Fourth Sunday of Advent
Father Richard Rohr shares what Christ’s incarnation offers to all humanity:
Since the very beginning of time, God’s Spirit has been revealing its glory and goodness through the physical creation. Christians believe that this universal Christ presence was later “born of a woman under the law” (Galatians 4:4) in a moment of chronological time. This is the great Christian leap of faith!
We daringly believe that God’s presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! Instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God’s loving union with physical creation. [1]
Through his incarnated presence, Jesus offered the world a living example of fully embodied love that emerged out of ordinary, limited life situations. For me, this is the real import of Paul’s statement that Jesus was “born of a woman under the law.” In Jesus, God became part of our small, homely world and entered into human limits and ordinariness—and remained anonymous and largely invisible for his first thirty years. Throughout his life, Jesus himself spent no time climbing, but a lot of time descending, “emptying himself and becoming as all humans are” (Philippians 2:7), “tempted in every way that we are” (Hebrews 4:15) and “living in the limitations of weakness” (Hebrews 5:2).
Jesus walked, enjoyed, and suffered the entire human journey, and he told us that we could and should do the same. His life exemplified the unfolding mystery in all of its stages—from a hidden, divine conception, to a regular adult life full of love and problems, punctuated by a few moments of transfiguration and enlightenment, and all leading to glorious ascension and final return. As Hebrews 4:15 states, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who was like us in every way, experienced every temptation, and never backtracked” (my translation). Jesus’ life reveals that we don’t need to be afraid of the depths and breadths of our own lives, of what this world offers us or asks of us. We are given permission to become intimate with our own experiences, learn from them, and allow ourselves to descend to the depth of things, even our mistakes, before we try too quickly to transcend it all in the name of some idealized purity or superiority. God hides in the depths—even the depths of our sins—and is not seen as long as we stay on the surface of anything. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019, 2021), 16, 14–15.
[2] Rohr, Universal Christ, 110–111.
Image credit and inspiration: Nathan Dumlao, Untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We are born into this world a holy incarnation.
Story from Our Community:
A few years ago, I needed an emergency breast biopsy following a mammogram with suspicious results. I had just read the Daily Meditation on God as a Mother Hen. The women in the room during my biopsy were God incarnate, holding my heart steady with their gaze and comforting me as they led me through each awkward and painful step. I wept quietly, knowing how God spoke to me directly through that Mother Hen analogy brought to life moments later by my compassionate nurses.
—Andrea G.
