Transcript

St. Thomas Aquinas, when he wrote a short summary of the Christian faith for his good friend and secretary, Brother Reginald of Piperno, told him that there were two things he should always keep before his eyes: the divinity of the Trinity and the humanity of Christ.

Now, we've already covered the first point in an earlier session on the Holy Trinity.

The Son of God is co-eternal and consubstantial with the Father.

He proceeds from the Father as the Father's eternal Word.

The Son is true God, in other words.

In this session, we're looking at the second central point.

This very same eternal Son of the Father, who is true God, truly became man for our salvation in order to reconcile the world to Himself and to lead us back to the Father.

We read about this in the opening lines of St. John's Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh.

We abbreviate this in a single word, the Incarnation, which literally means the enfleshment of the Word, His becoming man.

One of my very favorite scripture passages on this theme is from chapter two of St. Paul's letter to the Philippians.

There, St. Paul is writing to a community he had visited some time earlier, and he quotes to them what some scholars believe is an early Christian hymn about Christ that both St. Paul and the Christians receiving his letter in Philippi must have known.

In fact, this hymn, they think, may be the oldest writing about Jesus that has come down to us, older even than the four Gospels.

And listen to what it says about Jesus.

Though He was in the form of God, Jesus did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

The eternal Son is God from all eternity, equal to the Father.

But sent by the Father, He emptied Himself and took on a human form or a human nature, a true humanity, even to the point that He accepted to suffer and die on the cross for us.

Now, this text and many others like it teach us two things about the inner identity of Jesus.

First, the person of the Son is God, and He preexisted His conception and birth as man.

Jesus is true God, and as God, He has always existed.

And the second point, when the fullness of time came, He was sent by the Father to assume a complete human nature, with a human body and a human soul, with a human mind and a human will, a true human nature with a human mother, with human emotions, and even with a human vulnerability to suffering and death.

In other words, Jesus Christ is one person who is true God and true man.

To use the more technical terms that we use in Catholic theology, in Christ, there is one person, the eternal Son, who, after taking on a human nature in the womb of the Virgin Mary, then subsists in two natures, the divine nature and an individual human nature.

Listen to how Pope St. Leo the Great put it in his famous letter written in 449 AD, which became the basis for the profession of faith of the Council of Chalcedon, one of the great councils in the history of the Church.

In the incarnation of the eternal Word in Mary's womb, Pope Leo wrote, The Son of God, descending from His heavenly throne, enters into the infirmities of this world.

And not leaving the Father's glory, He is generated in a new order and a new birth, for He who is true God is likewise true man, and there is no falsehood in this unity in which the lowliness of man and the heights of divinity coincide.

God is not changed by His compassion, nor is man swallowed up by such dignity, for each nature does what is proper to each in communion with the other.

This truth about the inner identity and constitution of Christ, that Jesus is true God and true man, then unfolds into a very beautiful truth about His work of salvation.

The eternal Son was sent into the world by the Father .

and became man for the salvation of the world.

So, listen to what the first letter of Saint John says.

God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him.

And in fact, Saint Paul testifies to the very same thing in Galatians chapter four.

When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

The reason for the incarnation, the reason why a person who is true God became also truly man was for us and for our salvation.

After our first parents fell into sin, what we read about in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, humanity was corrupted by sin and destined to die.

Jesus came as a savior, assuming our human nature, in order to redeem it and raise us up to share in His divinity, and more specifically, to share in His own sonship as we become adopted sons and daughters through Him.

This is why it is so important to profess that Jesus is true God and true man.

This is not a detail.

As true man, He truly enters into our condition.

He saves human nature from inside, you might say.

And as true God, He brings the eternal life of God into our humanity so that we could be raised up to share in His divinity.

Now, this is a marvelous truth.

It's a very profound truth.

It's so profound that it's hard for our minds to grasp it fully.

But it is, in fact, the heart of the Christian message of salvation, and it's why the church has been so careful to preserve and proclaim, to insist on her belief in the full divinity and the true humanity of Jesus Christ.

So, let's return to the Gospels to speak about another wonderful facet of the truth about Jesus.

As man, He is anointed by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Himself quoted the words of the Prophet Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, saying, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

You might also think of the Gospel recounting the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, where the Holy Spirit descended on Him in the form of dove.

And a voice was heard from heaven saying, 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' This does not mean that Jesus only began to be the Son at that moment, or that He only started to possess the Holy Spirit at His baptism.

Rather, this event, His baptism, was an extraordinary manifestation at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry of his true identity, an identity which she of course possessed from the very first moment of His conception as man.

And what is that identity?

That He is both the Son of God and also the anointed of God.

In fact, that's what Christ means.

Christos is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, which means the anointed one.

So, Jesus is true God and true man.

And as man, He is anointed by the Holy Spirit.

That means that in His sacred humanity, Jesus possessed every spiritual gift and every grace that it is possible for a human being to have.

He had, for example, all of the graces of prophecy, and even of knowledge, so that He could really read the hearts and minds of those around Him.

As John 2:25 says, Jesus knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man, for He Himself knew what was in man.

What is more, Jesus had a perfect knowledge of God.

He constantly beheld the face of the Father.

And therefore, as the Father's word, He was the most perfect possible revelation of God to the world.

He spoke in human words with human images, parables drawn from the human experiences of someone in first century Palestine, but He did that in order to reveal to us who God truly is.

Or to put it another way, Christ is the most perfect teacher because He is the Word incarnate.

Similarly, Jesus worked many extraordinary miracles, and one of the most striking things in the Gospels is the way that they show Him doing this from a power that He possessed in Himself, which is another way for the scriptures to show the divine authority of Jesus.

In fact, these miracles also confirm the truth of what Jesus said and taught.

So for example, when in the Gospels you hear of the Pharisees doubting that Jesus has the authority to forgive sins, Jesus proves that He has that authority by miraculously healing a man who had been paralyzed, who begins to stand up and to walk around.

But Jesus' greatest miracle, of course, was His resurrection from the dead after being crucified, killed, and buried.

And this, more than anything else, shows how His incarnation destroys death and bestows life.

But because this is such an important theme, we'll save it for our next session.