The Incarnation by Fr. Sean O'Brien

Almost Merry Christmas to everyone! We’re still preparing in Advent for Christmas. We’re preparing our hearts spiritually, and also we’re preparing for the glorious celebrations! “Keep Christ in Christmas” and “Jesus is the reason for the season” are more than cute phrases. Without Christ, it’s just a little extra time off from school and work to dedicate ourselves to consumerism or other worldly things. Let that not be you.

However, at Christmas we’re not celebrating Christ in general. We’re not celebrating Christ’s multiplication of the loaves or the start of His ministry or the Last Supper. No. We are celebrating the Incarnation, the “fleshification” of the Eternal Son of God, the event in which “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (Jn 1:14)

We actually do this every Sunday. During the profession of the ancient creed where we unite our personal “I” with the Church’s “I,” we bow down in reverence to the Christmas moment. It’s a little Christmas every Sunday, so make sure your heart is in your bow as you savor your mini-celebration!

While there are the heroic, genius saints who have written profusely about the Incarnation, I’ve been thinking about how best to simplify and summarize all that thought while still recognizing its depths. This is the meaning of Christmas, this is the meaning of the Incarnation: (1) God loves all human beings, and (2) He wants to make it easy for human beings to love God. We can also see the (3) divine affirmation, God’s “thumbs up,” to human flesh and blood.

What do I mean by this? I will take each of those parts and unwrap it. We begin with the first part: The Incarnation is a radical manifestation of God’s love for us. The fact that God loves us even without the Incarnation is radical enough already. The simple truth is that God has only loved us, and we have not been good to Him. We have truly offended Him, our Truest Lover. We have returned His goodness by ignoring Him, by disobeying Him, by despising Him. We all do this in different ways, but every sin directly offends Him. We make ourselves His enemies.

If you have not yet come to grips that you have made yourself His enemy, in whatever degree, and that it would have been worse if God had not prevented you from doing so, you will be paralyzed in discovering the great depths of God’s love.

“… while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son ….” (Rm 5:10) Yes, this verse talks about His death, but that’s only possible if He first incarnates Himself into a body capable of dying. God loves us, and while we offend Him, His heart just simply burns more deeply for us. He was born to die.

For this reason, the divine response of love to sin begins with the Incarnation. For that reason, the angel proclaimed the happy tidings to Joseph, and notice how it is announced in the context of sin: “[Mary] will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” (Mt 1:21) For a little homework, I invite you to meditate on a few other verses, too: Luke, 19:10; Galatians 4:4; Hebrew 2:14, 17-18; and 1 Tim 1:15.

To summarize this part, let us draw on the wisdom of St. Augustine. “What greater cause is there of His coming than to show God’s love for us?” God loves us sinners, and He wants us to be free from our sins. Therefore, He became a human being. Also, just like any lover, it was the divine desire to, well, to be with us. That’s pretty special.

The second dimension of the Incarnation that I alluded to was that He wants us to love Him. Augustine continues by saying “If we have been slow to love, let us at least hasten to love in return.” “Love is repaid by love alone,” was a motto of St. Therese of the Child Jesus taken from St. John of the Cross. The spirituality of the saint from Lisieux was one of giving pleasure to the Child Jesus, from which she takes her religious name. She knew the limits of being a human. She knew that it’s easier to love a child than to love the invisible God. That’s why she is Therese of the Child Jesus.

Did you ever wonder why baby animals are so dang cute? Even us humans. Some of us might already be like me: short, bald, and ugly. But even I was once a cute, little baby! God makes babies cute so that it is easy to love them and take care of them. That’s why the monsters of humanity are those who hurt God’s littlest ones, the most innocent.

Who is so proud as to not be moved to humility by the self-humbling God? Who is so hard-hearted as to not take notice of the crying baby in the feeding trough? Who is so indifferent as to not offer a sincere prayer of thanks before the baby in a nativity scene?

God has crossed the abyss between the Creator and the creature to make it easier to love Him. And why can’t this heart respond with greater warmth and generosity? Why does this heart take Him for granted? Why does this poor human heart focus so much on Christmas gifts, decorations, and parties and forget the birthday boy Himself? Oh, Lord! See our poor, weak, and distracted hearts and strengthen them!

We praise You O Infant Jesus, true God and true Man. We praise and worship You in all the mangers throughout the world. Thank you, my King and my God.

We conclude with a third observation on the Incarnation. While He is loving humanity and helping humanity love Him, He gives His eternal thumbs up to our flesh by accepting it as his own! Sometimes we become mixed up and find ourselves complaining about “these darn emotions.” Maybe we can tell ourselves life would be better without the wild impulses of sexuality. There are stages of life where our bodies ache, hurt, and suffer, and we wish we could be angels and free of injury and aging.

We must stop that thought process. We must praise the almighty wisdom for loving our bodies and for taking an actual body for Himself. He didn’t become an angel; He became a human! It is good to be human. Some people want to go “transhuman” or “posthuman,” pushing the evolutionary process forward. Not us. For us, if God loved our human nature and everything about it, so will we. Thank you, Jesus, for making us who we are. Thank you for the Incarnation.