Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

made Himself known to us in the most direct and comprehensible way possible, by coming among us as one of us, and sharing our life, its heights and depths, its joys and sorrows.” 2 Whatever else may have happened to the world after that, it could only be aworking out of this pivotal miracle: the Incarnation, the enfleshment of God, the divine Son dwelling among us, to begin with, as a little child in a manger. 1. The Church Fathers and the Incarnation Historians of Christian doctrine are sometimes surprised to find that some of the ancient Church Fathers came very close to saying that the world was saved by the Incarnation alone, with the Cross and Resurrection of Christ just as a working out of secondary details of our salvation. On closer inspection, however, it seems that the Fathers in question — particularly St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Cyril of Alexandria — were trying to establish an underlying point. In essence, they were arguing that the Incarnation was not just a prerequisite or “set up” for important things that were to happen later, such as Christ’s saving Death and Resurrection. On the contrary, the mere fact that theWord became flesh and dwelt among us, assuming human nature in His divine Person — this fact alone, in and of itself, brought blessings to the human race . To be sure, these Fathers of the Church must have been partially constrained to develop such an understanding of the Incarnation by the philosophical presuppositions common in their day. For example, the patristics scholar J.N.D. Kelly noted: Athanasius’s language often suggests that he conceived of human nature, after the manner of Platonic realism, as a con- crete idea or universal inwhich all individual men participate. From this point of view, when the Word assumed flesh and suffused it with His divinity, the divinizing force would be communicated to all mankind, and the incarnation would in effect be the redemption. 3 21 Saint Faustina and Devotion to the Christ Child