Incarnation

See also: Christ, Messiah, Christianity, Parousia, Flesh, meaning.

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Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds - Bernardino Luini

The Church calls "Incarnation" the fact that the Son of God assumed a human nature to accomplish in it our salvation.

In "The Gospel as it was revealed to me"

• The Incarnation why and how: because the eternal Goodness has no limits in its goodness, before the fault occurred, It thought of the means to destroy it. The means: Me, the Word.
• My garden! What garden is more beautiful and worthy of God, of Heaven than the one whose flowers are the Angels that God has created? Yet no. It is another garden that the Only Son of the Father wanted, the Son of man, because for man, I clothed myself with flesh without which I could not redeem the faults of the flesh of man.
• I had been God. I had become Man. Now, triumphing over the animal joined to the human nature, here I was the Man-God.
• It is those who habitually deny the human phases of the life of Jesus, and make Me something so far outside human life that it is only a divine thing. Where then is the Most Holy Humanity, where the sacrifice of the Second Person by clothing Himself with flesh? Oh! Truly I was the Man among men.
• Why the Incarnation. 
• Why the Incarnation really had to take place?
• The true Father of Jesus, our Master, is the Most High whom we adore. He allowed His Divinity, One and Triune, to incarnate in the Second Person and to come to earth while remaining united to Those who dwell in Heaven. Because God can do it, He the infinitely Powerful, and He does it through Love which is His nature.  
• Why God incarnated Himself. How He thereby merited the Salvation of men.
• Who must the Christ be? An angel? More than an angel. A man? More than a man. A God? Yes, a God. But with flesh united to Him, to be able to accomplish the expiation of the guilty flesh. 
• It was necessary that I clothe myself with flesh to persuade man that, by willing it, man can be chaste and holy in every respect.
• I came to Earth to converse with men, I, the Word of the Father, to take by the hand the children of man, I, Son of God and of man, I, the Way of Life.
• The Goodness of God is before you. The Wisdom of God took a mouth to instruct you. It is no longer the prophets, O people of Israel, who speak to you of the Unnamable. It is He Himself. He, who knows the mystery that is God, who speaks to you of God. He, who knows the Thought of God, who brings you close to His bosom, O people still childlike after so many centuries, and who feeds you with the milk of the Wisdom of God to make you mature in God.
• I wanted to show you that one can live as I teach. To show you, I had to take a real flesh to be able to suffer the Temptations of man and say to man, after instructing him: "Do as I do".

In other works of Maria Valtorta

The Notebooks of 1943

• August 27 : "Like someone who wants to make something understood, I go straight to the most important thing, which is here my kingdom. For in the kingdom is the justification of my Incarnation and my Death. For in my kingdom is the proof of my infinite power, my goodness and my wisdom. For in the kingdom is the proof of eternal life, of the resurrection of the flesh, of my power as judge."
• September 4 : "The Crafty knew that the Word would be made flesh by a fusion of Spirit with Spirit, in a womb where no sin dwelt. No sin, I repeat. If, since Eve, he had succeeded in inducing into Temptation all the Women, he would have been sure that he would never be defeated by the eternal Victor.[…] the Light can descend where it can incarnate, and Christ is born mystically in you as He was really born in Mary".
• November 25 : "The Eternal who, in His most perfect charity, has accomplished for you the two loving wonders of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and of my Incarnation".
• December 6 : "I am still the same powerful and compassionate God. I am twice as much now that I am not only the Creator Father, but the Savior Son, now that the Third Person has engendered the miracle of the Incarnation of a God to make of Him the Expiatory Victim of all humanity".
• December 29 : "The Son of man, born of a Woman of a holy lineage, consecrated to me, who was conceived, by the will of the Holy Spirit, without carnal weight, but only by infusion of love, the one who was born of Mary without opening His virgin womb when born, just as at conception, no one violated that womb which was consecrated to me, your son by His Mother, O humanity, and my Son by His divine origin".

The Notebooks of 1944

• August 8 : "[Jesus] had, out of love for men, placed limits to those perfections incarnated in your misery at the same time as His spirit, so Good that it allowed them to grow According to the rules linked to human Age: He therefore progressed with measure by growing in wisdom and in Grace, as Son of man before the face of God his Father, and before men His sons, and now their brothers because of His Incarnation".

The Notebooks from 1945 to 1950

• From September to November 1950, Commentaries on the Apocalypse, Part 3/6 : "The Incarnation of the Word and the foundation of the Church will not be repeated".

In fundamental Christian texts

In the Bible

• "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen His glory, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• CEC 237 : The Holy Trinity constitutes a mystery inaccessible to reason alone and even to the faith of Israel before the Incarnation of the Son of God and the Mission of the Holy Spirit.
• CEC 258 : It is especially the divine Missions of the Incarnation of the Son and the gift of the Holy Spirit that manifest the properties of divine persons.
• CEC 309 : It is the whole Christian faith that constitutes the answer to the question of evil: … the patient love of God who comes forth to meet man by his Covenants, by the redeeming Incarnation of his Son, …
• CEC 333 : From the Incarnation to the Ascension, the life of the incarnate Word is surrounded by the adoration and service of Angels.
• CEC 461 and following: The Church calls "Incarnation" the fact that the Son of God assumed a human nature to accomplish in it our salvation.
• CEC 464 and following: Jesus truly became man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man.
• CEC 470 : How is the Son of God man?
• CEC 512 : The Symbol of faith speaks, concerning the life of Christ, only of the mysteries of the Incarnation (conception and birth) and of the Passover (passion, crucifixion, death, burial, descent into hell, resurrection, ascension).
• CEC 517 : The whole life of Christ is the mystery of Redemption. Redemption comes to us above all through the blood of the Cross, but this mystery is at work throughout the life of Christ: in His Incarnation already, by which, by becoming poor, He enriches us by his poverty...
• CEC 519 : Christ did not live His life for Himself, but for us, from His Incarnation "for us men and for our salvation" to His death "for our sins".
• CEC 521 : "By His Incarnation, the Son of God has in a way united Himself to every man." We are called to be one with Him; what He lived in His flesh for us and as our model, He makes us share as members of His Body.
• CEC 606 and following: Christ offered Himself to His Father for our sins.
• CEC 661 : Only the one who has "come from the Father" can "return to the Father".
• CEC 686 : The Holy Spirit works with the Father and the Son … But it is in the "last times", inaugurated with the redeeming Incarnation of the Son, that He is revealed and given, recognized and [Homeli] as Person.
• CEC 727 : The whole Mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the fullness of time is contained in the fact that the Son is the anointed of the Father's Spirit since His Incarnation.
• CEC 1159 : Formerly God who has neither body nor form could absolutely not be represented by an image. But now that He has made Himself seen in the flesh and has lived with men, I can make an image of what I have seen of God.
• CEC 2602 : He, the Word who "assumed the flesh", participates in His human prayer in all that "His brothers" live; He sympathizes with their weaknesses to free them from them. That is why the Father sent Him.
• CEC 2666 : The Name that contains all is the one that the Son of God receives in His Incarnation: Jesus.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).