Note: This is a slightly adjusted version of a talk given by the author in December 2023.
The Incarnation of Christ is, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “the mystery of the wonderful union of the divine and human natures in the one person of the Word.” (CCC 483). At Mass, we proclaim our belief in it in the Nicene Creed: “and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.” [1] So much can be said about this unique and singular event in history, but here we will be examining two questions in particular. Why did our Lord come as an infant child? And why is this important for us?
This question is by no means a new one. In the fifth century, Saint Peter Chrysologus, a Doctor of the Church, asks this very question in one of his homilies:
We often wonder why Christ enters his world in such a way that he experiences the confines of the womb, that he suffers the indignity of being born, that he endures being wrapped up in swaddling clothes, that he tolerates being helpless in a cradle, that he seeks with tears to be fed at the breasts, that he feels completely the stages and constraints in life. (Sermon 158)
Saint Peter then goes on to say that “he wanted to be born, who wanted to be loved, not feared.” [2] In other words, as Saint Alphonsus Liguori says:
[I]f our Redeemer had come to be feared and respected by men, he would have come as a full-grown man and with royal dignity; but because he came to gain our love, he chose to come and to show himself as an infant, and the poorest of infants, born in a cold stable between two animals, laid in a manger on straw, without clothing or fire to warm his shivering little limbs. [3]
Perfect love—caritas, “charity”—is thus the primary reason why the Incarnation took place in this way. And this love manifests itself in many different ways through the Lord’s birth, infancy and childhood, of which we will here briefly examine three aspects. First, we will see how, through being a little child, our Lord shows us how to enter the kingdom of God. Then we will look at how the infancy of the Son, Jesus Christ, reveals God as our Father. Finally, we will examine how our Lord’s coming as a child teaches us about the Sacraments, especially Baptism, Confirmation and the Most Holy Eucharist.
Our Lord shows us how to enter the Kingdom of God
In the introduction to one of his shorter Christmas sermons, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux uses some elegant wordplay about its length to make a powerful point regarding the incarnation:
Great is this day’s solemn feast of the Lord’s birth, dearly beloved; but the short day requires me to shorten my sermon. What wonder if we make our word short when God the Father has made his Word abbreviated! Do you want to know how long [his Word was] and how short he made it? I fill heaven and earth, says this Word (Jeremiah 23:24); now, made flesh he has been laid in a narrow manger. From everlasting and to everlasting, says the Prophet (Psalm 89[90]:2), you are God, and see, he has become an infant one day old. (On the Lord’s Birthday, Sermon 1: On the Five Springs)
He through whom the universe was made (Hebrews 1:1) became a tiny baby, a little child. And this ties very strongly into what the Lord Jesus taught his disciples in his adult ministry:
At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:1-4; cf. Mark 9:33-37; Luke 9:46-48)
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We cannot enter the kingdom of God unless we become like little children. As if to hammer home the point, this teaching of the Lord is to be found in all three synoptic Gospels. Indeed, as Joseph Ratzinger comments, “It is striking to note that Jesus himself finds it so important for human existence that we be children… it is in ‘being a child’ that the very essence of what it is to be a man is realised.” [4]
And what, in the Lord’s teaching, is the key aspect of becoming like children? Humility: “whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4). The infant Christ shows us this radical humility, firstly in the very circumstances of his birth: he was born in a stable, wrapped, as Saint Bede the Venerable points out, [5] not in glorious purple royal robes but in swaddling cloths, and laid in a manger because there was no room at the inn (Luke 2:7). “The Lord is born on earth, and he does not even have a cell in which to be born… The entire human race had a place, and the Lord about to be born on earth had none” (Saint Jerome, Homily 44). This has profound theological meaning for us, as Saint Paul explains:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8)
The humility of God himself becoming a little child, being born like all men are, being helpless and dependent on others, models the humility that we are called to as Christians (see also Ephesians 4:1-3; Colossians 3:12-17; 1 Peter 3:8; 5:5). It also prefigures, as Saint Paul alludes to here, the life of Christ in his Passion, Death and Resurrection. The infancy and childhood of Christ, then, is an integral part of salvation history: by “emptying himself” (Philippians 2:7), by making himself poor, by this radical act of humility that turns everything on its head, the Son of God enters into history to save us. As Saint Ambrose says:
He was a baby and a child, so that you may be a perfect human. He was wrapped in swaddling clothes, so that you may be freed from the snares of death. He was in a manger, so that you may be in the altar. He was on earth that you may be in the stars. He had no other place in the inn, so that you may have many mansions in the heavens. “He, being rich, became poor for your sakes, that through his poverty you might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Therefore, his poverty is our inheritance, and the Lord’s weakness is our virtue. He chose to lack for himself, that he may abound for all. (Exposition on the Gospel of Luke, 2, 41-42)
In this humility of the Christ-child, however, is glory. The wise men, having followed the glorious heavenly sign of the star (Matthew 2:2, 9-10) bow down and worship the infant Jesus—indeed, the Greek word used in Matthew 2:11 is προσκυνέω, “to prostrate oneself before,” a recognition of one’s complete dependence on or submission to a higher authority. Christ is thus surrounded “with a double mantle. As God, the heavens themselves bear witness to his presence. That is his cosmic mantle. As weak child, the Magi find him in the arms of Mary, his Mother.” [6] The angels sing of the glory of the Lord to the shepherds (Luke 2:14), and in doing so have given us the first line of the hymn we proclaim every Sunday at Mass: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will!” At the presentation of the Lord in the temple, Simeon recognises his glory: “my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:30-32). [7] The prophetess Anna does likewise, telling everyone about the Christ (Luke 2:38).
The link between humility and glory in the infancy of Jesus is a prefiguring of the Lord’s later teaching, repeated three times in his ministry: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12; see also Luke 14:11; 18:14). The kingdom of God, with its reversal of worldly values, “is brought near in the Word incarnate, it is proclaimed throughout the whole Gospel, and it has come in Christ’s Death and Resurrection” (CCC 2816). As Ratzinger comments:
This should cause us to reflect—it points towards the reversal of values found in the figure of Jesus Christ and his message. From the moment of his birth, he belongs outside the realm of what is important and powerful in worldly terms. Yet it is this unimportant and powerless child that proves to be the truly powerful one, the one on whom ultimately everything depends. So one aspect of being a Christian is having to leave behind what everyone else thinks and wants, the prevailing standards, in order to enter the light of the truth of our being, and aided by that light to find the right path. [8]
Our Lord’s coming as a helpless child, in his Nativity—a word that comes to us from the Latin nativus, “that which has arisen from birth” (like “natal”)—thus begins to show us, even before his adult ministry, what the kingdom of God is, how we enter into it, and how we can continue in our lives to remain in it, until the coming of the kingdom in glory at the end of time.
Our Lord reveals to us how to call God “Father”
The infancy of Christ also reveals to us that God is our Father. As Saint Leo the Great says in one of his Christmas homilies, “Let [us] recognise the true and only Son of God, not just according to the divinity in which he was begotten by the Father, but also according to the humanity in which he was born of his Virgin Mother” (Sermon 25, 3). It was fitting that Jesus be born as all men are: he could have appeared suddenly as an adult, but his birth, infancy and childhood fully express for our benefit his very nature as the Son.
Indeed, the sonship of the Messiah had been prophesised in the Old Testament: for example, Isaiah tells us that “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given” (9:6), and “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (7:14). The letter to the Hebrews sums this up right at its beginning:
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. (Hebrews 1:1-4)
As Ratzinger says, “The central name that designates the dignity of Jesus is ‘the Son.’” [9] This is the revealed nature of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity: at the Baptism of Jesus, the Father says “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22), and this is repeated at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5; Mark 9:7; Luke 9:35). Jesus himself teaches us to call God “our Father” (Matthew 6:9-13). His presentation in the temple as an infant, as the Jewish Law prescribed, shows him to be the firstborn Son who belongs to the Lord (CCC 529):
[W]hen the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, they brought [Jesus] up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.” (Luke 2:22-23; see Exodus 13:2)
That Jesus is the firstborn Son is developed further by Saint Paul in the letter to the Colossians, where Christ is called “firstborn of all creation” (1:15) and “firstborn from the dead” (1:18). Here, the term “firstborn” takes on a cosmic dimension: the incarnate Son is before all creation (see also John 1:1-2), and he is the beginning and the goal of the new creation that has been inaugurated by his Death and Resurrection. To tie this in more explicitly with the infancy of our Lord, we can, with the benefit of hindsight, say that this cosmic glory is already present in the lowly manger of Luke’s Gospel (2:7, 12): “he who is truly the first-born of all that is, came to dwell in our midst.” [10] In other words, the firstborn Son of God deigned to also become the firstborn son of Mary, so that he might be revealed to us as Son, and that in turn he might reveal the Father to us.
The later childhood of Jesus the Son also reveals the Father to us in a special way. In Luke 2:41-52, we are told how the twelve-year-old Jesus stayed in Jerusalem after the Passover, and how Mary and Joseph searched for him for three days, [11] eventually finding him in the temple among the teachers. After our Blessed Lady says “your father and I have been searching for you in great distress,” (v. 48) the child Jesus replies: I am with my Father. “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (v. 49). His real father is not Joseph, but God himself. Ratzinger notes further that this revealing of God as Father—not as yet understood by Mary (v. 51b)—already anticipates the saving mission of the Son, in perfect obedience to his Father:
Jesus uses the word “must,” and he acts in accordance with what must be. The Son, the child, must be with his Father… He is already bound by the “must” at this early hour: he must be with the Father, and so it becomes clear that what might seem like disobedience or inappropriate freedom vis-à-vis his parents is in reality the actual expression of his filial obedience. He is in the Temple not as a rebel against his parents, but precisely as the obedient one, acting out the same obedience that leads to the Cross and the resurrection. [12]
Elsewhere, Pope Benedict XVI explains further the great significance of the twelve-year-old Jesus’ answer to his parents for our own prayer to the Father:
The term “Father” dominates the tone of this answer and the Christological mystery appears in its entirety. Hence, this word unlocks the mystery, it is the key to the Mystery of Christ, who is the Son, and also the key to our mystery as Christians who are sons and daughters in the Son. At the same time Jesus teaches us to be children by being with the Father in prayer. The Christological mystery, the mystery of Christian existence, is closely linked to, founded on, prayer. Jesus was one day to teach his disciples to pray, telling them: when you pray say “Father.” And, naturally, do not just say the word, say it with your life, learn to say it meaningfully with your life. “Father”; and in this way you will be true sons in the Son, true Christians. (General Audience, 28 December 2011)
This last sentence is derived from what Saint Paul says in Romans 8:15 (see also Ephesians 1:5; Galatians 4:5), “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” The Greek word used here for ‘adoption as sons’ is υἱοθεσία, “a technical term in the Greco-Roman world, expressing the legal assumption of a person into the status of sonship in a natural family.” [13] Saint Paul takes this terminology and gives it a theological sense: “adoption is not simply God’s gracious act: it bespeaks the comprehensive and total transfer of one’s passions, love, and allegiance from the world to God.” [14] The divine Sonship of Christ—expressed not just in his adult ministry but in his coming as an infant child, born of the Blessed Virgin Mary—is what makes us all, whether male or female, adopted sons of God:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons [υἱοθεσίαν]. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. (Galatians 4:4-7)
The closeness of the Son, who took on all our human experience in order to save us, reinforces the closeness of the merciful Father to us—our Father, Pater noster, who has adopted us as his sons (and daughters) in Christ, as “sons in the Son.”
Our Lord gives us the sacramental life
Our adoption as “sons in the Son” provides an apt transition to the third reason why it is important for us that Christ came as an infant: because through this act, the whole of the sacramental life of grace is given to us.
We have just seen that, in the letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul writes that the birth of the Son of God provides the means for each one of us to be adopted as “sons” and heirs. But how does this adoption take place? Through the liturgy of the Church and the Sacraments: “The fruit of the sacramental life is that the Spirit of adoption makes the faithful partakers in the divine nature by uniting them in a living union with the only Son, the Saviour” (CCC 1129; see also 1110). Furthermore, “the mysteries of Christ’s life are the foundations of what he would henceforth dispense in the sacraments, through the ministers of his Church” (CCC 1115). As one of these mysteries, the Incarnation and birth of Christ opens the sacramental life of grace and the way of salvation to us. Saint John Chrysostom says in one of his homilies that:
It is from this day [of Christ’s birth] that the feasts of the Theophany, the sacred Pasch, the Ascension, and Pentecost had their source and foundation. Had Christ not been born in the flesh, he would not have been baptised, which is the Theophany or Manifestation; nor would he have been crucified, which is the Pasch; nor would he have sent down the Spirit, which is Pentecost. So it is that, just as different rivers arise from a source, these other feasts have their beginnings from the birth of Christ. (On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, 6, 24)
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The Sacraments of Initiation—Baptism, Confirmation, and the Most Holy Eucharist—depend, then, on the birth of the infant Christ. As he is begotten of the Father from above, and born of Mary, so too we must be born from above/born again in Baptism (John 3:3, 7). [15] Jesus was “conceived by the Holy Spirit” (Apostles’ Creed), and, as the Son, promised that the same Spirit would be poured out on the apostles and all the Church (John 7:37-39; 16:7-15); following the evening of Easter Sunday (John 20:19-23) and Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4), “the apostles, in fulfilment of Christ’s will, imparted to the newly baptised by the laying on of hands the gift of the Spirit that completes the grace of Baptism.” [16] Confirmation thus, as the Catechism says, “roots us more deeply in the divine filiation which makes us cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (CCC 1303). With regard to the Eucharist, Saint Gregory the Great says the following:
Bethlehem is by interpretation the house of bread. For it is the Lord himself who says, I am the bread of life which came down from heaven (John 6:53). The place therefore where the Lord was born was before called the house of bread, because it was there that he was to appear in his fleshly nature who should refresh the souls of the elect with spiritual fullness. (Homilies on the Gospels, 8)
The Incarnation and birth of the Lord, in which the divine became human, prefigures what the grace of the Sacraments give to us and what the ultimate destiny of the Christian is: eternal life with God, communion with the divine Trinity. As Saint Irenaeus says, “Our Lord Jesus Christ, in his immeasurable love, became what we are in order to make us what he is” (Against the Heresies, V, preface). Similarly, Saint Hippolytus of Rome says:
To show that he was not different from us, he undertook hard work, he went hungry and thirsty, he took rest and sleep, he did not shirk suffering, he revealed the resurrection. In all this he offered his own self, so that when you suffered you would not lose heart, but rather would recognise that you are a man, and would yourself expect to receive what he received from God.When you have learned to know the true God, you will have a body immortal and incorruptible, like your soul; you will gain the kingdom of heaven, you who lived on earth and knew the king of heaven; freed from passion, suffering and disease, you will be a companion of God and a co-heir with Christ, for you have become a god. (On the Refutation of All Heresies, 10, 33)
This is often referred to as “divinisation,” a word that perhaps sounds quite foreign to us, but in fact expresses the Church’s traditional teaching about salvation. “[H]e who was God became Man in his effort to make godlike those who were men… God’s power is wonderful but more marvellous is his mercy, for he, who was able to be born in this manner, wished to be so born,” as Saint Augustine says (Sermon 192, 1). The Father wants us to share in his own divine life, [17] and for this reason sent his Son, though the Incarnation, to redeem us—as well as to give us the Sacraments, by means of which we “receive in increasing measure the treasures of the divine life and advance toward the perfection of charity” (CCC 1212).
Indeed, in the offertory at every Mass, the Priest prays in a very similar way at the mixing of the water and wine, itself a symbol of the Incarnation and, as both Saint Cyprian and Saint Thomas Aquinas state, [18] the unity of the faithful with Christ himself:
By the mystery of this water and winemay we come to share in the divinity of Christwho humbled himself to share in our humanity.
Conclusion
In conclusion, then, these are only a few of the ways in which our Lord’s coming as an infant are important for us. To recap:
- The infant Jesus shows us, by the circumstances of his birth and by being a helpless baby, how we can enter the kingdom of God: like little children, in radical humility;
- The birth of Christ makes him the son of Mary, thus revealing to us his very nature as the Son of God, “born of the Father before all ages” (Nicene Creed), and showing us that God is “our Father”;
- Finally, the Lord’s Nativity opens the sacramental life to us: it is the source and foundation of the life of grace that we are called to live, and that we hope we will live in all eternity with the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
I will leave the final words to Pope Francis, from his Apostolic letter Admirabile signum, on the meaning and importance of the Nativity scene, a short text that I commend to you during this Advent and the upcoming Christmas season:
When, at Christmas, we place the statue of the Infant Jesus in the manger, the nativity scene suddenly comes alive. God appears as a child, for us to take into our arms. Beneath weakness and frailty, he conceals his power that creates and transforms all things. It seems impossible, yet it is true: in Jesus, God was a child, and in this way he wished to reveal the greatness of his love: by smiling and opening his arms to all…God’s ways are astonishing, for it seems impossible that he should forsake his glory to become a man like us. To our astonishment, we see God acting exactly as we do: he sleeps, takes milk from his mother, cries and plays like every other child! As always, God baffles us. He is unpredictable, constantly doing what we least expect. The nativity scene shows God as he came into our world, but it also makes us reflect on how our life is part of God’s own life. It invites us to become his disciples if we want to attain ultimate meaning in life. (Admirabile signum, 8)
NOTES
[1] Indeed, in the traditional Roman Rite, a genuflection is always made at these words in Mass, whereas in the Roman Rite as reformed after Vatican II such a gesture is only made on Christmas Day and the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord (25 March).
[2] This is something Saint Peter mentions elsewhere: see, for example, Sermon 72B, 4: “So this is the first reason for the Lord’s Passion, whereby he wanted it to be known how much God loved humanity, since he wanted to be loved rather than feared.”
[3] “Discourse II: The Eternal word being Great becomes Little”, in The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ; Or, The Mysteries of the Faith, (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1887), p. 37
[4] Joseph Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ: Meditations on the Triune God (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2008), p. 71
[5] Exposition of the Gospel of Luke, 1: “[T]he sign given of the Saviour’s birth is not a child enfolded in Tyrian purple, but one wrapped with rough pieces of cloth. He is not to be found in an ornate golden bed, but in a manger… Though he was Lord of heaven, he became a poor man on earth, to teach those who lived on earth that by poverty of spirit they might win the kingdom of heaven.”
[6] Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, Chapters 1–11 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), p. 83
[7] This is also the source of a liturgical canticle, the Nunc dimittis (Luke 2:29-32), used every day at Compline, demonstrating the importance of the infancy of Christ for the liturgical life of the Church
[8] Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 66-67
[9] Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ, p. 72
[10] Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, p. 71
[11] The number of days is not coincidental here, as Saint Ambrose points out: “Nor is it idly that, forgetful of his parents according to the flesh, he who according to the flesh assuredly was filled with the wisdom and grace of God is found after three days in the temple. It is a sign that he who was believed dead for our faith would rise again after three days from his triumphal passion and appear on his heavenly throne with divine honour” (Exposition on the Gospel of Luke, 2, 63).
[12] Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, p. 124
[13] Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Yale Bible, 33; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 500
[14] Stephen E. Fowl, Ephesians: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), p. 42
[15] The Greek word ἄνωθεν can mean both “from above” and “again.” The double-meaning here is purposeful: Nicodemus misinterprets the words of Jesus here by not seeing the polyvalency and by his literal interpretation of “again” (v. 4: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”).
[16] Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution Divinae consortium naturae: AAS 63 (1971), pp. 657-664, at p. 658
[17] See CCC 52, 759-760, 1131; also Vatican II, Lumen gentium, 2: “His plan was to raise men to a participation of the divine life. Fallen in Adam, God the Father did not leave men to themselves, but ceaselessly offered helps to salvation, in view of Christ, the Redeemer…”
[18] Saint Cyprian, Epistle 63, 13: “[B]ecause Christ, who bore our sins, also bore us all, we see that people are signified in the water, but in the wine the Blood of Christ is shown. But when water is mixed with wine in the Chalice, the people are united to Christ, and the multitude of the believers is bound and joined to him in whom they believe”; Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 74, a. 6, resp.: “Water ought to be mingled with the wine which is offered in this sacrament… because this is adapted for signifying the effect of this sacrament, since as Pope Julius says: We see that the people are signified by the water, but Christ’s blood by the wine. Therefore when water is mixed with the wine in the chalice, the people is made one with Christ.”
