Jesus is here..."But love does such things!"

A child born to us....from Adoration of the Child, Gerard van Honthorst (1620)

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! 

This is the Italian-German theologian Romano Guardini speaking in his classic The Lord. It's a classic because it has gained recognition generation by generation for offering incisive insight into the why and how of God among us. This book was first published in Germany in 1937, and an English-language translation was published in 1954. Guardini, a priest and and academic, influenced some of the ecumenical thinking expressed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). 

Guardini, in a chapter of The Lord titled "The Incarnation" continues:

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 "purer" idea of godliness, yet 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 bare 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; every one of them issues from the heart and its 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.

The particularity of God's coming to us in human form, as a kind of fulfilment of the proto-gospel of the ancient Greek and Roman legends, is astonishing given the social status of those given the responsibility of parental care, and the colonised nation, and the minor towns of birth and residence in which Jesus was planted to grow in stature and then to step forward to address the world. However, ...

If someone in Capharnaum or Jerusalem at the time had asked the Lord: Who are you? Who are your parents? To what house do you belong? – He might have answered in the words of St. John’s gospel: “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am.” (8:58) Or he might have pointed out that he was “of the house and family of David.” (Luke 2:4)

How do the Evangelists begin their records of the life of Jesus of Nazareth who is Christ, the Anointed One? John probes the mystery of God’s existence for Jesus’ origin. His gospel opens: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing that has been made. . . . He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew him not. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. And we saw his glory – glory as of the only-begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1–14)

The incarnation, God taking on human form, and the trinity of persons in one Godhead, are the most distinctive truths of Christianity: 

Revelation shows that the merely unitarian God found in post-Christian Judaism, in Islam, and throughout the modern consciousness, does not exist. At the heart of that mystery which the Church expresses in her teaching of the trinity of persons in the unity of life stands the God of Revelation.

Here John seeks the root of Christ’s existence: in the second of the Most Holy Persons; the Word (Logos), in whom God the Speaker, reveals the fullness of his being. Speaker and Spoken, however, incline towards each other and are one in the love of the Holy Spirit. The Second “Countenance” of God, here called Word, is also named Son, since he who speaks the Word is known as Father.

In the Lord’s farewell address, the Holy Spirit is given the promising names of Consoler, Sustainer, for he will see to it that the brothers and sisters in Christ are not left orphans by his death. Through the Holy Spirit the Redeemer came to us, straight from the heart of the Heavenly Father. Son of God become man – not only descended to inhabit a human frame, but “become” man – literally; and in order that no possible doubt arise, (that, for example, it might never be asserted that Christ, despising the lowliness of the body, had united himself only with the essence of a holy soul or with an exalted spirit,) John specifies sharply: Christ “was made flesh.”

Only in the flesh, not in the bare spirit, can destiny and history come into being. . . .God descended to us in the person of the Savior, Redeemer, in order to have a destiny, to become history. Through the Incarnation, the founder of the new history stepped into our midst. With his coming, all that had been before fell into its historical place “before the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” anticipating or preparing for that hour; all that was to be, faced the fundamental choice between acceptance and rejection of the Incarnation.

He “dwelt among us,” “pitched his tent among us,” as one translation words it. “Tent” of the Logos – what is this but Christ’s body: God’s holy pavilion among men, the original tabernacle of the Lord in our Midst, the “temple” Jesus meant when he said to the Pharisees: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19)

Somewhere between that eternal beginning and the temporal life in the flesh lies the mystery of the Incarnation. St. John presents it austerely, swinging its full metaphysical weight. Nothing here of the wealth of lovely characterization and intimate detail that makes St. Luke’s account bloom so richly. Everything is concentrated on the ultimate, all-powerful essentials: Logos, flesh, step into the world; the eternal origin, the tangible earthly reality, [but still] the mystery of unity.

Merry Christmas everyone! And may it mean a rich appreciation of God's love for each of us.

Gerard van Honthorst - Adoration by the Shepherds (1622) cropped