Sorry that I haven’t posted for a while. I was sick and the last days I’ve been rather busy. But here are some reflections of the Incarnation, based on my Christmas Day homily.
We have now come to the Christmas season and I want to reflect on what that means to us, what we are celebrating. On Christmas Day, we celebrated Mass, which is what Christmas is all about. Some say “keep Christ in Christmas,” I would also say “keep Mass in Christmas.” Because it is precisely in the celebration of Mass that we meet him. Now, what is it that we celebrate?
Th Gospel for Christmas in the Church of Norway lectionary is John 1:1-14. The climax, v. 14, states that the eternal Word or Logos, which is God (John 1:1) became flesh:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.
God became matter, the Eternal Word came to us as a little helpless child. He became the Word without words. We call this the Incarnation, which means that God became flesh (Lt. carne). God came to us in matter, as a human being, as a creature. It is therefore a word that can be easy to understand purely linguistically, but almost impossible to fully grasp. Because it says that God, the eternal and unchanging, came down to us, as one of us. The Incarnation tells us that we have gained communion with God because He became a creature and because He did what we were called to do, by grace, completely free of charge.
This is so unfathomable that we actually cannot fully understand it. How can the infinite God come to us and become a finite creature? How can the Word become wordless? We cannot grasp this with thought. But we can receive it and accept it, with trust and in thanksgiving.
But what do we receive? The Christmas Day Gospel reading ends with John 1:14. But the prologue of St. John’s Gospel continues for another four verses. And I think that these verses are essential. Let me quote the last three, John 1:16-18:
From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
The point of the incarnation was not merely that God should walk among us but that we should become one with Him. We have received God’s fullness (Gk. plḗrōma), and that entails not some divine bonus but God Himself in His fullness. By grace, through faith, we receive a participation in God, fully and completely, and freely, because “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” That is the point of the incarnation. And now we receive that fullness not in the abstract, but in concrete and visible or sensible things, in the word and in the sacraments.
Even though God can come to us in many ways, He has given us very specific places where He has promised to be, for us, for our salvation. On His promise, we receive this once in baptism, and again and again in the word and in the Eucharist. In concrete words and in bread and wine, we receive the Holy Spirit who creates faith in us. And at Christmas, as it is indeed a Mass, we should focus particularly on the Eucharist. There, in completely ordinary bread and wine, in everyday things, we share in the divine fullness.
Christ is fully, completely, and substantially present there, because the bread and wine are his body and his blood, given for us and to us. And so the bread and the wine, and we, indeed the whole of creation, are lifted up so that creation can partake of God. But it does not happen by removing us to a ‘spiritual plane,’ away from the concrete and physical. The Eucharist is not a portal that takes us away from our physical world. No, it gives us a share in Christ precisely through the physical, here and now. And this finds its logic precisely in the incarnation.
When God became man, creation received a share in God in a most particular manner. The point is not that we should become ‘extra spiritual,’ but that the Word became flesh. God has given us the word and the sacraments as specific places of promise. He meets us there, where we are. By receiving the Eucharist, we share in Christ himself, the fullness of God, “grace upon grace,” here and now.
Together with Easter, Christmas is the ultimate of what God has done for us. God became flesh for you, for me, for us all. God the Father gave us his Son as a newborn child, so that through Him, we would become God’s children. We are baptised in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the grace we received there, we receive again and again when we hear or read God’s word and when we receive the Holy Eucharist. There, we participate in the divine fullness.
Let us, therefore, pray God to allow us, like Sts. Mary, Joseph, and millions of Christians throughout history, to receive Jesus, again and again. Because it is in Him that we find salvation, the fullness of God, in Him who came to us as a gift, as Jesus himself says in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.