Posted on 12/18/2022 4:00:08 PM PST by MurphsLaw
Today's 4th Sunday of Advent readings highlight the Promise of Salvation history
whereby God becomes fully human
for the necessary redemption of his creation.
Fear Not.
13 min. YouTube video link below:
Friends, the Gospel for today presents Matthew’s version of the Incarnation.
The central claim of Christianity—still startling after two thousand years—
is that God became human.
The creator of the cosmos, who transcends any definition or concept,
took to himself a nature like ours, becoming one of us.
Christianity asserts that the infinite and the finite met,
that the eternal and the temporal embraced, that the fashioner of the galaxies
and planets became a baby too weak even to raise his head.
And to make the humor even more pointed,
this incarnation of God was first made manifest not in Rome,
Athens, or Babylon, not in a great cultural or political capital,
but in Bethlehem of Judea,
a tiny outpost in the corner of the Roman Empire.
One might laugh derisively at this joke—
as many have over the centuries—but, as G.K. Chesterton observed,
the heart of even the most skeptical person is changed simply for having heard this message.
Christian believers up and down the years are those who have laughed with delight at this sacred joke
and have never tired of hearing it repeated.
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