INCARNATION AND SOCIAL MISSION

Incarnation and Social Mission

“For when peaceful stillness compassed everything, and the night in its swift course was half spent, Your all-powerful word from heaven’s throne bounded, a fierce warrior, into the doomed land” (Wisdom 18, 14 – 15). For the starting point of the Christ-event was a flight into the temporal, into the material, to this world of births and generations, to this world of buying and selling, to this world of housing and education, this world of leisure and of work, in order to transform, elevate, transfigure. Salvation is not a flight, a withdrawal, a retreat from the world. Not a flight of the alone to the Alone, not a rout from men and matter into the unfathomable Prajapati; not a denial of the existence of the world, not an aspiration towards nothingness. But salvation is an incarnation, an advance, an introit into the temporal and material, into the economic and social by the Word of God. Not that man and the Word may merely contain the Word, for Christ’s humanity is not a vessel of rare material in which reposes the Divinity; but that by a transfusion of the divine, man and the world may be redeemed and sublimated. For Christ’s humanity, through that indwelling, is raised to the highest realization possible to man. The social mission of the Incarnation is thus strictly within the movement and grace of the Hypostatic Union.

In the Incarnation the elevation has been wrought such as bewilders the heavenly intelligences. It is an injustice to the Incarnation to confine its effects to merely internal graces. Rather, in every line of progress – spiritual, intellectual, social, material – the advancement of humanity must be achieved. The material and social needs of our fellowmen fall within our Christian mission, within the mission of the Church whose divine Founder had pity on the famished crowd, who proclaimed that his disciples would be known by the love they had for one another, who gave the disciples of John a sign whereby he would understand that the Messiah was abroad: for the lame walked, the blind saw and the lepers were cleansed. And that sign has not changed since.