4th Sunday of Advent, Year B
First Reading: 2 Sm 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16
Second Reading: Rom 16:25-27
Gospel Reading: Lk 1:26-38
In this Sunday’s First Reading, God makes a promise to King David: “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.”
In the Gospel Reading, God keeps his promise when he invites Mary to conceive and bear a son who “will be called the Son of the Most High” and inherit “the throne of his ancestor David.” When Mary asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” she is told that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, and the power of the Most High overshadow her, so the child “will be called Son of God.”
When tolerant, well-meaning people remark that all religions are really the same, this is the fact to remember, for it distinguishes Christianity from all other religions: our belief that God became Man.
When our belief is challenged, we have to admit that God’s Incarnation is a mystery. However, that means not that we cannot understand anything about it, but that we cannot understand everything about it. Let us explore, then, what it means to say that God became man.
The Church says, precisely, that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures: the nature of God and the nature of man. To explain the difference between person and nature, Frank Sheed suggests that we imagine ourselves in a dark room becoming aware that something else is there. If we cannot tell what it is, we ask, “What is that?” If we can tell that it is a person, but nothing more, we ask, “Who is that?” The difference between what and who is the difference between nature and person.
Who is Jesus Christ? He is the Second Person of the Trinity. What is He? He is a man and he is God. Since the Incarnation, God the Son, who, without beginning, has God’s infinite nature in all perfection, has the nature of man as well. He did not simply put on humanity like a mask while he was on earth. He is man in Heaven, for all eternity, without end.
He is as truly human as we. Like us, he was conceived in a woman’s womb, inheriting his human characteristics from all his ancestors, including King David. Like us, he suffered hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and discomfort. Like us, he had to learn--that is, his brain had to process the evidence of his senses. Like us, he had friends whom he loved especially; he wept when one of his friends died. Like us, he was tested by the devil.
In one respect he is more completely human than we are: he never sinned. However, even in that respect he made himself like us at the Last Supper, when he assumed the sin of the whole human race, becoming, like us, afraid of what our sins had incurred, to the point where he begged his Father to spare him.
In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope St. John Paul II said it seems that God “has gone as far as possible” in his “stooping down” to humans. “In a certain sense,” he added, “God has gone too far!”
Only Christians accept a God “who is so Human,” he writes. For others, it is “too much,” they cannot “tolerate such closeness.”
God’s Incarnation is Christianity’s “starting point,” the pope said, for it “attests that God goes in search of man” because “he loves him eternally” and wants to raise him “to the dignity of an adoptive son.”
As Christmas approaches, meditate on the words “God became man.” Pray to God, “who is able to strengthen you according to my Gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ,” as St. Paul said. Pray for an increase of faith in, and understanding of, “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge. All the materials (video and print) are available online at www.beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 16, “Mary and Joseph,” will be available January 3.