CHAPTER
13
SINCE THE FOURTH CENTURY, Catholics by the thousands—by the millions—have been going to Sunday Mass and saying the most astonishing things.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
We somehow manage to say all of this with the blandest expressions, as if we were reciting a list of active ingredients on a bottle of cough medicine. I know, I know: By this point in the Mass, we’ve confessed our sins and heard four Bible readings and a homily. Maybe we think we’ve done enough work for a day of rest. Maybe by this point we’re reciting our rote prayers automatically and unthinkingly.
But maybe, too, we fear that we just can’t bear the reality of what we’re saying.
Maybe we like our God as long as we know he’s in heaven, but we fear him when he draws close to us in our sin.
Maybe we fear the truth about Christmas.
Why did God become man? It is one of the great and insolvable mysteries, like Why is there something rather than nothing?
But in this instance an angel gives us a clue by way of the Scriptures. It is the angel who tells Saint Joseph: “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
Surely Jesus’s name, given by heaven, tells us something about his purpose. He came to “save his people”—more specifically, to save them “from their sins.” To do this is a pure act of merciful love, because sins are by definition offenses against almighty God. Yet it is God himself who has taken flesh for the sake of our salvation. He came, moreover, not just to save the wayward members of his chosen people but to save even the gravest sinners of Babylon and Egypt.
In the act of saving us, God drew close to us, so that we could see him and touch him. He became a baby, so that he would need to be picked up and caressed, changed and fed.
As we draw close to God incarnate, we can see more clearly the nature of God eternal. And that, too, was why he became man; revelation is bound up with our salvation. In our fallen state, with our darkened intellect and weakened will, we could not see God or know him, though we could know that he existed.
God drew close so that we could see clearly—and know that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). In eternity, that is his deepest identity. Before he created anything to love, he was love; and love is an act that requires both a subject and an object, a lover and a beloved. God is that pure act of love. Because of the revelation of Christmas, we know that love as the Blessed Trinity. Pope Saint John Paul II summarized the matter in a memorable way: “God in his deepest mystery is not a solitude, but a family, since he has in himself fatherhood, sonship, and the essence of family, which is love.”1
It may seem a leap from the manger to the Trinity, but it’s not. The dogma of the Trinity appears nowhere explicitly in the infancy narratives, but it is everywhere implied. Christmas is an effusion in time of the love that is eternal—an icon on earth of the love at the heart of heaven. “The glory of the Trinity becomes present in time and space,” said Saint John Paul, “and finds its manifestation in Jesus, his Incarnation and his history.”2
Saint Luke interprets the conception of Christ precisely in the light of the Trinity, as the pope explained. The angel said to Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Pope Saint John Paul explained this passage:
The angel’s words are like a short Creed which sheds light on the identity of Christ in relation to the other Persons of the Trinity.… Christ is the Son of the Most High God, the Great One, the Holy One, the King, the Eternal One, whose conception in the flesh takes place through the power of the Holy Spirit.3
In that single line from the angel we encounter God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nine months later, at Christmas, God manifests himself to the whole world in a deeply personal way—a tri-personal way.
Pope Benedict XVI observed that this startling new revelation was, at the same time, continuous with the Old Testament.
The angel’s words remain entirely within the realm of Old Testament piety, and yet they transcend it. In the light of this new situation, they take on a new realism, a hitherto unforeseeable depth and strength. At this stage, the Trinitarian mystery has not yet been thought through, it has not been worked into a definitive teaching. It appears spontaneously in and through God’s way of acting, as prefigured in the Old Testament; it appears within the event, without at this stage becoming a doctrine.4
It appears within the event. The Trinity is there for us to ponder, in the details of Christmas.
In our weekly recitation of the Creed we say many curious things. We affirm, for example, that Jesus is “the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.” But what can it mean to be “born” or “begotten” apart from time or sequence? What can it mean for a son to live eternally—simultaneously—with his father? Cardinal Donald Wuerl pondered this mystery in his book of reflections on the Creed:
Jesus is the Only Begotten. He is unique. Only the divine Word is eternally Son in relation to the eternal Father. Their relation is outside time; it is before the beginning. The Father has always been fathering the Son, eternally. This relationship is unique and quite unlike human begetting, which takes place in a sequence of events over the course of time. A human father must precede his son. My father was born in 1909, and in the usual turn of events I was born in 1940. The divine Persons of the Trinity, however, are coeternal. They coexist outside time, and there has never been a moment when one has been without the others.
Thus the term “only begotten” can illuminate God’s life for us, but it also challenges us to think beyond ordinary human categories. This is how revelation works. God accommodates himself to us by using our language and even taking on our nature, but he also calls upon us to reach upward to him, to the supernatural, as he makes us his children and shares the divine nature.5
Cardinal Wuerl brings us to an important insight. God was born in time to teach us about his “birth” in eternity. Revelation discloses truth in terms we can understand. To explain the spiritual to us, God draws analogies with what we know. He takes his analogies from the material, physical world.
But at Christmas he is not simply disclosing information. He’s not merely dispensing doctrinal data and helping us to understand something that far exceeds our limited minds. If that were all he came to do, it would be a wonderful thing. But it’s not all. As we’ve just seen, he also came to save his people from their sins.
But that’s still not all! The revelation of Christmas is not merely information, and it’s not only about the forgiveness of sins. For God, these are great means to a still mightier end. God reveals himself and forgives our sins because these are preconditions to a still greater gift, and Cardinal Wuerl touched upon that in the passage we’ve just read. Salvation consists in God making us his children and sharing his divine nature with us.
The saints have called this the “marvelous exchange.” God assumed our human nature in order to give us his divine nature (see 2 Peter 1:4). That is the most profound meaning of our salvation. And Saint Paul put it in terms that evoke the squalor of the stable in Bethlehem: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Salvation is more than knowledge and more than forgiveness, as great as those gifts are. To be saved is to live like God and to love like God.
We go to Bethlehem because that is where the eternal Father decreed that we should go to meet his eternal Son. We can earn many degrees in theology, but if we do not come to know Jesus as Son, we will know little about God. So said the great theologian Joseph Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI). Jesus’s “existence as a child corresponds in a unique way to his divinity, which is the divinity of the ‘Son.’ And this means that his existence as a child shows us how we can come to God and to deification.”6
That’s a strong word: deification. To be deified is to be made into a god. And that is exactly what God has done for us by sending his Son to Bethlehem. The Son of God became the Son of Man so that we, children of men, might learn how to become children of God. Jesus said: “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).
Jesus holds many titles. He is King, Savior, Redeemer, Messiah, Lord, Master, Rabbi, and God. But no title is as exalted as Son, and it is as Son that we come to know him at Christmas. Thus, Christmas uniquely shows us the way to salvation. Joseph Ratzinger concluded: “One who has not grasped the mystery of Christmas has failed to grasp the decisive element in Christianity. One who has not accepted this cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”7
God wants us with him in the kingdom, and that is why he “sent his Son.” The first Christians cherished that phrase for all the love that it implied. For it implies the eternal love of the Trinity as well as its overflow onto the earth. “In this is love,” said Saint John, “not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.… And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world” (1 John 4:10, 14).
Why would God do this? Saint Paul found the answer in Bethlehem: “God sent forth his Son, born of woman …, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4–5).
It all comes down to his sonship. And he himself came down to share it, in Bethlehem.
Salvation arrives by way of the family—the Holy Family. The household of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph became a “home away from home” for the eternal Son of God. It was an outpost of heaven, an image of the Trinity in the world. “We may say,” said Saint Francis de Sales, “that the Holy Family was a trinity on earth which in a certain way represented the Blessed Trinity itself.”8
Jesus is, of course, the Son common to both “families.” Joseph, in his relationship with Jesus, was an earthly image of the heavenly Father. Mary, who conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, became the very image of the Spirit in the world.
So God took his place in a human family—and invited you and me to find our place as well. He made a home for us in the Church, “a people,” said Saint Cyprian in the third century, “made one with the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”9
And our own homes, too—our Christian homes—also share in this awesome gift of Christmas. Pope Benedict expressed that in the strongest terms I can imagine.
God had chosen to reveal himself by being born into a human family and the human family thus became an icon of God! God is the Trinity, he is a communion of love; so is the family despite all the differences that exist between the Mystery of God and his human creature, an expression that reflects the unfathomable Mystery of God as Love.… The human family, in a certain sense, is an icon of the Trinity because of its interpersonal love and the fruitfulness of this love.10
We are created for the sake of love. When we experience love in family life, it is heavenly, but it is still only an image of the greater glory we hope to behold in heaven.