As we recite the words “He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man”) something happens in the liturgy that is worth noting. On most days of the year when the Creed is said, every member of the congregation (assuming they have been properly catechized) takes what is known as a “profound bow”: that is, a bow from the waist. On the Solemnity of the Annunciation (March 25) and again, nine months later on Christmas Day, the congregation kneels at these words. Why? Because the liturgy teaches us through gesture to make our flesh a participant in the memorial of the Incarnation as we declare with our mouth that the Word became flesh. Just as the Son of God humbled himself to become flesh, so we, with our bodies, humble ourselves too by bowing or kneeling in memory of his humbling himself through his conception and birth.
The book of Hebrews takes a passage from the Psalms and places it on the lips of Jesus to summarize the why of this act of self-humiliation by God:
[W]hen Christ came into the world, he said,
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,’” (Hebrews 10:5-7)
This captures perfectly the early Church’s understanding of the reason God the Son became man: to do the will of the Father as man. The logic is as simple as it is astounding: No Mary, no human nature for God the Son to assume. No human nature, no death on the cross. No death on the cross, no resurrection from the dead. No resurrection, no salvation. The Incarnation is the utterly necessary prelude to the entire drama of redemption. And it begins (in time, at any rate) at the Annunciation when Mary’s utterly free “Yes” is offered to the God who has willed the Incarnation from all of eternity.
Given the omnipotence of God, most people can grant, in theory, that he can do as he pleases and take on human flesh. But throughout the history of the Church, there have been people who still found the doctrine incredible for a host of reasons. The proposition is, after all, that God, the invisible power that hurled the universe into being and invented DNA and holds quarks together and spoke to prophets and parted the Red Sea and knows everything and can do everything—that God–somehow joined himself to a single cell in the womb of a creature with a digestive tract built on the same basic model as that of an earthworm, with blood reflecting the same salinity levels as the seawater from which life sprang, bearing a nervous system, endocrine glands, musculature and a gene array that is made of the same sort of stuff as the rest of the animal kingdom. God became a creature whose diapers had to be changed. That is the Christian claim. And if it doesn’t shock you, you haven’t been listening.
The Church’s Developing Understanding of the Incarnation
The Catechism speaks the plain historical truth of the Church’s message when it declares without compromise:
Belief in the true Incarnation of the Son of God is the distinctive sign of Christian faith: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God” (1 John 4:2) Such is the joyous conviction of the Church from her beginning whenever she sings “the mystery of our religion”: “He was manifested in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16). (CCC 463)
That Jesus Christ is “true God and true man”—fully God and fully human, not half man and half God–lies at the very heart of what the Christian tradition has said about Jesus from the beginning of the Church. And yet, this seemingly simple proposition has met with a host of challenges over the centuries, each one of which has required a response from the Church, and each response requiring the Church to think more and more deeply about who and what Jesus is and what he has accomplished for us.
As we saw in Chapter 4, this was emphatically true concerning the question of the relationship of God the Son with God the Father, but it is even more true regarding the question of how God the Son can be man.
Some difficulties surrounding this question seem obvious given the materialist temper of our age. So post-moderns have little trouble empathizing with Jesus’ contemporaries who could easily accept his humanity but not his deity as they said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (John 6:42).
Much less easy for post-moderns to grasp are those objections of ancients who had no problem accepting Jesus’ deity but found his humanity to be the incredible thing. For the Docetist of the late first century, the difficulty was with the proposition that God the Son would take on human flesh. And so, the apostle John must warn the Church that denial of Jesus’ humanity, not his deity, comes of the spirit of antichrist:
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist. (1 John 4:1-3)
As the history of the Church rolls on, the immense fertility of the human mind in coming up with ways to complicate the very simple words “true God and true man” are on full display. Just as Arianism had threatened to destroy our understanding of the relationship of the Father to the Son, so a series of heresies proposed “solutions” to biblical paradoxes which, if taken seriously, would have been absolutely fatal to the central claim of the entire Christian faith that the Word became flesh.
Of which more tomorrow.
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