INCARNATION

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.