The Advent of Emmanuel

Advent is the period of preparation for Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation of the Lord.  The divinely revealed truths of the Trinity of Persons in the one God, and that of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, who is truly and perfectly both God and man, are the two teachings that make Christianity unique among world religions.  Christmas shows their connection.  Out of love for us and for our salvation, the eternal and only-begotten Son of God, the eternal Word of the Father, leaped down from heaven, taking flesh of the Virgin Mary, and became man.  He was born at Bethlehem so that He might die in Jerusalem; his back felt the rough wood of the manger on the day he was born, as he would feel the wood of the Cross on it on the day he died.  He was born that he might give the God who forbad the making of idols a human face by which he might be known and loved, and in the same moment gave us the vision of what God considers perfection in human life and virtue.

The Incarnation is a teaching easily misunderstood.  Historically speaking, at one end of two extremes of error, we find the falsehood of believing Jesus to be only the first of God's creation, above mankind  but below true God, a kind of demigod whose true humanity is denied as well as his true divinity - a doctrine held by Arians in antiquity and by Jehovah's Witnesses in the present  day. A more common error in the present time is the denial that Jesus is truly God,  and just a "great moral teacher" or a "prophet".  If this were true, the death of Christ on the Cross was just another human death, without power to save the world or rescue us from death, and we are therefore still locked under sin and the prey of the devil.  If Christ were man only, earth would not be joined to heaven, and Jesus' connection with God  would not differ essentially  from that of Moses or the other Jewish prophets. Against this false understanding, Jesus says "The Father and I are one," (John 10:30) and "Before Abraham came to be, I AM," (John 8:58.) 

Thanks be to the Trinity of Power who has given us a Savior who is truly God and truly Man in one divine Person.  Jesus possesses a divine nature as the Divine Son, coequal to the Father and sharing one life and existence with Him, and also, possesses a complete human nature, with a human body, a created human soul, with a full set of emotions and passions.  God was born as one of us so that divine power, accomplishing what we could not,  might cleanse us of sin and death, and  raise us up into immortality.  This is the Christ Child we  await in Advent, fortold by the prophets (especially Isaiah, who is appropriate reading in this season):  "A child is born for us, a Son is given us, upon his shoulder dominion rests (Is. 9:5)," Jesus Christ, our brother and our God.