Part 6: He Came Down from Heaven – Saving Us in Four Different Ways

Understanding that the core reason for the Incarnation was “for our salvation”, Catholic tradition has teased out four ways this salvation unfolds for us.

According to the Catechism (CCC 457-460):

1. The Word became flesh for us in order to save us by reconciling us with God, who “loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10): “the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world” (1 John 4:14), and “he was revealed to take away sins” (1 John 3:5).
2. The Word became flesh so that thus we might know God’s love: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” (1 John 4:9). “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
3. The Word became flesh to be our model of holiness: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me” (Matthew 11:29).  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). On the mountain of the Transfiguration, the Father commands: “Listen to him!” (Mark 9:7; cf. Deuteronomy 6:4-5). Jesus is the model for the Beatitudes and the norm of the new law: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). This love implies an effective offering of oneself, after his example.
4. The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature“: (2 Peter 1:4) “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God” (St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 3, 19, 1: PG 7/1, 939). “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God” (St. Athanasius, De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B). “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Opusc. 57, 1-4).

There is a progression at work in the Church’s description of the Son’s saving mission. 

First and most fundamentally, the Son became man to reconcile us to God.  As we shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 7, what Jesus “satisfied” in the saving act of the Passion was the love, not the fury, of the Father, who was, after all, the one who sent the Son because he desired our salvation, not our destruction. 

This brings us to the second point, that the Son came to show us the Father’s love.  In the words of Pope St. John Paul II:

[W]e do not forget even for a moment that Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, became our reconciliation with the Father. He it was, and he alone, who satisfied the Father’s eternal love, that fatherhood that from the beginning found expression in creating the world, giving man all the riches of creation, and making him “little less than God”, in that he was created “in the image and after the likeness of God”. He and he alone also satisfied that fatherhood of God and that love which man in a way rejected by breaking the first Covenant and the later covenants that God “again and again offered to man.”[1]

Not that there is no such thing as the wrath of God: there is.  But it is directed at our sins, because sin hurts us, the apple of God’s eye.  This is a crucial Catholic insight:  we are punished by, not for, our sins.  The one taking vengeance on me when I sin is myself.  God seeks to heal the burn and uses even the pain to do us good: to remind us not to do that again.  He is entirely ordered to our good.  “In him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5)

This brings us to the third point: that the Incarnation gives us a model for holiness.  We are a monkey-see-monkey-do species who learn by imitation.  Jesus shows us by his living example what a truly human being looks like.  That is why, after he washed the feet of his disciples as a slave would do, he told them: “I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15).  His whole life provides us with a series of images for us to emulate.

That said, as the fourth point makes clear, the great thing the Church made clear in the conflict between Augustine and Pelagius is that Jesus did not come merely to be a model for us, because we require more than that.  We need the divine life of God we lost or we could no more imitate Jesus than an imitative monkey could become a human. So the fourth and most important point about why the Word became flesh is that he came to divinize our human nature and make us participants in the life of the Blessed Trinity.  The Christian vision of both our life here and now and our ultimate destiny in Christ goes far beyond merely “being a moral person” or “doing good deeds”.  Jesus is not a mere ethical instructor.  His gospel is about our becoming “little Christs”: people who participate in the supernatural life of God himself.  As C.S. Lewis puts it:

God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game.”[2]

[1] Pope St. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 1979.  Available on-line at http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_04031979_redemptor-hominis.html as of July 3, 2018.

[2] Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 182