Why Did God Become Man?
By Protopresbyter Fr. George Metallinos
By Protopresbyter Fr. George Metallinos
Wearied by the many celebrations that have degenerated into the mere formal fulfillment of social conventions, modern man approaches Christmas as well without any inner engagement. Most people — even those who are otherwise religious — see Christmas as a large family celebration that offers an opportunity for the scattered family to gather again around the Christ of the manger and the Christmas tree, which has also been taken out of storage to decorate a corner of our home for a few days. Yet today each of us is called to pose the question to himself: What does Christmas mean to me? This is the personalization of the broader question: “Why did God become man?” — a question that has occupied the greatest minds in history.
“…that we might receive adoption as sons”
Christmas is the birth of the Eternal God from a human being, a Mother — the Most Holy Theotokos — and the entry of the God-man into history. What the wise of this world could not even approach with their imagination became reality at a specific moment in time. The Uncreated God becomes “what He was not” for our salvation. He whom the universe cannot contain is “contained in a womb.” The infinite God voluntarily limits Himself within the human nature He took from the All-Pure Theotokos. In the language of our Holy Fathers this is called condescension (synkatavasis). God condescends. He who is beyond all measure and magnitude becomes small. He who is incomprehensible to every sense becomes perceptible, tangible, and visible. Why? In order to commune with us. God translates Himself into our own language so that we might be able to receive Him and understand Him. If He spoke to us in the heavenly language, we would not be able to believe Him; therefore He speaks our own, earthly language (John 3:12). Thus God Himself accomplishes what man failed to achieve.
Man was created “according to the image” of Christ. His model — his archetype — was Christ as the God-man. Toward this archetype man was meant to ascend: to be purified and to love God so much that God would come to dwell within him and the God-man would be revealed in history. Deviation from this path constituted the fall of man. The love of God heals man’s failure. “When the appointed time — determined by God — of the economy of the Incarnation came,” “God sent forth His Son.” That is to say, God Himself came “of His own initiative,” as the poet of the Akathist Hymn aptly says, in order to “redeem us” from the curse of the Law and grant us adoption as sons. The incarnate God was born “under the Law,” was circumcised, and did everything required by the Old Testament Law, fulfilling it entirely (Matt. 5:17), while remaining free from all sin. Thus the Lord remained outside the curse of the Law, which says: “Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all the words of the Law, to do them” (Deut. 27:26). He therefore fulfilled the entire Law, redeeming us from its curse, since we were never able to keep all its commandments. And by freeing us from the curse of the Law and uniting us to Himself through holy Baptism, He grants us adoption, making us sons of God by grace. Our adoption, therefore — our union with Christ, our deification — is the purpose of His Incarnation. This is the sole “destiny” of man, the unique purpose of our life.
The Foundation of our Salvation
Through His incarnation “by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,” Christ was born free from all the consequences of sin — pain and death. Yet just as God became incarnate out of love for mankind, so out of love He also accepted the consequences of our own sin — pain and death. He assumed the entirety of human reality, except for sin itself. He did this in order to crush our sin and its consequences, even death, within His own human nature. For this reason Christ accepted the Passion of the Cross. For this reason, bearing our sins, He descended even into Hades. He descended to the very lowest step of our fall in order to put our sin to death on His Cross, to bury it in the depths of Hades, and to raise human nature purified and illumined, lifting it up to the Kingdom of the Triune God through His Ascension. This is why Orthodoxy does not limit itself to the emotionalism evoked by the Cross and the Passion of Christ, as often happens outside it. For the foundation of our salvation is the Incarnation of the Divine Word. Without the Incarnation and Christmas, the Crucifixion of Christ, His Death, and His Resurrection are inconceivable. Saint Maximus the Confessor says that the Incarnation of the Word of God is “the blessed end for which all things were made.” That is, all creation came into being for the Incarnation, since the deification of man and the sanctification of the world are the sole purpose of creation.
Participation in Salvation
Through His Incarnation, the Divine Word united within His Person the created with the uncreated, God with man. Yet what occurred in the individual human nature of Christ also occurs in each of us. Through His Incarnation, Christ united all of us to Himself. Through our Baptism, we participate in the event of the Incarnation; we are grafted into the deified human nature of Christ, so that we may be buried (die) with Him and rise with Him. But for our salvation to be complete, our personal identity — our “self,” our will — must also be united with Christ. This happens when we are purified from our passions and allow the Holy Spirit to dwell within us. This is what the Apostle Paul reminds us of today. The proof that we have been deemed worthy to become sons of God, he says, is the presence of the Holy Spirit within us, who prays in our hearts (Gal. 4:6). This is the “noetic prayer” or “prayer of the heart” of which our Holy Fathers speak. Through the grace and cooperation of the Holy Spirit we remain united with Christ, and our entire life is sanctified. By the grace of the Holy Spirit we participate in salvation in Christ — we are saved, we are deified. The life of the Church is the continuous struggle of the faithful to remain within the grace of God, to have the Holy Spirit dwelling within them, so that our entire life — both personal and social — may be sanctified, and our whole life may be transformed into the life of Christ.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.