Incarnation

“In literature and in art, we call the inversion of two elements a “chiasm,” from the Greek letter Chi (Χ) that can be physically traced when each element is joined to its repetition, since in their second occurrence the elements have switched places. In other words, in poetry you have a rhyme scheme like a-b-b-a, in which the place of the a and b are inverted when they are repeated. Such chiastic connections also occur in painting, intertwining elements across a canvas, or across the length of a novel or other work of literature…chiasm is the very essence of sacramental life, of all Christian life, of the gospel itself: God became man so that man might become God (St. Athanasius of Alexandria). This chiasm is the gospel in one sentence. I think that readers will see this basic theological chiasm at the heart of the gospel directly and easily because in this case the chiasm of in the sentence is also the chiasm of being, of existence. There is a “divine commerce”–one name by which the Fathers called chiasm–involved in our taking on God’s divinity, while He takes on our humanity.” (Timothy G. Patitsas)

“While it is true that “God became man so that man could become God,” it is equally true that God became man so that man could become man – truly human. To be truly human we must sing and dance, create art and tell stories. We engage in commerce and build cities. All that is human life and existence is a gift from God and has a God-given purpose and direction.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“Prior to the Incarnation of Christ, there was simply no reason to believe anything like this. It was obviously better to be some kinds of people than others. It was better to be free than a slave, it was safer to be male than female, and just about everyone asserted that his culture was better than his neighbor’s. (Of course, some cultures were better than others: it was better, for example, to be a part of a culture that didn’t practice human sacrifice.) But Christianity changed all this by insisting that, regardless of their physical differences, all people were equal in their radical dignity as human beings. No one in history had ever said anything like this—until God became man, there was no reason to.” (Dr. Zachary Porcu)

“Christ our God became man in order to reveal to us a complete vision of God in a manner apprehensible to human sight…the Son of God became man, we in turn may participate in God.” (Dynamis 8/5/2019, Orthodox Study Bible, Christology)

“Death, our common enemy, is the great issue opposing human life. When God became man, He reversed the evil of death by rising from the dead. He endowed us with life. The account of the Myrrh-bearers commands us, as disciples, to give thanks to our Lord who trampled down death, the tyrant over us all. The Almighty lifts up His feeble ones; the Master brings life, the improbable remedy. Sin inverts the good order of God, so that mankind calls “evil good and good evil” (Is 5:20). “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,” Christ asks, “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?” (Mt 7:11). Having led death captive, Christ our God manifests His ineffable goodness toward all mankind in a multitude of ways.” (Dynamis 4/30/2023)

“In an unfallen world the Incarnation of Christ would indeed have sufficed as the perfect expression of God’s outgoing love. But in a fallen world and sinful world His love had to reach out yet further. Because of the tragic presence of sin and evil, the work of man’s restoration was to prove infinitely costly. A sacrificial act of healing was required, a sacrifice such as only a suffering and crucified God could offer.” (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware)

“Because the problem was corruption and death, and not merely the offense of transgression, for which divine forgiveness upon repentance would have sufficed, the only solution was the incarnation of the incorruptible and immortal Word. Christ therefore offered his own bodily temple as ‘substitute’ for all (antipsychon, literally ‘life for life’; cf. 4 Maccabees 6:28-29) and so, also being united to human nature, vanquished death and clothed humanity with incorruptible life. Athanasius celebrates with Paul by citing one Corinthians 15:53-55…the supreme goal of Christ’s coming to earth was to overcome the condemnation (katadike) of death by His own death and resurrection, both of which are the ‘trophy’ or ‘monument’ (tropaion) of Christ victory over death. Athanasius seems to do justice to Paul’s concerns about human corruption and death but says nothing about the wrath of God or about justification of the sinner as forensic acquittal, despite the language about debt and substitution, language that apparently was used because of the pull of scripture.” (Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos) 

“The Incarnation was important, not simply for Jesus’ journey to the cross, but because He confirmed the goodness of the material world through becoming part of it. Because the material world contains God, it cannot be evil, nor can it lack spiritual coherence. Moreover, the salvation Christ purchased offers a way, not to escape from our material body, but for our experiences in the flesh to be transformed, so we can flourish according to our proper telos. That telos is nothing short of fulfilling our vocation as kings and priests, and thus to participate in the world’s healing.” (Robin Phillips) 

“The goal of the Incarnation and the Christian life that Christ makes possible—as well as the goal of exegeting Scripture—is deification, meaning real, personal transformation in this life, leading to fullness of eternal life (life in God) in the next.” (Dr. Mary S. Ford) 

“The Word of God became human, born of the Virgin. God comes to identify with His human creatures by becoming one of us! This incarnation is the salvation of humanity, for by taking on Himself all that is human, Christ our heals our fallen humanity by reuniting it to divinity. God shares in all that is human (except for sin), in order to restore humanity to its divine purpose. Christmas is thus the feast of God uniting Himself to us humans for our salvation.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“We serve one another because we know that the world is full of pain and suffering caused by sin. We serve one another because we would hope that if the roles and circumstances were reversed we would also want others to serve us. But most of all we serve one another because Christ taught us how to serve one another fully. He showed us what it is to be a human by the way that He served and gave of Himself even to the point of death. This is our calling, difficult as it may be. We incarnate the life of Christ by dying to ourselves knowing that God sees our daily sacrifice and pours out grace upon us to multiply and bless our work.” (Fr. James Guirguis)

“Christ’s behavior towards people wasn’t monolithic. He reacted in a variety of ways. In any case, He became incarnate, was made manifest to people and revealed His wisdom with the aim of ‘presenting His life as a model to be imitated’, as Saint Gregory Palamas puts it. The way He acted depended on the particular case. He didn’t behave diplomatically or out of self-interest but always with a view to the salvation of the person concerned.” (Metropolitan Ioïl Frangkakos)

“We put the fruit of the spirit into practice only in and through our bodies. Our bodies were created to be united to God, to be bearers of God. As Christians united to Christ, we become one with Him, not only spiritually, but in His resurrected flesh which is spiritual. In the incarnation, Christ assumed our flesh in order to save it. In ascending to heaven bodily, Christ shows our flesh to be spiritual, created for life in heaven. We work out our salvation in and through our bodies, not apart from them. Spirituality involves our bodies. To be spiritual, we humans have to use our bodies for spiritual purposes. We will not be spiritual by ignoring our bodies or trying to escape from them. We become spiritual by transforming our bodies into temples of the Holy Spirit.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“That primary saving reality, our common nature and its communion with the God/Man, is something that has largely been lost in our modern understanding, dominated as it is by the myth of individualism. Christ’s incarnation is only effective if our humanity has a corporate reality (it would make little sense otherwise). It was classically summed up in the fathers by saying, “He became what we are that we might become what He is.” This is only possible if there is, in fact, a “what” that we all share. This “what” makes possible not only our communion with Him, but also our communion with each other.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“We must understand, however, that the result belongs to God’s grace. Ours is the will and effort. The struggle is no longer exhausting nor without joy. Once you start to want to change and to become a ‘little Christ’, living his life, then joy and freedom begin to burgeon tangibly within you. Then this sweetness fills your existence and becomes an incentive for further progress. Our life isn’t just our failures, our lapses, our dysfunctionality. It’s also what gives us beauty, completeness, meaning and delight: repentance, forgiveness, goodness and self-sacrifice, humility and openness of heart. All the things that Christ bestows on those who want to live his life and who strive to do so.” (Fr. Andreas Agathokleous)

“The Incarnation, it was said, is an act of identification and sharing. God saves us by identifying Himself with us, by knowing our human experience from the inside. The Cross signifies, in the most dark and uncompromising manner, that this act of sharing is carried to the utmost limits. God Incarnate enters into all our experience. Jesus Christ our companion shares not only in the fullness of human life but also in the fullness of human death. ‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows‘ (Isaiah 53:4) – all our griefs, all our sorrows. ‘The unassumed is unhealed’: but Christ our healer has assumed into Himself everything, even death.” (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware)

“The Birth of Christ acquires meaning as an existential fact for each of us in our particularity and uniqueness, in our own personal concern and in our anxiety and fear about our elimination and our hope for life. If the ‘sun of righteousness’ doesn’t rise in the soul of each of us, we’re wasting our time expecting the enlightenment of humankind in general. If salvation doesn’t become a personal event for each of us, there’s no point in wondering and complaining about the general prevalence of hatred, crime and warfare. And if the Birth of Christ is no more than an important, but distant historical event or an emotionally moving feast of the Church, rather than a reality within each of us, it’s meaningless to seek any obvious consequences deriving from it.” (Ioannis Karavidopoulos)

“With His incarnation, His humanization, God entered the innermost core of our lives in the most obvious way. He entered our circulatory system, our heart, the center of everything, the center of the universe. After He’d been expelled from our world, our body and our soul through our voluntary sin, He returned, through His incarnation, to our world, our body and our soul, becoming completely human and working for us as a human being. He dwells in the world, and from the creation provides for the creation, sanctifying, saving, transforming it. The incarnation of God is the most earth-shattering event and the most radical upheaval on the earthly world and on all other worlds, because through it the wonder of wonders became reality. If, until then, the creation of the world from nothing was the greatest miracle, God’s incarnation as a human being surpasses its miraculousness. Then, at the creation of the world, the words of God were clothed in matter. Now, at the incarnation, God Himself is clothed in matter, the flesh. This is precisely the reason why God’s incarnation is the most momentous event in all worlds, for each person, for each being, for everything created.” (Alexandros Christodoulou)

“In the incarnation, God the Word became flesh, or to put it in other words, God became that which is ‘not God.’ This action of God is our salvation, for what God’s plan is, that mystery revealed in Christ, is the reunion of God with His human creatures. Jesus Christ is God incarnate. In the Ascension, Christ shows that our human flesh is fully united to the heavenly realm. Our humanity has become deified in its union with God in Christ.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh) 

“The scandal of the Incarnation, God-becoming-man, is the seeming contradiction of the utterly transcendent God and the particularity and limits of human existence. It is a scandal whose errors run in two directions. First, there is an assumption that God is so displeased with sin that He can have nothing to do with it, or that sin somehow nullifies the work of God. Second, there is an equally odious belief that human beings, in their observance of the commandments, are never righteous enough to actually be compatible with true holiness. The first is an error about God, the second an error about human beings.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“Another reason for the dullness of mind is the over-familiarity that breeds complacency. It is possible to go from one Christmas to the next without growing in our understanding of the incarnation of the Son of God. In that case, our mind is like a knife that keeps cutting the same thing until it loses its edge. The remedy for this loss of sharpness is not a novelty. Rather, we should pay more attention to what is sung, prayed, and proclaimed and probe more deeply into its meaning.” (Fr. Basil)

“And who is this Son of God? We have already said many things about Him, but here is a summary of who He is: He is both divine and human, both fully God and fully man. He is the second Person of the Holy Trinity, which consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is human in every way yet without sin. He is one divine Person in two natures—divine and human. With the Incarnation—a word that means “taking on flesh,” indicating that God has now truly become man—humanity is now joined to God.” (Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick)

“When this salvation, theosis [union with God], is presented to Abraham in Genesis 15, it is not a new development. Rather, it represents the purpose for which humanity was originally created. It is the destiny of humanity, created a little lower than the angels but crowned with glory and honor, to surpass the angelic hosts through Christ’s incarnation (Ps 8:1-5; Heb 2:7-9).” (Fr. Stephen De Young)

“…salvation is our being united to God, already in the incarnation of the Word salvation has begun for us. Salvation is not just from Christ’s death on the cross, but because it was the incarnate God who died on the cross, His resurrection is the way to our salvation for it eliminates all the obstacles to our union with God (namely, death or our mortality). So not only in the Christmas Feast, but also in the Annunciation and even in the birth of the Theotokos [Mary], we humans see God working out our salvation—establishing the very way to our union with God. So, the Nativity of Christ is also the Feast of our Salvation: Paradise is open to us again and we celebrate this grand re-opening at every Feast of Christ or the Theototkos.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“We tend to think in linear, historical terms, beginning with God having brought creation into being, followed by the first human beings, Adam and Eve, using their God-given freedom against their creator and so plunging the world into sin and mortality, a condition in which it languished while the work of salvation was gradually being prepared, culminating in the Incarnation of Christ. If, in this perspective, we affirm the unity of creation and salvation, it would be in the sense of the whole of creation being saved, or as the distinct events of creation and salvation both being fitted together into one salvation history under the control of the one God.” (Fr. John Behr)

“The uncreated Son of God will assume created human flesh, restoring the relationship with Him that mankind lost as a result of the Fall (see Rom 8:19–23). The whole world shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord…through the incarnation, God and humanity are reconciled and communion is restored not according to a substitutionary formula or measure of infinite satisfaction for sin in God’s mind but by the power of divine love, first in Christ the God-man and second in the creature…In the Incarnation, God did not come in appearance only; He truly assumed flesh and blood from the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and became the same as we are so that He could truly enter death and bring us salvation. Christ destroyed the devil's power by using the devil's strongest weapon—death itself.” (Orthodox Study Bible, Isaiah 11:6-9, Vigen Guroian, Orthodox Study Bible, Hebrews 2:14)

“He is born to free us all from the various forms of slavery, sickness, and corruption that mar the beauty of our souls. He was born in a time and place of violence and hatred, with His life at risk even as a small child from a jealous and bloodthirsty ruler. He lived in a world where people of different religions, political affiliations, and ethnic backgrounds despised and tried to kill one another. Purely out of love, the Savior entered fully into our corruption in order to heal us, even to the point of offering Himself on the Cross in order to liberate us from death by His glorious resurrection on the third day.” (Fr. Philip LeMasters)

“The angel of the Lord first reveals Jesus as “Savior.” Ordinarily, we reserve this term for someone who saves us from danger, destruction, or death. By “saving,” we mean actions that preserve us physically, such as rescue from flood, fire, or mortal wounds. However, being saved in this present life has its limits. Like Lazarus, we will eventually die, for reprieve is only temporary. Universal death is merely forestalled by earthly saviors, for they too are mortal. The birth of Christ the Savior, however, illumines our greatest salvation. God assumes human flesh and shows other saving acts to be nothing but antitypes….He is the prototype of all saviors, for “in Christ all shall be made alive.” (Dynamis 12/24/2020)

“…we may suspect that the incarnation, the joining of God with man, was always in the plan, and not simply a response to the ancestral sin.” (Edith M. Humphrey)

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation…“The distinction between the divine and the human, the sacred and the profane—the former being viewed a superior to the latter—is not valid in the Christianity of the New Testament…the creation and then the incarnation witness to one reality All things are made by God, humans beings reflect God’s image and likeness. The Spirit of God is present and active everywhere in the world. Everything that is, is holy…Jesus is the face of God. God entered creation, became part of, subject to time and space in the incarnation. Jesus then shares everything we have in this world and life except sin.” (Madeleine L'Engle, Father Michael Plekon)

“The Incarnation tells us of the paradox of two natures: of divine love and human love mixed in one vessel, contained in one human being. The Incarnation says that God became Man; and the Incarnate God, Christ, was both fully human and fully divine.” (Robert A. Johnson)

“The doctrine of the incarnation is very hard to receive…, that this God who surpasses all understanding and baffles all calculation, having passed by angels, archangels, and all the spiritual powers above, deigned to become human, and to take flesh formed of earth and clay, and enter the womb of a virgin and be borne there for nine months, be nourished with milk, and suffer all those things to which human beings are liable.” (St. John Chrysostom)

“You and I have been trained by our culture to not believe in the supernatural. As we saw earlier, as a Jewish woman, Mary had been trained by her culture to not believe that God could ever become a human being. So, though they are different, the barriers she faced against belief in the Christmas message were every bit as big as the barriers you may be facing.” (Pastor Timothy Keller)

“I consider it both a strange mystery and a settled matter of the faith that God prefers not to do things alone. Repeatedly, He acts in a manner that involves the actions of others when it would seem, He could have acted alone. Why would God reveal His Word to the world through the agency of men? Why would He bother to use writing? Why not simply communicate directly with people? Why speak to Moses in a burning bush? Why did the Incarnation involve Mary? Could He not have simply become man, whole, complete, adult, in a single moment?” (Father Stephen Freeman)

“With His Incarnation everything entered a new phase. The Word arranged His coming in the flesh in a unique way, so that He might win back to God that human nature which had departed from God.” (St. Irenaus)

“What had once been seen as an unbridgeable gulf between the divinity and humankind had, for Christians, been bridged by the Incarnation of the eternal Word of God made flesh. This not only bridged the gulf between the divinity and humankind. It also made God’s saving dispensation a permanent reality.” (Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ)

“Through the incarnation we a see a God full of love and compassion for His creation, one who taught us how to love and be compassionate to others; one who unites Godself with us so that humans can go beyond what we are capable of; in the Incarnation we have a God who came to lead us to God, to an intimate union with God.” (Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou)

“God's original intent for the Incarnation was not redemption from the Fall but adoption as sons of God...For when God contemplated creating the world, He planned on bringing it into union with Himself through the Incarnation of His Son, that is, through the Son's union with human nature." (Orthodox Study Bible, Ephesians 1:4-6)

“Without the incarnation, for example, Jesus could not have become human...It means that God is not remote—He is truly with us.” (Pastor Timothy Keller)

“The Church is the extension of the incarnation, the place where the Incarnation perpetuates itself.” (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware)

"The beauty of human myth reflects the transcendental beauty, while the Incarnation embodies this beauty, for Christ is the absolute Beauty of God." (Lisa Coutras)

“…belief in the incarnation of God in the man Jesus…is not an easy one to affirm… The incarnation, the idea of God becoming human was, and is not an easy thing to grasp…In the Incarnation we don’t simply see a God who became man, we see a God who emptied Godself for us…Through the incarnation we a see a God full of love and compassion for His creation, one who taught us how to love and be compassionate to others; one who unites Godself with us so that humans can go beyond what we are capable of; in the Incarnation we have a God who came to lead us to God, to an intimate union with God. Without the incarnation we don’t have any of this.” (Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou)

"...because of the Incarnation, humanity has the ability to once again grow in relationship with God. However, still possessing free will, individuals can also choose a different path - to remain separated from God...we are all called to draw near to God through Jesus.” (Deacon and Fellow Pilgrim, Foundation Study Bible, Exodus 24:12)

“Christianity is not a highly refined “spiritual” religion...The Incarnation has changed forever the spiritual state not just of Christians, nor just of humans, but of all creation. The physical world then, including our bodies, is not a barrier to the grace of God but rather a vehicle for it.” (Archpriest Lawrence Cross)

“The scandal of the Incarnation, God-becoming-man, is the seeming contradiction of the utterly transcendent God and the particularity and limits of human existence. It is a scandal whose errors run in two directions. First, there is an assumption that God is so displeased with sin that He can have nothing to do with it, or that sin somehow nullifies the work of God. Second, there is an equally odious belief that human beings, in their observance of the commandments, are ever righteous enough to actually be compatible with true holiness. The first is an error about God, the second an error about human beings.” (Father Stephen Freeman)

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