Our Life in the Lord Part Five: The Word Made Flesh
God breaks the silence with a greeting to a girl in Nazareth, a town of no reputation in the hill country of Galilee. God sent his Son into the world the way every human being enters it, through a mother.
Mary Preserved from the First Instant
The Church holds as dogma that Mary was preserved immune from every stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ. God preserved her at that first instant, so that no stain of original sin ever touched her. The same Redeemer who saves the rest of the race saved Mary, more completely than the rest, because he saved her in advance. In Mary, uniquely since Eden, God preserved a will that no sin had disordered, so that when the angel put his question to her she was wholly free to say yes.
A Household Behind Her
The Church remembers a household around Mary that the Gospels do not mention. Tradition gives Mary’s parents the names Joachim and Anne, an aging couple longing for a child as Abraham and Sarah had longed. Their story comes from an early writing called the Protoevangelium of James, which the Church has never counted as scripture (which would never be quoted as scripture). The tradition preserves a household: devout, patient, ordinary, a home in which Joachim and Anne could raise a graced child to know the God who had graced her. Grace builds on nature, and families hand on nature, so even the mother of the Redeemer was somebody’s daughter and somebody’s granddaughter.
The Annunciation and the Free Yes
Gabriel greets Mary with her condition itself, full of grace, before she has said or done anything. For centuries the Church has prayed that greeting as Hail, full of grace. The dogma states what full means: Mary’s grace was already complete before Mary consented. The scripture text in its newer rendering reads “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28). This is not reflective of the truth of the underlying Greek. Mary then gives her consent: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). A fallen angel approached Eve, and Eve distrusted the God who had given her everything; a faithful angel approached Mary, and Mary trusted God with everything at once: her body, her reputation, her betrothal, her life. She is the New Eve, the helpmate who says yes where mankind had long said no. With her yes God opens his counteroffensive against the serpent’s lie. Mary said that yes again at every step, all the way to a hill outside Jerusalem and beyond, which even David, for all his repentance, could not do.
Luke preserves the scene’s smallest movements. Mary is greatly troubled at the greeting and ponders what sort of greeting it might be. God’s grace comes to her whole person, mind included, so Mary gives her yes with her mind awake. She asks her plain question, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” (Lk 1:34). Gabriel answers that the Holy Spirit will overshadow her, and he gives her a sign, the impossible pregnancy of her elderly kinswoman Elizabeth, “for nothing will be impossible for God” (Lk 1:37). Mary then goes in haste into the hill country, where at the sound of her voice the unborn John leaps in Elizabeth’s womb, and Elizabeth cries out: “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk 1:42), words the Church repeats in every Hail Mary. Mary answers with the Magnificat, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord” (Lk 1:46), singing of the God who has looked upon his lowly servant, scattered the proud, lifted the lowly, filled the hungry, and remembered his promise to Abraham and his children forever. The Magnificat is the first Christian hymn, a summary of the long pursuit, sung by the girl carrying its fulfillment in her womb.
Joseph and the Line of David
What was conceived in her had no human father. Joseph, a just man of the line of David, learns that Mary is with child and resolves to divorce her quietly. Then the angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream and tells him what has happened and what to do: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Mt 1:20–21). Joseph obeys without a recorded word, at the cost of his own reputation. By naming the child he makes Jesus his legal son and heir of David’s line. Mary gives the child his humanity, flesh of her flesh. Joseph receives as his own a child conceived by the Holy Spirit and shelters mother and child with his work and his silence. Both parents are understood to be of the tribe of Judah. The name the angel brought says what the child is: Jesus, Yeshua, God saves.
The House of Bread
Mary bears her son under a census at Bethlehem, whose name means house of bread, and lays the newborn in a manger, a food trough for beasts. The manger is the Gospel in miniature: God presents his child to the world as food for the world, in the city of bread, with shepherds from the nearby fields the first to come and see him.
Isaiah had written out the child’s titles seven centuries in advance: “They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace” (Is 9:5). Each title is the opposite of a failure in Israel’s long experiment with kings. Israel’s kings had failed by cunning, by might spent on their own people, and by holding office for a season. This ruler has wisdom, spends his might for his people, has a father’s permanence, and makes peace the method of his reign.
One Person in Two Natures
This child precedes creation in his divine nature, the eternal Son, the Word through whom all things were made, now unable to lift his own head. He is one person in two natures, human and divine, neither absorbing nor diluting the other: as enfleshed as we are, and God whole and entire. That is, he remained wholly God in coming down, and he took up the whole of our humanity. The Church fought for centuries over the exact words here, because everything depends on both natures being real. This is why the Church calls Mary Mother of God, Theotokos: the title guards her Son, insisting that the one Mary bore is the eternal Son, divine from all ages. Mary is the best of us; every honor the Church has ever paid her points past her to her Son. The finger that points to the moon is not the moon, and the moon is not the sun.
One misunderstanding needs correcting. The Father sent his Son as the next step of the rescue he had pursued since the gate of Eden closed, out of the same love that had called Abraham, fed Israel, and pleaded through the prophets. We did not draw Jesus out of the Godhead through Mary’s womb, as though humanity had finally perfected a summons that worked. In the Incarnation God stoops the last of the distance, from covenant to flesh, and reaches the floor.
The Early Arrival of the Nations
The nations notice before the capital does. Magi from the east, foreigners following a star, travel a long road to Bethlehem, where they prostrate themselves before an infant king who has no royal trappings about him and open treasures that a poor family could never have expected. God had always meant the light he kindled in Israel for all the nations; here the nations arrive early, and they come to do homage. Herod, meanwhile, answers the same news with the sword, so the family flees as refugees into Egypt, where the child retraces his people’s steps.
The Hidden Years at Nazareth
For roughly thirty years the Gospels record nothing, a silence the Church has always learned from. The Son of God spent nearly the whole of his earthly life in Nazareth, a village of no importance, learning a trade at Joseph’s bench, keeping the Sabbath, obeying his parents, praying the psalms, drawing water, unnoticed. The Gospels record one episode, the boy of twelve found in the Temple about his Father’s business, and then record nothing for another eighteen years. The hidden life of Jesus teaches that most of a holy life, his own included, is lived in obscurity. God willed those hidden years for his Son as fully as he willed the public ones.
The Sword and the Candle
The hidden life of this family was hard. This family’s record reads: scandal at the start, a birth in a stable, murderers on the child’s trail before his second year, flight into Egypt as refugees, return to obscurity, and, waiting decades ahead, a cross. At the Presentation, Mary and Joseph carried the infant into the Temple with the offering of the poor, wherewith elderly Simeon took him in his arms and blessed God, and then turned to Mary: “and you yourself a sword will pierce” (Lk 2:35). God included the sorrow in his plan from the beginning, for he chose this household when he could have chosen any: a family with such difficulty was a suitable place for the Son of God to grow up, where love flourished amidst relocation and poverty.
Simeon also gave the day its lasting image, calling the child “a light for revelation to the Gentiles” (Lk 2:32). For many centuries the Church has kept the feast of the Presentation as Candlemas, blessing a year’s candles on that day. The Church carries that flame through a Christian’s whole life: at the Easter Vigil she lights the Paschal Candle from new fire, at every baptism she lights a small candle from that one and hands it to the family with the charge to keep it burning, and at the deathbed she brings a candle again, at least in symbol. One flame passes hand to hand from the Temple steps to the font, then to the grave. Light remains whole when it is shared - nothing lost, and so does the one it signifies.
The Exchange of Natures
At every Mass, as a drop of water disappears into the wine, the priest says a prayer that states the meaning of the hidden years and of the birth behind them: “by the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” That is the exchange the Incarnation opens. The Son took what is ours, our nature, our hunger, our weariness, our mortality, so that he might give us what is his. Adam had reached for divinity as a thing to be seized, and he lost even what he had. In the fullness of time God gave as a gift what Adam had tried to steal: a share in his divine nature, so that his own life becomes our home.
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