An Implication of the Incarnation
5 minutes
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of God, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
It sometimes happens that a bit of Scripture reaches out to take hold of you. While reading the passage above the other day, I was suddenly struck by the implications of the Incarnation for the life of a Christian. Specifically, it hit me that if Christ has come, then he must be here with us in just the same way he was with the apostles and the disciples. And if he’s with us, then he is with us body, blood, soul, and divinity. What, after all, was he promising when said, “I will not leave you orphans,” and “I will be with you always, even to the end of time,” if not his continual incarnational presence on Earth?
Now since this is so, and since Christ is the Incarnate God, the manner in which the Holy Spirit makes him present must also be incarnational. To be sure, Christ is present in the life of the Church, in the souls of those around us, and events that unfold. But if God has come to live with us in the person of the God-man, then he must also be present in his physical presence in the Church itself. We see this dynamic at play on the road to Emmaus when Christ walks in a hidden way with his disciples, but then also manifests himself bodily in the breaking of the bread.
This is why the Incarnation implies the sacraments, the mysteries by which the person and life of Christ is recapitulated and made present in the here and now. How, after all, can we behold the glory of God unveiled, unless Christ’s glory is here to behold?
I think this gets at a basic difference between the apostolic Churches – Catholicism and Orthodoxy – and the several-hundred-years-old-at-best Protestant churches. Protestants are “people of the book,” people whose faith centers around Christ’s person as filtered through certain passages of Scripture. The Protestant encounters Christ primarily through prayerful reflections on him, or on his teachings, as mediated through particular pastoral deliveries. For example, the Protestant minister selects a verse – usually from Paul – and then expounds upon it, connecting it with other passages in the New and Old Testaments in order to convey knowledge about Christ, or his teaching.
For Catholics and (I assume) the Orthodox, the encounter with the person of Christ is something that happens directly, through the agency of the Liturgy and the Eucharist (the Lord’s Supper,) which agency makes him present in his glory in the here and now. For us, Scripture is a very important and essential means of fleshing and deepening that encounter, but the encounter itself is primary.
And the encounter cannot be simply a mental or emotional encounter. Christianity is a historical faith, because it is an incarnational faith. What hit me when I read the passage above is that a Christian discipleship without the continual, actual accompaniment of the living Incarnate God is as senseless as a Christian faith without the Resurrection. If Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain. But if Jesus – body, blood, soul, and divinity – is not still with us now, then our faith is also senseless. It ceases to be an incarnational faith, and becomes a series of theological propositions about a God who became man once upon a time. Yet is not the whole thrust of the Gospels in the direction of God coming to be with us here and now? What, after all, is the point of Christ’s being born in the stable in Bethlehem and rising from the tomb in Jerusalem if not that he has conquered death, and now reigns here on earth? But, once again, he is the God-man. That being the case, for Jesus to be here means that he must be here in the full incarnational dimension of his Divine Personhood.
That, in my opinion, is why there is something ultimately hollow about Protestantism, as well as something deeply wrong with post-Vatican II attempts to strip down and de-liturgize the Mass. The point of Christian faith is not to read about Christ, and thereby come to pray to him in just the same way that Old Testament Jews did God, or to accept certain propositions about him in just the way that Old Testament Jews did God. The point of Christian faith is that Christ is Emmanuel: God With Us, Here and Now, and Forever. But this implies that Sacrament, not Scripture, is the primary vehicle of our presence with him. As Jesus said to very religious (and mistaken) Pharisees: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have eternal life.” (John 5:39-40.) What does it mean to come to him, if he is not here?
Christian faith is insensible apart from a means of actual encounter with the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. After feeding five thousand with bread and meat, Jesus tried very hard to make this point to his disciples (in John 6.) A year later, he took bread, again blessed it, and declared that it was indeed his own body and blood. And that is why it makes sense for Paul to say, in the passage above, that by the God who is the Spirit, “we all with unveiled faces are beholding his glory…” If he is not here to behold – here in the flesh – then what we behold is not him, but our best ideas and reflections about him. If he is not here – incarnationally, sacramentally – then he is only here notionally; that is, as filtered through our noblest notions about him. And that is not enough to be the Good News. But if the one who came to be born in the city called “House of Bread” is indeed present with us on earth, then it is primarily through the “breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35) that he is made known to us, and we to him.
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