Dec 22 Sun
What did God the Son come to do? Fourth Sunday of Advent
The Son of God became incarnate. The “Incarnation”—literally infleshment—is the theological term that captures St. John’s expression, “The Word became flesh.” It is the fact that the Son of God assumed a human nature in order to accomplish our salvation in it.
Christ’s Incarnation refers not just to Christ’s body. It means the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, with his divine intellect and divine will, joined a complete human nature: his human body with its emotions and passions and his human soul with its human mind and human will.
Did Christ do this? Why did he do this? Our second reading expresses that He did this and why He did it. Christ took on human flesh to do God’s will: “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Lo, I have come to do your will, O God.’”
It is completely appealing that He chose to arrive in the most pure womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as an embryo, and to develop there, to be born, and to grow up from childhood to manhood in a family.
What is the will that Christ came to fulfill? The Father’s will, this was his “plan of redeeming love.” Jesus embraced this master plan at every moment of his life—including all his ordinary activities—including his life of prayer—but it reached its pinnacle in “his redemptive passion.”
We can then meaningfully contemplate every stage of Christ’s life.
Did Christ fulfill the Father’s will? In Christ, and through his human will, the will of the Father has been perfectly fulfilled once for all.
The order of charity must be reflected in our deeds, not only in feelings of affection. Our Lady was not content simply to go and greet her cousin, nor to remain a few days with her. She stayed for as long as she could be useful. During the months she spent with Elizabeth, we can imagine all the help she would have given her. How many opportunities she would have had to show her affection! St. Josemaría insists: “We have to behave as God's children toward all God's sons and daughters. Our love has to be a dedicated love, practiced every day and made up of a thousand little details of understanding, hidden sacrifice, and unnoticed self-giving."
What is the consequence of this fulfillment of the Father’s will? We are delivered from sin and sanctified.
What should I do, then? To contemplate the Unborn Christ.
With Our Lady, we adore Christ as a newborn baby at Christmas when we gaze at a Nativity scene. Or we contemplate the childhood of Christ in the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. Or we meditate on his public life in the Luminous, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary.
With Our Lady, shouldn’t we adore Christ as an unborn baby in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary in this last week before Christmas?
We can bring everything we happen to know about fetal development, the experiences of a pregnant woman, the reality of who this unborn baby is, the reality of who this mother is, and their mission which God the Father has set for them.
Then we can ask Our Lady and her Son, What is my place, my calling, in the Father’s plan of redeeming love?
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