The Profound Mystery of the Incarnation

The Profound Mystery of the Incarnation

St. John says: the Word became flesh. Not became man, and not even became human. St. John wrote became flesh—and he meant it.

Understanding "Flesh":

In ancient languages, the word flesh encompasses all things of cosmic matter and worldly energies. The Blessed Trinity has been creating this cosmos for billions of years. At every moment, God has been this cosmos’s Creator and Lord, accompanying everything in the physical cosmos both within and beyond it.

Now, God is personally in His own creation. That’s the Incarnation—and it makes our minds boggle. What can our faith say about it?

Our Enfleshed Existence:

We believe that we are made up of matter—of stardust that congealed into this little blue planet from which we have our bodies. We are not angels waiting to escape our bodies; we are enfleshed spirits or enspirited flesh—we are both. In our lives, we experience many good and plenty of hard things. We experience them whole. Whether joy in our spirits or pleasure in our flesh first, we experience everything as a whole—in head, heart, and hands all together.

The Incarnation of the Son of God:

This tells us that He lives in a body made up of our same stardust. And while He was with us, He also went through many good and plenty of hard things. This is what scripture says:

We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).

When we rejoice and when we agonize, our God experiences these things, creating us, creating the experiences, redeeming us—knowing all this in His own divine Self!

God's Presence:

God is not up in heaven out there. God is in our flesh, knowing us from deeper within ourselves than we can now penetrate. Both within and beyond, He loves us as we are.

Fr. Joe Tetlow, S.J.