then I decide to be proactive and cancel a few email newsletters, but over time more slowly creep in.

Most larger organisations now have contact centres and calling them costs us nothing except time. But getting through to someone who can really help is difficult. And so some now resort to writing letters again. Even though letters are now considerably more expensive to send, some people are rediscovering them, because they are one of the few ways to reach people in a world of cheap communication.

I wonder whether in the age of cheap communication it is hard to listen. Maybe it requires costly communication for us to pay attention. In the Gospel of John Jesus is described as God’s Word, God’s communication to us. And that communication is costly communication. It required God to become human, to become poor for us. In all the noise of the world, there’s still no guarantee that we would pay attention to that communication. We may still disregard it. But it is God’s costly communication that told us most clearly about God’s love for humanity and God’s costly salvation of the world. To us it may appear somewhat more complicated than a meme that’s making the rounds. But would we really understand if we were only given a few memorable sentences? In Jesus God lived among us here on earth, showed us what God is like. Jesus is God’s most complete communication, costly communication at that.