Proclaiming the Prologue to Saint John's Gospel during Mass today, I became aware that close to the middle of this pericope, of this unit of holy writ, the mystery of the Incarnation of the Father's only Begotten Son is set forth. I believe the heart of the mystery can be found in the tenth verse of the first chapter of the fourth Gospel:
He was in the world,These sixteen words (in Greek- twenty in the NAB translation) really capture the mystery of God-made-man.
and the world came to be through him,
but the world did not know him
Jesus often didn't make sense to people of his own day. Quite frequently, he still baffles us today. Take the Gospel and politics- those who want to politicize Jesus are as wrong as those who want to de-politicize him. In other words, the Gospel certainly has political implications that followers of Jesus have to take seriously but neither does Jesus present us with a political program. In fact, he seems to repudiate programmatic politics.
Part of living between the already of his first coming, which inaugurated God's kingdom, and the not-yet of his return, when that kingdom will be fully established, requires Christians to find a way to continue on the Way amid the realities of this world. Just as we must make some peace with how to handle wealth, we must continually discern how to relate to power. We get a flavor of this in Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans as well as in Saint Justin Martyr's First Apology.
Again, I am only using politics as a case-in-point for showing the crisis the Incarnation foments and also how we try to evade the mystery by reducing it, in various and manifold ways, to our own measure. By his becoming truly human, the Son, through whom the world came to be, willingly submitted himself to his creation, to his creatures, those made in his divine image but who, through sin, forfeited their likeness to him. As with creation, the Incarnation shows us God taking a risk, a big one. I don't think that we think about God as a risk-taker often enough.
To jump from John to the Synoptics, it is by becoming human through the Blessed Virgin Mary that God's Son becomes Emmanuel- God-with-us. Christ is God's solidarity with us. As Paul asks, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" We state this even as, along with Saint Teresa of Avila, who a hagiographical anecdote has saying to God: "If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder why You have so few of them!" This is why Christian life requires a lot of patience and perseverance. Even in this, Jesus shows us the way.
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