Why Christmas Was Unnecessary (sorta)

Joe examines Thomas Aquinas’ Christmas reflection, and why Christmas and the Nativity weren’t actually necessary.

Transcript:

Joe:

Merry Christmas and welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And today I want to talk about a Christmas sort of isn’t necessary because the incarnation sort of wasn’t necessary. Now that might sound heretical, might sound insane for a Christian to say, but I think it’s actually an important thing for us to get right. And for support, I would point to the arguments made by people like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Who argue that Christmas was not strictly speaking necessary, but it’s really good that it happened anyway. But let’s unpack both halves of that. Why wasn’t Christmas necessary in the strict sense? And why is it still really good that this is the course of action God chose anyhow? As I say, I’m going to start with St. Augustine and then we’ll look at St. Thomas Aquinas and I think you’ll see as they lay out their arguments that they’re right.

So St. Augustine, this is from a work called Detroitate or on the Trinity and he’s trying to decide how we should answer the objection. And the objection goes something like this. What? Had God no other way by which he might free men from the misery of this mortality, that he should will the only begotten son, God coeternal with himself to become man by putting on a human soul and flesh and being made mortal to endear death. So that’s the objection he’s hearing. Somebody is going to hear the story of Christmas and they’re going to say, “Really? God had to do that. That was the only way to solve the problem of sin.” And I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but it’s a good question to ask. All right, even if we say Christ came into the world to save sinners or the cross is a remedy to sin, or any of these things that we might be in the habit of just saying, have we stopped to think, “Wait, did he have to?

Couldn’t he have done something else instead?” And Augustine’s going to say, “Yeah, he could have done something else, but it’s good that he didn’t.” He puts it like this. He says, “It’s not enough so to refute as to assert that that mode by which God deins to free us for the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus is good and suitable to the dignity of God.” But we must also show not indeed that no other mode was possible to God, to whose power all things were equally subject, but that there neither was nor need have been any other mode more appropriate for carrying our misery. So he’s saying three things there. It’s a little bit unclear at first what he’s saying. He’s saying, “It’s not enough to just say this isn’t contrary to the dignity of God.” There’s going to be one argument that says it’s inappropriate for God to become man.

It’s inappropriate for the God of the universe to be a baby and a manger that we’re going to have to be able to defend as Christians. No, no, there’s nothing in humanity that is contrary to divine dignity given the humility of God. We’ll have to unpack all of that, right? But we also have to show, this is actually the very last thing he says, that this was the best way he could have done it. We don’t have to show this was the only way he could have done it. So notice that he doesn’t say it’s strictly necessary because obviously all things are possible with God. And so of course he could have done it some other way. So even if you say Jesus Christ comes into the world to save sinners, absolutely true. Does that mean that this was the only way the problem of sin could be remedied?

You’ll hear some theologians, some pastors today who talk that way. That is simply not true. And it’s offensive to the dignity of God to imagine that it is, that God couldn’t have come up with some other solution. After all, when we talk about the problem of sin, he’s the one to whom the debt of sin is chiefly owed. And if you’re the one somebody owes, you can always just say, “Eh, don’t worry about it. ” Or you can say, “You know what? I’ll regard that debt is paid off if you do this other thing for me. ” How often have you found yourself in a situation where someone can’t really repay you? So for instance, if you’re a parent, you have a situation where your kid wants something that costs money, you know they can’t actually afford it, but you just say, “You know what?

You do this. You put $3 from your Christmas money or you do a chore around the house or something else that isn’t really equal, but you have the sovereignty as the parent to say you’re going to count it as equal.” Well, similarly in this case, God as sovereign and God is the one to whom the debt of sin is paid could have said either, “I’m just going to wave away the dead or I’m going to allow the debt to be satisfied in some trivial kind of way,” but he does not do that. And if your solution to why he doesn’t do that is because he is indebted to some higher law of justice, then you don’t think God is truly sovereign. You think he is beneath some higher law that he is a servant of or a slave of, not that he’s the actual sovereign of all things.

And so Augustine’s point is he wasn’t forced by some higher power to do the incarnation. That’s not what’s happening here. So in that sense, Christmas isn’t necessary, but it is still good, not just good in the sense that it’s not offensive to his dignity, but it’s actually the best thing he could have done. St. Thomas Aquinas is going to approach very much the same kind of conclusion. He’s going to make a slightly different way of articulating this distinction. He’s going to say, when we talk about something being necessary, we mean that in two senses. Sometimes we mean you can’t get your goal without it. Like you need to eat or you’re going to die. Now, intubation and all of that exists now, but in his day it didn’t. Or if you want to choose like you need to breathe or you’re going to die, whatever example you want, something where it’s literally strictly necessary.

But then there’s other times we use need when we actually mean something more like it’s fitting, it’s appropriate, it’s the best way. So if you say you need, he gives the example of you need a horse to get there, or we would say something is driving distance. You need a car if you’re going to get from Kansas City to St. Louis. Could you walk it? Technically, yes. It’s a four hour drive and it’s a very long walk. I don’t know how long, because I’m not crazy enough to have ever tried that, but that’s the idea. Sometimes when we say you need to do X, we mean literally strictly necessary. Other times, it’s not strictly unavoidably necessary, but it’s obviously the appropriate kind of course of action. We use it in both ways. They used it back then in both ways. If you mean necessary in the strict sense, he’s going to say no.

In the first sense, it’s not necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. He’s omnipotent and his omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways. On the other hand, if I necessarily just mean fitting, well then sure, it’s necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. And in fact, it’s good to think about why he chose to do it. That this isn’t just some technical nuance thing of like, “Do you need to or do you need need to? ” No, no. The point here is really simple. God was powerful enough to have done something other than Christmas to resolve the problem of sin. So why Christmas? Why the incarnation? Why the story of Jesus of Nazareth? Why is that the solution? Because once you see that it is fitting but not necessary, then you can’t just say, “Well, he had to do it.

He had no other choice. He did have other choices.” So why this? And so I think it’s actually really beautiful to start with the fact that Jesus did not have to come at Christmas. Christmas is not strictly necessary, but it is necessary in another sense, the necessity of fittingness. It is fitting, it is appropriate, it is apt. So why is Christmas fitting? I’m going to just draw strictly from St. Thomas Aquinas for this part because he is going to be drawing very heavily from St. Augustine and a little bit from St. Leo, and we’re going to get to St. Leo last. But I’m going to just follow the way that St. Thomas Aquinas lays this out because he’s going to give five negative reasons and five positive reasons. The five positive reasons are five ways Christmas draws us to the good and the five negative reasons are going to be five ways Christmas draws us away from evil.

And so these 10 reasons are the 10 reasons for Christmas that he lays out, but he’s very clear to note there are a bunch of other reasons as well you could easily come up with. But here are 10 good reasons that are worth praying on, reflecting on, meditating upon and beginning with the positive reasons, the way Christmas draws us to the good. Number one, this is true in regards to faith, which is made more certain by believing God himself who speaks. So think about it. Whenever we talk about faith, there’s an act of trust we have to make in somebody else. And Jesus, by becoming incarnate, makes it easier for his listeners to make an act of faith in him because it’s not a prophet saying that God said something, is God in the flesh saying something. It’s easier to say yes to that. And so he’s going to quote Saint Augustine here, as he’ll do repeatedly.

And Augustine says, “In order that man might journey more trustfully toward the truth, the truth itself, the son of God, having assumed human nature, established and founded faith.” Everyone still has to make an act of trust that Jesus does not come to take away the need for faith, but he does come to make the act of faith easier to make. It’s easier to trust Jesus of Nazareth than it is to trust somebody else telling you about him. And so now that there is this established point in history where we know Jesus lived, he taught, we have a really good sense even from just history, even apart from faith, you can compile a pretty decent amount of evidence that there really was a guy named Jesus, he taught more or less this and his followers believed he rose from the dead. All of that you can establish even before you get to the act of faith, and that makes it so much easier to make the act of faith rather than just hearing something like Moses says that he saw God in a burning bush.

Now this is also, by the way, the reason that those prophets could do things like miracles to make the act of faith easier. It’s more likely you’re going to believe a guy saying he saw God in the burning bush if his brother can turn the staff into a serpent or he can perform all these incredible miracles with the plagues. The point there is in all of these supernatural activities, including with the incarnation, he’s making this necessary thing, faith, more palatable. And so we can talk about him establishing and founding faith in the incarnation. That’s the first reason. Second, hope. It’s greatly strengthened. Here’s Augustine. Nothing was so necessary for raising our hope as to show us how deeply God loved us. I love that line and it’s easy to gloss over that, but let’s just pause on that. I want you to think about that because sometimes life can feel hopeless.

You can look around at the world and a lot of things are going crazy and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the midst of that. And it’s easy for people … Look, right now, people are often very isolated, very alone, and there can be this incredible despair and hopelessness and rage and everything else that kind of builds up in that, that are all these kind of manifestations of a kind of hopelessness, of thinking, “This is not good. I am not good.” One of the beautiful things that I know the group live action is doing right now is they’re making t-shirts that just say, “It is good that you exist.” Because what they found is that in combating abortion, one of the things they needed to do was to convince mothers that it was good that they existed. Because if you don’t believe in the goodness of your own existence, the idea that it would be good that you’d be bringing a child into the world is so much harder to believe in.

But it’s not just like from a utilititarian perspective, like, no, no, people need to know it is good that they exist. And so Augustine can say nothing was so necessary for raising our hope as to show us how deeply God loved us, but the incarnation is a sign of an incredibly loving and merciful God. You’ve got the problem of sin, we get it. We’ve done things that are horrible. We’ve done things that might seem unforgivable at times. And you might imagine God just sending fire down from heaven, but instead he sends his son down from heaven and his son greets us a cooing baby in the manger. That’s the response that he has to sin, is to send his son into the world to lead us to a better place. Augustine continues, and what could afford us a stronger proof of this than that the son of God should become a partner with us, of human nature.

It’s easy to be misanthropic. Like right now, if you say you hate the opposite sex, if you say you hate other races, people regard you as a social pariah and understandably. But if you say you hate humanity, you’re just a misenthrope, human stink, we should have zero population growth and we should all just die out as a species, that is for some reason, a completely acceptable position to have socially. It’s this most profoundly deeply antisocial position and it’s treated with an air of intellectual respectability that I think it has not earned. Augustine’s point is in the face of this, this desire to give up not only on yourself, but on the human race, God shows us a dignity to the human race that he is not giving up on it. He’s become a partner. He has assumed our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.

And so that should make us hopeful that no matter what else we may do wrong as a species, God is not giving up on us. And so we have a well-founded hope. Third, the incarnation helps with regard to charity, with love, which is greatly inkindled, as St. ThomasSequana says, or as Augustine says, “What greater cause is there of the Lord’s coming than to show God’s love for us?” And he afterwards adds, “If we have been slow to love, at least let us hasten to love and return.” So yeah, open your heart this Christmas. Maybe you’re somebody who is a little mythanthropic. Maybe you’re someone who has trouble loving your neighbor, but once you see not only the hope that you should have that God’s not giving up on you, but the incredible love that God has shown you, even if you’ve been slow to love, be quick to love and response, love back.

Because one of the reasons it can be hard to love is you don’t want to be the person who’s really vulnerable while the other person is … I’m thinking of you more as a friend, but Jesus doesn’t just think of you as a friend. He actually has this profound, incredible, to the cross kind of love for you. And so if you’re too afraid to love, at least be bold enough to love back. And the incarnation is him making the first move so you can at least love back. Fourth reason. With regard to what he calls well-doing, it’ll be clear when you just see what he means. Augustine says, “Man who might be seen was not to be followed, but God was to be followed who could not be seen and therefore God was made man that he who might be seen by man and who man might follow might be shown to man.” So I don’t know if you’ve thought about this.

This is a strange kind of paradox of human existence, but think about prior to the incarnation, you’ve got this God who is invisible and you’re expected to listen to him and follow him. And meanwhile, you’ve got all these people leading you in the wrong direction, showing you visible like idols and giving you visible bad examples and everything else. And it’s so easy to want to just follow what’s immediately before you. I think we have this problem with politics today, with current events today, with celebrity culture today. They’re on your screen, they’re in your ears and your eyes and in your head, and you start to follow them without even really noticing. Whereas God feels more remote. He closes that distance in the incarnation. So now you can know what he would say to you because he’s said it. You could know the example he would set because he said it.

And so it’s easier to do the things you’re supposed to do now because you have a visible example in the person of Jesus Christ. Now obviously that example has now sent it into heaven, but he has set that example in history in a way that he hadn’t before. So you no longer have to, like the WWJD, what would Jesus do bracelets? That’s a little hammy maybe, but it’s pointing to something real that we can look to Christ for an example of well-doing and then follow the example that he sets. All right, fifth positive reason. This is a biggie because it’s the full participation of the divinity, which St. Thomas Aquinas says is the true bliss of man and the end that means the goal of human life. And this is bestowed upon us by Christ’s humanity. This is what’s sometimes called theosis or divinization. It’s the idea that as Augustine says, God was made man that man might be made God.

Now this is the subject of a lot of confusions. I want to say just a couple words on it. Number one, this is the goal of the whole Christian life. This is the goal of all of human existence and it deserves to be talked about much more that the point of this life is not just God put you here to give you a bunch of tests and if you don’t pass the test, you get burnt up for all eternity. And if you do pass the test and you avoid getting burnt up. That’s not a very good understanding. God has invited you into his own life. Now, we don’t share that life by our nature. We are not ontologically the same as God. Just as Jesus needs to become man, so we need to, in a certain way, become God. We need to become partakers of the divine nature, as St. Peter says.

St. John puts it like this. He says, “We already are children of God by virtue of our baptism.” So you’ve got these three tears. Let’s start here. First here, there’s a certain sense in which all of us are children of God by dent of creation. So if you look at the genealogy of Luke and Luke three, he traces his genealogy back to Adam’s son of God. Or in Acts 17, when St. Paul is at Mars Hill, when he talks about all creation being or all humanity being God’s offspring, there’s a certain sense in which every author has a kind of paternal relationship to his books. Every painter has that relationship to his paintings. And so every creator has a certain kind of fatherly, or I guess in the case of a woman, motherly relationship of a certain kind to the things lovingly created, because in the things that you’ve made, a reflection of the author can be found.

But those things aren’t ontologically the same thing, meaning at the level of being, they’re not the same thing. I’ve got books and I’ve got children and all of them reflect something about me, the books and the kids, but the books are not of the same nature. They’re not the same kind of thing that I am a human being, my kids are. That’s what we mean here. So the first way we are children of God, offspring of God in a loose sense, is by being his creatures. We share something of God’s glory that the invisible attributes of God are seen in the visible. So in one sense, all creation does this, but man being made in the image of God does this in a fuller way. That’s the first level. But then we are invited by baptism to become children of God. And this is all over the New Testament, but this idea that the spirit of sonship and adoption is put in our hearts by the Holy Spirit so we can cry out Abba, Father.

Now we become sons in a deeper sense. So now the life of God is dwelling within us. And so there is a deeper thing going on, but all of this happens through the incarnation. Like you don’t get to step two if you don’t have Jesus coming into the world and presenting God as Father, but also letting us access this union between divinity and humanity that begins on the incarnation. We are then invited in a strange way into that unity. We’re invited into this relationship, this interplay, and so that God can come and dwell in your soul. So this is where one John three comes in, that we are God’s children now. And that’s why the world doesn’t know us. If the world’s still at level one, they don’t know what it’s like to become a child of God in this much deeper, fuller, realer sense.

But then John says, that’s actually not enough because what shall be has not yet been revealed, but we do know that when it is revealed, we shall see him, we’ll be like him for we shall see him as he is, that we’re actually being transformed to become Godlike. That’s the promise. That’s step three, so to speak. And so you don’t get to step three without the incarnation and getting to step two. That’s the Christian promise. Going from glory to glory, as St. Paul says, that we become sons and if sons, then heirs, heirs of God and co-ers with Christ. That’s the idea. And this happens in the incarnation, which is amazing. If God had just waved away the problem of sin and said, Ed, don’t worry about it, you don’t become divinized. You don’t become like God because then in that just waving away, he’s just ignoring or wiping away the problem, but he’s not creating this solution in which the solution is a union, the marriage of humanity and divinity, which is signified in the union of the divine bridegroom and the human bride, the church.

That’s this union, the two become one flesh. As St. Paul says in Ephesians five, that’s the mystery of Christ in the church. That’s the mystery in a certain way for every one of us. You are called to become like God. Much more could be said on that. I know I’ve said stuff on that before, but because it is genuinely like the most important part of Christianity, I think it bears repeating. All right. So those are the positive ways. What about the negative ways? What about the ways that Christmas leads us away from evil? Negative here, I don’t mean like these are the bad things about Christmas. This is the crampest part. No, I mean, what are some of the things that the incarnation is good for in leading us from the bad outcomes? Number one.

I could go six through 10. I’m just going to start the one through five over again because that’s what St. Thomas Aquinas does. Number one, because man is taught by it not to prefer the devil to himself. Now that might be very confusing. Why would we need to be taught not to prefer the devil to ourselves or to honor the devil who’s the author of sin? Well, he quotes Saint Augustine. Since human nature is so united to God as to become one person, let not these proud spirits dare to prefer themselves to man because they have no bodies. Think about it. This is why that matters. By order of creation, the angelic spirits are of a higher order than human beings. I don’t know if you know that or not, but this is true. The angels are higher at the level of nature than you and I are.

And that also means that the fallen angels, the demons are stronger and smarter than you, and they can look down on you and they can instill in you this kind of error, this heresy, that kind of nostic spirit that says bodies are bad. The material world is bad. The flesh is just evil and wicked and bodilyness is gross. And wouldn’t it be great if we were all just spirit? We’re just souls trapped in bodies. You can find Christians saying that kind of stuff. You can find the secular world saying that kind of stuff, and that is a lie from the pit of hells. I mean that quite literally, because this is one of the devil’s big bugaboos. This is one of the things he’s really big on, is that he is better than you because he doesn’t have a body and you do and bodies are gross.

And then Jesus comes into the world with the body and puts this lie to bed that we now see the devil has no room for boasting because now God has given bodilyness this incredible dignity that human nature has now been united to God so it’s to become one person. There’s one person who is a divine person with a human body and a human nature. And so let’s not trash on bodies and humanity and bodilyness and human intellect and human will and all that stuff because it’s not angelic. No, it’s something better. Not better by nature, but better by the order of grace. So we will be higher than the angels. St. Paul is quick to point this out. Do you not know you’ll be judging angels, that we have been called from the bottom to the top of the heap. And so we should not fall for these demonic lies that say like, you’re just a soul trapped in your body and your body is the problem.

Your body is not the problem. Pride is the problem. The ways we act like demons, those are the problems. The body is something that is wounded, but is being redeemed. Your soul is something that is wounded and being redeemed. So don’t fall for those lies. Second, because we’re taught thereby how great is man’s dignity, lest we should solely it with sin. And Sugustine says, God has proved to us how high a place human nature holds amongst creatures and as much as he appeared to men as a true man. This is underscoring this. You have more dignity than you realize. So it’s not just don’t be annostic. It’s also recognize your dignity and then live according to your dignity. So avoid sin. He then quotes a sermon by Pope Leo that I’m actually going to return to at the very end. So I’m going to skip it for now because the sermon I’m going to just quote almost in its entirety because it’s so beautiful.

But the third negative reason, the third thing that helps us to avoid besides becoming nostics or treating our humanity lightly in a way where we solely it was said. The third is in order to do away with man’s presumption. So there’s two extremes we can go to. One extreme says, “I’m trash or I’m going to live like I’m trash.” The other extreme is like very puffed up. I can get to God on my own. I’m basically a good person and we see plenty of that as well. And this is also an error. And so the fact that we need a savior is a sign that we shouldn’t be presumptuous. The grace of God is commended in Jesus Christ, though no merits of ours went before, as Augustine says. So we didn’t earn Jesus unless you say we earned him by being sinners who were unable to solve the problem of sin on our own.

So it is at once kind of a gut check and a reminder to be humble and at the same time, a reminder of our dignity. It does both of these things at once. Like, “Hey, you actually caused a problem with sin you couldn’t resolve, but God has such good plans for you that he wants to redeem you anyway.” So you don’t fall to the depths of just being like a groveling, disgusting, “I just have a sin nature.” No, that’s not true, but neither are you just basically a good person who has like a couple things that sort of need to be worked on, but you basically got it under control. It’s neither of those. You are good but broken and you’re not able to repair yourself and only those who recognize that are ready for the divine physician and Jesus comes into the world to show us both of these things.

If humanity was simply beyond redemption, he couldn’t have become human, but if humanity was basically already fine, he wouldn’t have needed to become human, again, needed in this sense of fittingness, but it shows us that those two extremes, the two errors we’re always asked between, are we basically good or basically evil? That these are two false choices. We’re good and broken and we need to be redeemed fourth because man’s pride, which is the greatest stumbling block to our clinging to God, can be convinced and cured by humility so great, as Augustine says. The thing that is going to keep you out of heaven most, the biggest stumbling block there is, is your pride. And again, that pride can take the sense of like being too proud and being unwilling to admit you’ve sinned or being so proud that you’re convinced your sin is bigger than God’s mercy.

Yeah, God can heal other people, but if you knew what I had done, those are both manifestations of pride. And to see not only that Jesus needed to come into the world for you and that he was willing to come into the world for you, which should already be these great calls to humility, but also simply the way he models humility, that God who He has everything. Philippians two, right? He’s got the fullness of divinity and he doesn’t view that as something to just be grasped at. Rather, he empties himself taking the form of a slave, that he takes the lowest place so he can bring us to the highest place. This is what he is showing us, and this gives us a model so to do. Luke 22, the last supper, Jesus reminds the disciples of this, that the leader should be as a servant and he is among as one who serves.

If you want to know how to exercise greatness, have it be that radical humility that Jesus has, a humble servant leadership. He shows us how to do that because if we can live that way, then the biggest stumbling block to our salvation, namely our pride, is not quite as big anymore. I’m amazing at this, by the way. I’m the best at being humble. Just kidding. All right. Fifth. He does this. This is the final reason St. Thomas Aquinas gives us. Again, he mentions there are others. Fifth, in order to free man from the throlldom of sin, which as Augustine says, ought to be done in such a way the devil should be overcome by the justice of the man, Jesus Christ. And this was done by Christ satisfying for us. So again, there’s a sense in which God is sovereign. He could have just waved it all away, but there is something more fitting about him doing this in a way that seems perfectly fair, perfectly just.

He gets the outcome he wants and nobody can really complain about how he does it. He says it like this. Now mere man, this is Thomas now. Now, mere man could not have satisfied for the whole human race and God was not bound to satisfy. Hence, it behooved Jesus Christ to be both God and man. But as both God and man, he is on the one hand able to pay this debt because he’s divine and he’s part of the party, humanity that has incurred the debt. And so it’s not just somebody paying from the outside. He has joined the ranks and then paid it. This is a weird example, but imagine it a little bit like this.

For an aid, let’s say you’ve got a country that has massive debts and they can’t pay them off. You could have like some wealthy country just write a check or forgive the debt or whatever. And they might say great. But that might also give them a sense that they don’t have much national pride. But now imagine some billionaire comes to their country and just says, “I want to become a citizen of the country and I’m going to be a taxpayer and everything else and my taxes are going to be so high that’ll pay off the debt.” Now, this country is able to pay off the debt because of this one coming in from the outside and assuming the status taxpayer citizen that they couldn’t have generated that, but it’s now not coming just from the outside. In a way, it’s coming from the outside, right?

Somebody comes in from the outside. In another way, it is coming from inside. So it is with the incarnation. God responds to the problem sin from the outside. He’s not a sinner and he’s not a human person by his nature. He’s a divine person, but he takes on our full humanity. He adopts citizenship as a human and he has a human nature, a full, true human nature. And as such, he’s able to make this offering. We were too impoverished to make on our own. Okay. The last thing here, I just want to read you big chunks of a fairly short, but really beautiful Christmas sermon by Pope Leo. And it’s one that I’ve found in preparing for this episode and then St. Thomas Aquinas quoted from it. And I thought, all right, I’ve come across this twice in the last two days. I should probably just share this.

So Pope Leo depicted here responding to Atila the Hun, I don’t know if you know this story, it’s pretty incredible. Leo, this is a true story. We don’t really know how this happens. A Tilla the Hun is going to destroy Rome. Leo goes out, talks to him and convinces him to turn around and go back. And he does. We don’t really know what he said, but he saves the city of Rome and he is just this incredible Pulp. Anyway, he gives Sermon 21 is a Christmas sermon and it is incredible. So here you go. He says, “Our savior dearly beloved was born today. Let us be glad. There’s no proper place for sadness when we keep the birthday of the life, which destroys the fear of mortality and brings to us the joy of promised eternity.” Alrighty, very beautiful. This is our cause for Christmas joy.

Not that we got the best presents, not just that we got to see family. Those things are great if they happened, but even if they didn’t, it’s a birthday of life and this destroys our fear of death and brings us instead the joy of promised eternity. And then he says, “No one is kept from sharing in this happiness. There is for all one common measure of joy because our Lord, the destroyer of sin and death, finds none free from charge, so has he come to free us all. ” So all of us stood in need of a redeemer and he comes to redeem a salt. So he says, let the saint exalt and that he draws near to victory. Let the sinner be glad that he’s invited to pardon. Let the Gentile take courage and then he’s called to life for the son of God in the fullness of time, which the inscrutable depth of the divine council has determined, has taken on himself the nature of man, thereby to reconcile it to its author.

In order that the inventor of death, the devil might be conquered through that, he means that nature, which he had conquered, meaning that the devil had conquered. But the devil must have felt like he was doing pretty well. You look at the long track record of human behavior prior to the incarnation and you’ve got a bunch of humans behaving in a pretty stupid way and they’re easy to attempt and trick and trap and torment and other T words. And then Jesus comes along and he takes a full humanity and he is untrappable. He’s untemptable. He’s untrickable. He’s untormentable. And in fact, he overthrows the reign of Satan from the cross. And so that should give us a great deal of joy. And in this conflict, Leo says, undertaken for us, the fight was fought on great and wondrous principles of fairness. This is a point sometimes Aquinas made earlier.

So here’s what he’s talking about. “For the Almighty Lord enters the list with his savage foe, not in his own majesty, but in our humility. “In other words, if Jesus wanted to square up with the devil, it’s not fair if he goes in using the full force of his divinity, but instead by entering humbly as a baby and in his humanity, opposing him with the same form and the same nature which shares indeed our mortality, though it is free from all sin. Then he has a digression, I’m skipping here about just like original sin and Jesus doesn’t have original sin. But his point there is really simple that rather than facing off against the devil simply as Almighty God, he faces off against the devil as a true human, albeit a sinless one. And again, there’s a dignity given to humanity there. If you take that example before, somebody comes in from the outside, they become a citizen.

Well, now if that country goes to war, maybe they’re the greatest fighter in the world. Now they’re going to go out and fight. And it’s like, well, this isn’t some foreign power intervening and meddling in the affairs. Now it’s somebody from within who is just unstoppable. That same kind of thing is here. The human condition which seemed unsalvageable is being salvaged not from just outside, but from within. That the incarnation is the story of God entering humanity from within to redeem it. He then talks about Mary. He says,” A royal virgin of the stem of David is chosen to be impregnated with the sacred seed and to conceive the divinely human offspring in mind first and then in body. “This is a beautiful theme that I’ve seen several of the saints talk about that Mary has to say yes to the word first before she can conceive the word bodily.

The angel presents a message to her and she says yes, but it be done to Mia according to thy word, that she receives the word of God and then she conceives the word of God. And there’s something very beautiful about this that she is a disciple first and then a mother. I’ve mentioned before, even in recent episodes, I won’t belabor it, that often in medieval art, Mary is depicted at the enunciation reading scripture to show this kind of encounter, that she’s not just a random person. She’s someone who is seeking after God and receiving him every day in his word. Well, similarly, you and I should be in the habit of receiving Jesus in the word, both in scripture, and then we would say also in the Eucharist, that you can receive him both in mind first and then in body. So these two things should go together.

“Unless in ignorance,” Pope says. “Of the heavenly councils, she should tremble it so strange a result. She learns from converse with the angel that would just be wrought in hers of the Holy Ghost. “So he just looked at this in Connor in this twofold way that she’s receiving him both in mind and in body. Now he’s going to say,” What about this other sort of tension or paradox that she has to be both virgin and mother? “Nor does she believe at loss of honor that she is soon to be the mother of God, for why should she be in despair over the novelty of such conception, to whom the power of the most high has promised to affect it. Her implicit faith is confirmed also by the attestation of a precursory miracle and Elizabeth receives unexpected fertility in order that there might be no doubt that he who had given conception to the baron would give it even to a virgin.

It’s kind of a fascinating point that the birth of John the Baptist is in some ways a preparation given for Mary’s sake. The miracle of John the Baptist birth is given so that Mary can know just how incredibly powerful God is in this much more visceral way, because she’s being asked to do this incredible thing and this thing that seems to all human reasoning to just be impossible, a virgin burying a child and to pave the way for her to be able to grasp what is even being asked of her, her elderly relative conceives a child. Therefore, he says,” The word of God himself, God, the son of God, who in the beginning was with God, through whom all things were made and without whom was nothing made, with the purpose of delivering man from eternal death became man. “So bending himself to take on him our humility without decrease in his own majesty, that remaining what he was, divine, and assuming what he was not human, he might unite the true form of a slave to that form in which he is equal to God the Father and join both natures together that by such a compact that the lower should not be swallowed up in his exiltation, no, the higher impaired by its new associate.

Okay. This is deep theology, but it’s worth saying two things here. Number one, when we talk about the incarnation, he doesn’t cease to be God even for a little bit. He doesn’t lose omnipotence, that doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t lose omniscience, doesn’t lose any of this stuff. He doesn’t cease to be God. In his divinity, he remains exactly as he’s always been, and Leo’s very clear about that, but something new is added in a certain way. A human nature that did not exist before is created and is joined to the second person of the Trinity. So now he has something he didn’t have in the sense of a nature that he didn’t have. And this is not a blending such that the humanity and divinity form some semi-human, semi-divine sort of thing. He’s truly and fully divine, truly and fully human in an unmixed way, but they’re united.

That’s what he’s saying. This is the two natures are joined together, but the exultation of the human one doesn’t make it like a demigod and the humility of his divinity doesn’t make him less than God. So you don’t end up in Hercules territory. He’s fully God, fully man, and the two are united, but not blended. Without detriment, therefore, to the properties of each substance, which then came together in one person, majesty took on humility, strength, weakness, eternity, mortality. Now I just want you to pause here. Even if that theology is too deep for you right now, just recognize that God is all of these things at once, that the throne is a cross. It is majestic. It is also humble. That he’s incredibly strong. He also is incredibly weak and chooses to be weak. He is eternal. He’s also capable of dying and he does die.

And for the pain off of the debt belonging to our condition, inviable nature was united with passable nature, meaning his divine nature is completely perfect. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t need to change. He unites it with a human nature that can grow and experience emotions and do all this other changing stuff. And true God and true man were combined to form one Lord so that assuited the needs of our case, one in the same mediator between God and men, the man in Christ Jesus could both die with the one and rise again with the other. I like this way of expressing it, that one way you see the two natures of Christ is to see, well, when he dies, it’s not his divinity dying, it’s humanity. And when he rises, it’s not the dead human nature that rises in the sense of the power. Obviously his human nature does rise, but not by its own strength, it’s by this divine strength.

So you can see the humanity and divinity and the death and the resurrection. Then he says, rightly therefore, did the birth of our salvation in part no corruption to the virgin’s purity. Again, in talking about Mary here, which is very … I mean, Mary gets a lot of shout outs at Christmas, even among many non-Catholics because hard to tell this story without seeing her very important role. “Rightly therefore did the birth of our salvation in part no corruption to the virgin purity because the bearing of the truth was the keeping of honor. Such then beloved was the nativity which became the power of God and the wisdom of God, even Christ, whereby he might be one with us in manhood and surpass us in Godhead. We want this. I’ll just say that. We want to be united with God and so it’s good that Jesus taking on humanity becomes totally united with us.

We don’t want to be united with him at the lowest level, right? We don’t want to just say like, ” Come on down here into the mirror of sin. Come join us there. “Because if he was able to just lose his divinity and come down to our level, that would just create more of a problem. We want him to be united with us in such a way that he’s able to pull us up out of the depths of sin and bring us up to where he is. And that’s exactly what is possible, precisely because he’s united with us in manhood and he surpasses us in his Godhead. Four, unless he were true God, he would not bring us a remedy. Unless he were true man, he would not give us an example. Therefore, the exalting angel song when the Lord was born is this, glory to God in the highest and their message, peace on earth to men of goodwill, for they see that the heavenly Jerusalem is being built up of all the nations of the world and over that indescribable work of the divine love, how ought the humbleness of men to rejoice when the joy of the lofty angels is so great.

Then he says this, this is kind of the closing admonitions. “Let us in, dearly beloved, give thanks to God the Father through his son in the Holy Spirit who for his great mercy wherewith he has loved us, has said pity on us and when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together in Christ, that means made us alive in Christ, that we might be in him a new creation and a new production. Let us put off then the old man with his deeds and having obtained a share in the birth of Christ, let us renounce the works of the flesh. Christian, acknowledge your dignity and becoming a partner in the divine nature, refuse to return to the old basiness by degenerate conduct.” That’s the part, Aquinas quoted by the way. “Remember the head and the body of which you are a member. Recollect that you were rescued from the power of darkness and brought out into God’s light and kingdom.

By the mystery of baptism, you were made the temple of the Holy Ghost. Do not put such a denisent of flight from you by base acts and subject yourself once more to the devil’s throlled them as right. I got to use the word throlled them twice in today’s episode. Because your purchase money is the blood of Christ, because he shall judge you in truth who ransomed you in mercy, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit reigns forever and ever. Amen. That’s my Christmas hope for all of you, that’s my prayer for all of you, that you can experience the true joy of Christmas and can be transformed by it. Drawn to all of those good things, drawn away from all those wicked things as we saw, and to see that in true God becoming true man without ceasing to be true God, your savior and your judge being one in the same, this is tremendously good news and should give us a true sense, both of our need for a savior, a check against pride, but also of our true dignity so we don’t fall into those actions which are beneath us.

Merry Christmas, God bless you. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless.