(Advent is the time when we await the coming of our Lord, both in time as the son of Mary and at the end of time as the Risen Lord who draws all the faithful to our heavenly Father. This is a good time to reflect on one of the great mysteries of our faith: the Incarnation. Paul Peterson, one of our faithful parishioners who was a civil engineer and a religion teacher – he taught for 11 years at Bishop Shanahan High School, Downingtown – recently shared a paper he had written on this very important subject. I found it to be so well presented that I asked him if I could share it with you; he reluctantly gave permission. The following is the first of three parts of his paper; I offer it for your reflection and inspiration as we look forward to celebrating our Lord’s birth at Christmas.)
How can God, the Eternal Being, wishing to show humanity His own character focused, His own thoughts expressed, and His own purpose demonstrated, introduce Himself into the stream of human history without disrupting it? He did so in the person of his son who, as we affirm in the Creed every Sunday, “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”
His early followers, the original Christians, struggled to grasp the Incarnation. The first Christians were all Jews. They came to believe in Jesus Christ in the same way that Jews had always come to know all of God’s truths – through revelation. At Pentecost in what is the first recorded Christian homily, Peter proclaimed to his fellow Jews: “Therefore let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made both Lord and Messiah this Jesus whom you crucified“ (Acts 2:36). Peter’s words shocked the Jews. Peter had called the man Jesus “Lord,” a title Jews reserved for Yahweh, the Most High God.
Peter backed up his amazing proclamation with an abundance of Old Testament quotations to show that everything previously revealed by God to his people was now being fulfilled in the Christian revelation of Jesus the Lord. This was a great scandal to many Jews. They simply could not accept what for them was a blasphemous teaching, that is, that God had become human. Other Jews, however, did accept the Christian revelation. And, as the Acts of the Apostles describes, the Church began to grow.
As the Church grew, Jewish Christians carried the Christian revelation to non-Jews. This created a problem, brought on by the fact that non-Jews, most of whom were brought up in the Greek tradition of rationalism, arrived at religious truth not through revelation but through speculation. In order to become Christians, both Jews and Gentiles had to make the same leap of faith concerning the Incarnation, but because of their traditionally different starting points for arriving at religious truth, Jews and Gentiles brought different predispositions to their newly accepted faith.
Jewish Christians accepted the Incarnation as the pinnacle of the Old Testament revelation concerning the Messiah. Gentiles, on the other hand, wanted to tinker with the whole idea of the Incarnation. Speculating about the “mechanics” of the Incarnation, they started asking, “How did God become man?” Their probing questions led to a furious debate within the Church, culminating in the great Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Two schools of thought attempted to answer the “how” question about the Incarnation. One school of thought had a negative view of human nature and therefore was suspicious of letting Jesus’ human nature “get too close” to his divine nature. According to this school, Jesus really did not have a human soul. Rather, the eternal preexistent Word (see John 1:1) operated in place of Jesus’ human soul. In this view Jesus’ “God-ness” was everything and his “human-ness” was virtually nothing. By becoming incarnate, God in Jesus saved humanity by “lifting” humanity, so to speak, up to God, or by “absorbing” humanity into divinity. By this view, Jesus’ human effort and will had little to do with the salvation of the human race. The implication of this viewpoint, of course, is that we human beings don’t amount to much in God’s eyes, because Jesus himself had not been fully human.
The second school of thought went to the other extreme in rejecting the proposition that Jesus’ human nature had been assimilated into the divine Word. This school said that Jesus’ divine and human natures had remained completely distinct during Jesus’ life. Thinkers of this school tended to make Jesus a “God-like man,” who by his moral example showed us how to attain salvation. The implication of this second tendency is that humanity saves itself by following Jesus’ moral example. If this is how God saves the human race, we could ask, how is Jesus any different from Plato, Buddha, Gandhi or any other God-like man?
Neither of these early approaches to “how God became man” understood the fullness of the truth of the Incarnation. Two persons in particular were instrumental in leading the Church to its eventual official formulation on the Incarnation. These two great thinkers were St. Cyril (Bishop of Alexandria, 412 – 444AD) and St. Leo the Great (who was the pope, 440 – 461AD). Their work is behind the Council of Chalcedon’s formula defining the Incarnation, “one Christ in two natures unconfused, unchangeable, undivided and inseparable…both coming together in one person and substance, not parted or divided among two persons, but in one and the same only-begotten Son.”
Perhaps today more people question Jesus’ divinity like this: We know that Jesus is human, but can his very humanness be present to us in a way that transcends history? Is the Gospel Jesus more than just a very wonderful historical figure? Many of us ask, especially in times of great need: Is Jesus Christ truly accessible to the inner anguish of my heart?
Jesus Christ is fully human, but if his humanity is to be truly accessible to us, then it must be humanity woven into something transcendently larger – divinity. The divinity of Jesus, rather than distancing us from the human Jesus, fulfills the searcher’s longing for a Christ who can bend very near. It is only the One who is the “Word of God, begotten not made,” who can reach down through the centuries with a presence that, to paraphrase the great insight of Saint Augustine, is more intimately near to my inner depths than even my own consciousness.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, one in being with the Father….This inseparable union of Jesus’ two natures in one person forms “the-Word- become-flesh” (John 1:14). It is this inseparable union between divinity and humanity in Jesus, and in ourselves, which distinguishes Christianity from all other religions.
There is a radical difference between Jesus just being a prophet, a moral leader who gives us insight, and a dynamic loving God who sends His Son into the world. The Son of God who through His life, death and resurrection brings about a relationship with God that was not possible before He did these things. Now God can become our Father; we can be transformed from being sinners into being fully men and women, sons and daughters of the Father. Now we can live a whole new life by the power of the Holy Spirit; we have the guarantee of our own bodily resurrection, something that we never had before. We know the love of the Father in a special way.
Saint Irenaeus, who was the Bishop of Lyons at the end of the second century AD, summarized what the Incarnation means from humanity’s point of view when he said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” In the Incarnation, divinity and humanity come together indissolubly, so that humanity becomes truly ennobled and dignified, raised to an entirely new level of existence, a level of existence in which the human and divine interpenetrate, fulfilling God’s ancient revelation to the Jews: “God created man in his own image“ (Genesis 1:27).
(Next week, Paul will reflect on the eternal plan of God in the Incarnation; stay tuned!)