Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

“image”], as Adam was in his innocence before the Fall, but in the sense of the completely realized “likeness.”The Incarnation, then, is not simply a way of undoing the effects of original sin, but it is an essential stage upon man’s journey from the divine image to the divine likeness…and so, from the very first moment of man’s creation in the image, the Incarnation was in some way already implied. The claim of Thomists such as Woroniecki, therefore, that this somehow implies that God’s Mercy was not the chief motive of the Incarnation“ is surely false.According to St. Thomas, God’s Mercy is His love operative “ad extra” to meet the needs and overcome the miseries of His creatures; therefore the Incarnation of the Word, even in an unfallen world, might still have been needed mercifully to lift mankind from the “image” to the fulness of the “likeness” of God, a destiny which He had always intend- ed for us. Cf. Hyacinth Woroniecki, O.P., The Mystery of Divine Mercy (Stockbridge, MA: The Marian Fathers, 1959), 77. On the other hand, it must also be true to say that the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, especially in His Agony and Passion, reveals a depth of divine love that could not have been communicated to an unfallen world ( Catechism , no. 412). As Gerald Vann, O.P., put it in The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God (NewYork:Alba House, 1994), 78, 52: “Suppose the Incarnation without the fall: we should have known much of the love and the condescension of God, but we should not have known their full- ness…. Had there been no sin we should not have known that immense revelation of the depths of love which is the Cross.” 10 St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul (London: Burns and Oates, 1951), 183-184. 11 St. Thomas Aquinas, ST III, 34, 2-3. 12 Caryll Houselander, Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross: The Little Way of the Infant Jesus (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute, 1995) 53-56. 13 Bl. Josemaría Escrivá, The Way (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1985), no. 94, p. 42. 14 St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy , 37. St. Alphonsus here quotes St. Peter Chrysologus, whom he relies upon extensively. 15 Houselander, Wood of the Cradle , 29-36. 37 Saint Faustina and Devotion to the Christ Child