The Incarnation
“For when
peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was
half-spent, your all powerful Word bounded from heaven’s royal throne, a fierce warrior into the
doomed land” Wisdom 18, 14 – 15).
The greatest
things are accomplished in silence – not in the clamour of superficial display,
but in the deep clarity of inner vision, in the almost imperceptible start of
decision, in hidden sacrifice and quiet conquest. It is in silence that the
heart is quickened by love, and the free will stirs to action. The silent
forces are the strong forces. The greatest events are accomplished in silence.
And the greatest event of all was when the Son of God leaped down from
his heavenly throne on to this earth. It was the most silence event because it
came from the infinite remoteness beyond the noise of any possible intrusion.
The Son of
God became man, - “the Word was made flesh” (John 1) in the womb of a young
virgin; and it hardly echoed in the upper circles of the time, ignored by the
Roman historians. No one, except the young virgin, knew that Divinity had set
up its tent among men. His royal chamber was the animals’ stable, his throne
the manger, his canopy the hanging cobwebs, the reek of the dung the incense.
In this
Child, God, having spoken at sundry times through the Prophets, chose to reveal
to man the mysteries hidden from all eternity. In this Child the Divine made an
advance into the world and man, a divine transfusion by which we are
transformed, elevated, redeemed; for whereas we were blind, now we see. As St.
Irenaeus says, “there is one Father, the Creator of Man; and one Son who
fulfils the Father’s will; and one human race in which the mysteries of God are
worked out, so that the creatures, conformed and incorporated with his Son, are
brought to perfection.” In this Child, God and man have a purchase on each
other. For God is so great that he can allow himself to become a child. He is
so strong that he can appear weak. So overwhelmingly attractive that he draws
everyone to himself without forcing anyone. God is so Almighty that he can bind
people to himself without limiting their freedom.
The
Incarnation, which was the starting point of Christianity, was a descent into
the temporal, into the material, into this world of births and generations,
into the world of buying and selling, into this world of housing and education,
to this world of leisure and of hard work; this world of unemployment and
taxes. The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, took upon himself all this
in order to transform, to elevate and transfigure.
Therefore,
our salvation does not consist in a flight, an escape, a retreat from the
world. Not a flight of the alone to the Alone. Not an escape from our fellowmen
and our day to day burdens.
It is an
injustice to the Incarnation to confine its effectiveness merely to internal
graces. Rather, in every line of progress, spiritual, intellectual and
material, the Incarnation must be sanctifying leaven. And if that is so, it
should be the rule and not the exception to have saintly workers and peasants,
saintly statesmen and judges, merchants and soldiers. All stages of life must
be elevated, from childhood to adolescence, from marriage up to our last day on
earth. “All flesh shall see the salvation of God” (John 1).
Indeed, it s
only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word that the mystery of man is manifest.
We neglect the mystery of man at our peril. Wherever the Christ Child is adored
there is at least some sense of mystery. Ignore that birth, and the road to
power runs straight as a ruler to the death camps. Focus on that birth, and the
road to true humanity, however it may roll and meander, cannot be missed.
This
divine-human Infant touched off a revolution, a quiet prolonged thunder, from
the recesses of the cave of his birth, founding a Kingdom, characterized by
unconditional love and undiscriminating service. The centre of this dynamic
process is the human heart, and its source, the Son of God, born in the heart
of each man and woman today. He is not an ideal or abstraction, a gaunt empty
figure beyond description, but a Person in whom is the fullness of the Godhead,
the most beautiful among men, Victor over death and hell, the great Judge. He
has come, not to use us as tools, carrying us along with him, striding on
rapidly towards a high abstract goal. Nay, nothing great he put before us to
achieve except to love him, to be faithful to him and to give testimony to him
when the times comes. Most great men have failed, for their schemes have been
their ideals, and their chosen men their tools. And when these great ones died
there was no one to weep over them. But Jesus dying lives, and living he dies
daily like the grain of wheat or else he takes no root in our hearts. His ideal
is that we love him, that we love one another for him and that we believe in
his love for us.
He comes
into this world, dispossessed Infinity, naked and cold, that each one of us may
give him something – the universe for his stable, for his manger our hearts and
their warmth.
For too many
people Christmas is the time for exchanging gifts, very often gaudy things that
no mortal ever bought for himself. It is one annual symptom of the lunatic
condition of the world, in which everyone tries persuading everyone else to buy
things.
So it’s good
to remind ourselves on that GIFT that was wrapped up in circumstances of
deepest poverty. And even though each Christmas I try to fathom its mystery, I
trust I know enough to realize that life consists maybe in gifts, but
certainly not in “gots”. For the truth about Saints like Francis of Assisi is
not idyllic things like chatting with the birds and preaching to the fishes;
but the real truth about them was their ability of calling nothing their own.
The way to the Spirit is the way of dispossession. If the Word of God reached
from Heaven to Bethlehem by way of dispossession, we have no right reach him
except by the same road. Gethsemane was not possible without Bethlehem; but
Bethlehem is meaningless without Gethsemane.
Now that doesn’t
mean that we must run off and get ourselves measured for sackcloth and sandals.
That is too simplistic a way of solving the world’s problems. There is another
way for which good Biblical evidence can be found – that we may have things but
not be possessed by them, for we hold them as stewards, as disposable for the
good of others. So it’s a good idea, especially at a time like this to keep
checking on what we can do without, to detach ourselves from created things,
and to help bring about the day when words like property owning, comfortably
established, and power will not mean more to us than ransomed, healed,
restored, forgiven. The devastating simplicity of the Christmas story reveals
this. And as for the rest, we have no right to expect a status higher than that
of the carpenter’s son.
