A Reflection on the Incarnation

 From The Lord, by Romano Guardini:

THE Christmas liturgy includes these beautiful verses from the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Wisdom: "For while all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her course, thy almighty word leapt down from heaven from thy royal throne..."

The passage, brimming with the mystery of the Incarnation, is wonderfully expressive of the infinite stillness that hovered over Christ's birth. For the greatest things are accomplished in silence -- not in the clamour and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice.

Spiritual conception happens when the heart is quickened by love, and the free will stirs to action. The silent forces are the strong forces. Let us turn now to the stillest event of all, stillest because it came from the remoteness beyond the noise of any possible intrusion -- from God. Luke reports:

"Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, ... and when the angel had come to her, he said, 'Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.' When she had heard him she was troubled at his word, and kept pondering what manner of greeting this might be.

"And the angel said to her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God. Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he shall be king over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.'

"But Mary said to the angel, How shall this happen, since I do not know man?'

"And the angel answered and said to her, 'The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee; and therefore the Holy One to be born shall be called the Son of God.'

"But Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her."

How quietly everything occurred is clear from the following: as it became evident that Mary was expectant, Joseph, to whom she was promised, wanted to nullify the betrothal, for he thought she had been unfaithful to him; he is praised for planning "to put her away privately" so as not to expose her to scandal, for she was certainly very dear to him (Matt. 1: 19). What has happened is so impenetrably deep that Mary cannot speak of it even to her future husband, and God himself must inform him.

Underlying depths that with sufficient reverence we can at least begin to fathom, the unfathomable depths of God, for it is to him that the opening verses of this chapter refer:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God;

God is being described. With him is someone else, someone called "the Word"; he is the expression of the meaning and fullness of God, the First Person, Speaker of the Word. This Second Person is also God, "was God," yet there is only one God. Further, the Second Person "came" into his own: into the world which he had created.

Let us consider carefully what this means: the everlasting, infinite Creator not only reigns over or in the world but, at a specific "moment," crossed an unimaginable borderline and personally entered into history -- he, the inaccessibly remote one!

How can we best picture God's relation to the world? By imagining him as one who, having created the world, lived somewhere up there, endlessly remote and blissfully sufficient unto himself, content to allow creation to roll automatically along its once established course? Or is he to be considered as something in the world, the worlds own original cause and Urgrund, a creative Power permeating all things, which are but the material expression of his essence?

The first conception isolates him in celestial unapproachability. The second would make him the essence of all that is.

And the Incarnation? Was there once a man so completely in the extraordinary clutch of the divine idea, so inflamed by divine love that it could be said of him: God Himself speaks in him? Or perhaps: God is expressed in all things, in all people, but in one particular person that expression was so powerful and clear that it may be said: in him God appeared bodily on earth. It is immediately evident that neither interpretation is found in Holy Scripture.

Revelation's account of the incarnation and the relation of God to the world is something fundamentally different. According to the Bible, God entered into time in a specific manner, acting on an autocratic decision made in complete freedom. The free, eternals God has no destiny which is a matter for mortals living in history. What is meant is that God entered into history, that's taking destiny upon himself.

However, this journey of God from the everlasting into the transitory, this stride across the border into history, is something no human intellect can altogether grasp. The mind might even oppose the apparently fortuitous, human aspect of this interpretation with its own pure idea of godliness; get precisely here lies hidden the kernel of Christianity. Before such an unheard of thought the intellect bogs down. Once at this point a friend gave me a clue that helped my understanding more than any measure of bear reason. He said: “but love does such things!” Again and again these words have come to the rescue when the mind has stopped short at some intellectual impasse. Not that they explain anything to the intelligence; they arouse the heart, enabling it to feel its way into the secrecy of God. The mystery is not understood, but it does move nearer, and the danger of scandal disappears.

None of the great things in human life springs from the intellect; everyone of them issues from the heart and it's love. If even human love has its own reasoning, comprehensible only to the heart that is open to it how much truer must this be of God's love! When it is the depth and power of God that stirs, is there anything of which love is incapable? The glory of it is so overwhelming that to all who do not accept love as an absolute point of departure its manifestations must seem the most senseless folly.

Time unrolls further. Joseph, instructed by God, takes his promise bride to him. How deep that instruction must have gone to decide this sober man! How must he have felt before he realised that God had laid hand on his future wife, and that the life she had conceived was of the Holy Spirit! In that realisation awoke the great and blissful mystery of Christian chastity (Mark 1:19-5). Luke continues: “and Joseph also went from Galilee out of the town of Nazareth into Judea to the town of David, which is called Bethlehem - because he was at the house and family of David - to register, together with Mary his espoused wife who was with child. And it come te pass while they were there, that the days for her to be delivered were fulfilled. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped in  swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn."

What we have just attempted to grasp in the obscurity of divine action now presents itself to us in visible form. At first a child like any other, it cries, is hungry, sleeps, and yet is "the Word.. become flesh.” It cannot be said that God "inhabits" this infant, however gloriously; or that heaven has set its seal upon him, so that he must pursue it, suffer for it in a manner sublimely excelling all other contacts between God and man; this child is God in essence and in being.

If an inner protest should arise here, give it room. It is not good to suppress anything; if we try to, it only goes underground, becomes toxic, and reappears later in far more obnoxious form. Does anyone object to the whole idea of God-become-man? Is he willing to accept the Incarnation only as a profound and beautiful allegory, never as literal truth? If doubt can establish a foothold anywhere in our faith, it is here. Then we must be patient and reverent, approaching this central mystery of Christianity with calm, expectant, prayerful attention; one day its sense will be revealed to us. In the meantime, let us remember the directive "But love does such things!"

The tenor of the infant's destiny is now fixed. What one is by birth determines the general theme of the life to follow; everything else is necessarily supplementary. Incident and environment are certainly influential - they sustain and burden, promote and destroy, effect and form. Nevertheless, it is the first step into existence with its heritage of blood and spirit that is decisive. Christian thinkers have spent much time and thought probing Jesus' inner life, now from the psychological, now from the theological side, in an effort to discover what must have taken place there. But all psychology of Jesus shatters on the rock of what, essentially, he is. An analysis of Christ might be valid for the periphery or outmost surface of his being, but any significance or image it manages to construct is almost immediately consumed by the power of the center. As for theological analysis, however true in itself and fundamentally important to Christian thought, it is necessarily abstract. Hence, in order to advance at all in our faith, we are bound to call some concrete train of thought to our assistance. Let us try this one:

The young creature in the stall of Bethlehem was a human being with human brain and limbs and heart and soul. And it was God. Its life was to manifest the will of the Father: to proclaim the sacred tidings, to stir mankind with the power of God, to establish the Covenant, and shoulder the sin of the world, expiating it with love and leading mankind through the destruction of sacrifice and the victory of the Resurrection into the new existence of grace. In this accomplishment alone lay Jesus' self-perfection: fulfillment of mission and personal fulfillment were one. The Resurrected himself points this out: "Did not the Christ have to suffer these things before entering into his glory?" (Luke 24:26).

It was as if Jesus' self-realization meant that his human being "took possession" of the divine being he had always intrinsically been. Jesus did not "experience" God; he was God. He never at any given moment "became" God; he was God from the start. His life was only the process by which this innate divinity came into its own. His task was to place divine reality and power squarely in the realm of his human consciousness and will; to reflect holy purity in his relation to all things, and to contain infinite love and divinity's boundless plenitude in his heart of flesh and blood. The Lord's life might also be called a continuous penetration, infiltration of self, a hoisting of his being to ever higher levels of self-containment. For him self-conquest is seizure of his own superabundance. All external speech, struggle, action is simultaneously an unbroken advance of the man Jesus Christ into his own divinity. The thought is certainly inadequate. It does not pretend to be perfect theological argument but only a stimulus when we reflect on the frail child in the crib and on all that stirs behind its small forehead.

The public life of the Lord lasted at the utmost a brief three years; some say scarcely two. But precisely for this reason how significant the preceding thirty years in which he did not teach, did not struggle, did not work miracles. There is almost nothing in Jesus' life which attracts the reverent imagination more than the prodigious silence of these thirty years.

Once something of the enormity behind it breaks through: the incident in the temple when the twelve-year-old is for the first time allowed to accompany Mary and Joseph on the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem which custom demanded. His parents start for home believing the child to be with the group of relatives also making the pilgrimage, but the boy has stayed behind.

At last he is definitely missed, and three days of anguished searching follow, first among the relatives, then in Jerusalem. When the boy is finally found in the temple, he answers astonishment with astonishment: "How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?" (Luke 2: 41-49). Jesus enters the temple, and something in him seems to rise and grip him. His mother, Joseph, his traveling companions are utterly forgotten! His reply to Mary's shaken questioning best reveals how remote from theirs is the world in which he stands even then. 

Nevertheless, he obediently returns to Nazareth with his parents to grow with the years in wisdom and grace before God and men.