Peace be to you.

You remember that in a previous instruction we said that our blessed Lord called himself both

son of God and son of man, that he was both God and man.

This is indeed a great mystery.

It is what is called, actually,

the mystery of the incarnation.

That word incarnation means

incarnay, in the flesh.

It means that God assumed a human nature,

that he was infleshed, as it were.

St. John has a very beautiful description of it.

He says the word became flesh.

The word means, of course, God, of the second person of the Blessed Trinity. This is a difficult mystery, and we are going to try to explain it with a number of examples.

When we say that God became man, we do not mean to say that heaven was

empty. That would be to think of heaven as a kind of a space like a room that was 20 by 30 feet.

When God came to this world, he did not leave heaven. like a room that was 20 by 30 feet.

When God came to this world, he did not leave heaven empty.

And when he came to this world, he was not shaved down. He was not whittled down to human proportions.

He was rather, Christ was the life of God dwelling in human flesh.

St. Thomas Aquinas has a very beautiful description of this in one of his hymns.

He said the heavenly word proceeding forth, yet leaving not the father's side.

Now let us begin with answering the question, why did God become man? We limit ourselves to the historical order in which we live.

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