What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
|
by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
The Incarnational Approach
A little boy called to his father at night, “Dad, I’m scared.” The father came to his cradle and chided, “Didn’t I tell you that you should not be scared because angels are watching over you?” The little boy replied, “I know, but I want somebody to watch me that has skin on him.”
Sometimes we think of God as out there somewhere above some seventh heaven. He seems to be very remote and not concerned about our affairs. Christmas is the feast of a God who is close to us, who has skin on him.
It is odd that we think of God as remote when he is terribly close to us. “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’” (Acts 17:28) said St. Paul to the Athenians. God is present to us with his power. We are related to him like rays to the sun. If the sun ceases to shine the rays cease to be. We survive with momentary installments of existence extended us by God. Even when we rebel against him we do so with power he has given us. “For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you.” (Wis. 11:24-25)
God is present to us through his wisdom. Before an artist makes something he must have an idea of what he will produce. So things in the world are imbued with God’s ideas and that is what makes them intelligible to us. Our ideas are true because they resemble God who is Truth, because they conform to the divine mind. In every act of knowledge we give testimony to the presence of God in the universe.
God is present to us through his goodness. God is perfect and has no need of anything outside himself. If he creates it is not for his benefit but for that of the things he makes. Creation is an expression of his goodness and generosity. In striving to perfect ourselves we participate in the divine perfection. Every flower growing to its perfection should lead us to God.
When the Son of God became man he translated divinity into human terms and made the invisible God visible. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (Jn. 14:9) With his human body as a tool the Son of God, also called Jesus (God saves), did three things. He taught us about God in a human tongue and became a prophet or teacher and thus perfected the mind of humanity. He established a kingdom and conduced himself as a shepherd or guide and in this way he perfected the will of human beings. He forgave sins through a human voice and sacrificed his body on a cross so that the debt of sins could be paid and we could be reconciled to God. In this way he functioned as a priest, a link between God and humankind. He was a perfect priest because he was perfectly God and perfectly man with his two natures joined in one divine Person, that of the Son of God. By his priestly activity he perfected the soul of humanity. Thus he was present to the very root elements of our existence: our souls, our minds, and wills.
When Jesus ascended into heaven he did not cease his activity in our world. He exercises it now through a new body that he has joined to himself. It is the Church. “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it.” (I Cor. 12:27) Jesus’ Church is the new organism established by him to continue his threefold activity of teacher, king, and priest in the world throughout the ages. If you are incorporated into his new and complete Body, cells therein, so to speak, it is impossible of thinking of God as distant from you.
He taught with a human voice and ordered his Church to teach in his name and with his authority. “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations,…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matt. 28:19-20) It was not so much a question of the Church remembering what Jesus said and faithfully reproducing his teaching. It was more a question of the Church making his voice heard in our day. “Whoever listens to you listens to me.” (Lk. 10:16)
He established a kingdom and with a human voice left us commandments and a group of officers for his new Body, the Church. “Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 18:18) Just as the movement of my hand gives evidence of the invisible command of my will so the invisible will of Jesus is made visible through the exercise of the authority he has given to his Church.
Jesus forgave sins and reconciled us to God through his human body. He continues the work of salvation through his new Body, the Church particularly through the sacramental system that he established. We encounter him acting in each sacrament that we receive. In baptism our sinful nature dies, is buried with Christ, and is given a new birth through water and the Holy Spirit and so the waters of the Jordan continue to flow in our time. In Confirmation Jesus sends the Spirit that he gave up on the cross and descended on the disciples at Pentecost. In every eucharist we receive the risen body and blood of Jesus as nourishment for our souls. Thus he renews in our day the multiplication of the loaves and the sacrificial offering of the Last Supper.
In the sacrament of reconciliation Jesus forgives sins through the voice of a priest just as he did with his own voice in the case of the paralytic and many others. In the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, he sometimes heals bodily ills but, more importantly, the vestiges of sin just as he did in the case of the good thief. In the sacrament of Matrimony he makes the joining of husband and wife a sign of the union of himself with his Church, a union that produces holiness. He blesses couples as he did the couple at Cana. In Holy Orders he repeats the ordination of priests at the Last Supper and sends new apostles to teach, guide, and sanctify and thus continue his work of reconciliation.
Those who keep the commandments of Jesus become the home or dwelling place of God. (Jn. 14:23) One who lives in you cannot be remote.
Thus God has fulfilled every possible intimacy of love: hearing (revelation), sight (incarnation), touch (healings), union (grace and divine indwelling, living in us as a temple) and sacrifice (passion and death and its continuation in the eucharist). So it is all right to think of God as mysterious, as incomprehensibly loving, but since the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem we may never again think of him as remote.
(Printed December, 2002)
