The Logic of the Incarnation Gives Us the Church
21st Sunday of the Year
Imagine the situation after the Fall: the freedom that human beings had been given was used to fracture God’s design for creation. The world was broken. Human beings were broken. If God did nothing, allowed the sin and the brokenness to continue forever, then it would seem as though had had no power. He could create the world, sure, but he can’t fix it, save it, redeem it.
But God is all-powerful (and all-loving), so he wants to do something to fix the world, to save the world. What should he do?
Maybe he could snap his fingers or count to three, and then, suddenly, in an instant, there would be no more sin, no more brokenness. God is absolutely that powerful. He could have started over with the project of creation, give it a second chance, just erase what existed and gone back to the drawing board. Or he could have decided to hit the rewind button and return to the beginning, clean up the mess a little, and give human beings one more shot at getting things right.
But for God to start over or hit rewind would have violated the freedom he gave to human beings. He would have been saying, “Look, I gave you this gift, but you abused it, so now I’m going to take it away from you, and you don’t get to use it any longer.” Well, what would be the point of giving human beings freedom if you’re just going to take it away as soon as freedom is misused? You can’t really have freedom unless you risk the consequences that come from misusing it, and God knows that truth as well as we do.
Maybe, instead of hitting rewind or starting over, God could have built some kind of a ladder, something that goes really high into the sky, something very hard to climb, and told human beings that anyone who wants to get to God and escape from the broken world needs to climb the ladder, claw themselves away from the sin. Most people might not go to the effort of climbing, but some would, and then they could be saved. Lots of pagan religions over the centuries thought along these lines: climb a mountain, climb a pyramid, climb a ziggurat, go get closer to some god and away from the world.
But for God to give human beings a ladder to climb is not for God to fix a broken world, to repair the damage caused by sin. The human beings who got to the top of the ladder would still be wounded, weak, disordered, while the world below them would still be shattered by violence and corruption. So, no plan to build a ladder would be good enough to fix the problem.
Maybe, instead of starting over or building a ladder, God could have given human beings a long list of rules to follow, rules about everything: family life, social life, even rules about how to worship, giving instructions to human beings about how to pray and what to sacrifice. Any human being who followed the rules would get saved. The Jewish people believe something along these lines, thinking that the law God gave Moses gives us a straight shot to salvation.
But for God to give human beings a list of rules to follow is meaningless unless he gives us the ability to follow the rules. And the problem is that broken, disordered creatures just aren’t going to do so well with following rules. Again, we get back to the problem of woundedness: human beings don’t need a way to navigate around the wounds of sin; human beings need the wounds healed; the sin needs to go. Whatever salvation looks like, it needs to get us back to where we started—free from sin, free from corruption, free from death, free from the law. No list of rules is going to make the sin go away.
So, what should God do?
We know the answer: God becomes a human being. He makes the choice to enter the life of the world he created, to become a fellow victim of its brokenness and disorder. The plan makes a lot of sense. If God becomes a human being, lives a real human life, claims our sin for himself, and then dies for us in an act of sacrifice, well, now we are getting back to the beginning, getting freed from sin, without violating the reality of human freedom. Christ wipes the slate clean, he settles the score, he atones on our behalf, and then for anyone who wants to follow him and live like him and rest in the eternal love of the Father, the way is now open to us to live that kind of life. You don’t need to follow Christ. God isn’t going to snap his fingers and make you a disciple. You still have freedom. But if you want to follow Christ, live like God, the way is now open to you.
What we are talking about is the logic of the Incarnation. What do I mean? I mean that God makes the choice to fix the world, save it, redeem it, by binding himself even more deeply to the life of the world he created. He doesn’t erase the world and start over. He doesn’t leave the world and human beings to live forever in sin and brokenness. He doesn’t destroy the gift of human freedom. He heals the wounds of sin by using creation to redeem creation. God works through creation to do the work of redemption.
The story of salvation history is the story of God working more and more through creation to prepare the world for the coming of Christ. God uses patriarchs and prophets to speak for him. He lets the truth of his perfect life get captured in the imperfection of human language. He gives us laws that paint an image-in-negative of what a good human life will look like. God has chosen to communicate his truth and his life to us through the mediation of human beings, and Christ is the ultimate, final, absolute point of divine-human mediation. The logic of the Incarnation is the way that God accomplishes the work of salvation, binding his life to the very creatures whose primal act of disobedience broke the world he created.
What I want you to see is that what happens outside of Caesarea Philippi in the Gospel today is an extension of the logic of the Incarnation. Christ—who is God living a real human life—gives to St. Peter a Church that is his Mystical Body, entrusting the future work of salvation to weak and limited human beings. A person baptized into the Church is incorporated into the Body of Christ. Do you see the continuity? The Incarnation is the moment at which God assumes for himself a human life, claims for himself a human body, and the mystery of the Church is that God then leaves that body in our hands. We get to become a part of the body of the Incarnate Christ, and to live as a member of the Body of Christ is salvation.
I’m not going to turn this homily into some kind of moral or spiritual instruction on how to live a better life. When we talk about the Church today, we usually focus on scandals or controversies or disagreements about truth and teaching. Hold those conversations for tomorrow. What I want is for you to see today the deep continuity of the logic of God, to see with the grace of spiritual vision that the mystery of the Incarnation and the mystery of the Church go hand-in-hand.
What I want to say is that more and more in the world today, almost by default, we have disconnected the mystery of the Church from the mystery of Christ, and the consequence is that many of us, at least some of the time, become far too casual in our relationship with the Church. Maybe we pick our spots when it comes to Church teaching. Maybe we pick our spots when it comes to Church history. Maybe we live with some kind of persistent cognitive dissonance, thinking that we love Christ while seeing in the Church only scandal and corruption and a broken human institution that needs to go, or change, or at least become less relevant. Maybe we tell ourselves we love Christ most of all while letting other parts of life—politics, family life, sports, careers—become far more important to us than the Church, even framing the way we live in relationship with the Church.
What matters the most, I think, is our attitude toward the Church and our vision of the Church—not the minute details of whatever scandal or controversy in the life of the Church consume our minds at any given moment. The Church that Christ entrusts to Peter outside of Caesarea Philippi is his Mystical Body. The logic of the Incarnation is the logic by which God accomplishes the work of salvation, and the logic of the Incarnation is the same logic that gives us the gift of the Church. There is no denying the Church without denying Christ. There is no rejection of the Church without rejecting Christ. There is no wounding the Church without wounding Christ. To be casual with the Church is to be casual with Christ. To take the Church for granted is to take Christ for granted.
I am convinced that if more people saw in the Church the logic of God at work, the mystery of the Incarnation made visible to our finite human eyes, then there would be less scandal, less corruption, more unity, more charity, more truth, more people living good Christian lives.
Homily preached on Sunday, August 27th, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary