The Incarnation: the Divine Beauty of Christmas

By Michele Grantham

Imagine you are God. You do not want to overwhelm us with Your power and glory; rather You want us to love You and know You. You want us to grow through every stage of our own lives with You. Thus, God came as a baby so we could know Him and love Him through His own human experience. How else do we really learn about a person than if we know them their whole life? Jesus was announced at His conception, and we know Him from this very instant. He physically entered the temporal world. We know Jesus’ family, His adventures and His friends. We know Him until He dies. And more significantly, we know Him in His Resurrection and life after death.

This article contemplates the beauty of Christmas, and the gift of Jesus for our salvation. St. Bonaventure says, “In Jesus we contemplate beauty and splendor at their source.” But what is beauty? One’s first thought is to think of beauty as a physical manifestation — such as a beautiful woman or a spectacular sunset. One thinks of beauty in relation to the senses — for example, perceived through sight, hearing, or even touch. One might experience a Bach sonata, or the Catalina Mountains covered in snow. However, beauty is more than mere aestheticism; more than qualities such as form, proportion, or color. When we experience beauty, we perceive and relate to the transcendent. Beauty delights us and makes us long for higher things, and ultimately to our vocation to love.

Pope Saint John Paul II said when “a person meets up with beauty, that beauty points to some good and causes that good to become attractive...” God came to us in humility as a beautiful and vulnerable baby, through the assent of His Blessed Mother saying “yes” to God. The Nativity narrative in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke show us the transcendental beauty of this great event signaling our salvation. When Jesus is born into our world, when the Word becomes flesh, this event literally divides time — we speak of the time before Christ and the time after Christ. The incarnation — God made flesh — is a concrete way we experience God’s love for us. The beauty of infant Jesus delights us and draws us to Himself and thus into the divine love of the Holy Trinity.

Beauty is both orderly and surprising. Order means that something acts properly according to how and why it is created. Surprise, more difficult to understand in relation to beauty, is its unexpected nature. Beauty produces a sense of wonderment– it is order presented as something new. St. Augustine, describing God, says “Beauty ever ancient, ever new.” Jesus says: “Behold, I make all things new.” [Rev 21:5]

On pondering the events of Christmas more than two thousand year ago, the beauty of Christmas is a surprise: Jesus was born in a barn. The newborn was swaddled and laid in an animal feeding trough. It was dark and cold. We would not expect this humble entry into our world. We would have thought that Jesus would have been born as a worldly king or a great military leader or perhaps just appeared as a fully grown man. Instead, we are surprised by Jesus being born to a humble mother and foster father born in a stable. Thus, the beauty of the Christmas Nativity is one of both order and surprise.

St. Bonaventure says, “In Jesus we contemplate beauty and splendor at their source.” What is this splendor that St. Bonaventure describes? As we contemplate the beauty of Jesus in the manger, we need to also contemplate the splendor of Jesus in the second person of the Holy Trinity. God is a Trinity — God the Father, God the Son & God the Holy Spirit — that is three distinct and divine persons in one nature. Pope St. John Paul II describes the Trinity as the Father who loves the Son and the Son who loves the Father and the Holy Spirit as the love between them. The beauty of the infant Jesus delights us and draws us to Himself and into the divine love of the Holy Trinity.

Jesus lived a human life, but He carried with Him the whole divine life of the Trinity. Jesus spoke of and prayed with the Father and ministered in the power of the Holy Spirit. The splendor at the source we are speaking of is this innermost life of God — an explosion of love — in the real person of Jesus born in Bethlehem.

We often hear that Jesus came to save us from our sins and from death. It is true that Jesus came to restore our humanity through forgiveness and redemption. But he also came to invite us to participate in the divine life of the Trinity — to the beauty and splendor St. Bonaventure describes. The Lord Jesus came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly [Jn.10:10]. 

We are called to participate in God’s life and become divine like Jesus. We hear the priest say at the Christmas Mass, "Oh God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself share in our humanity.” Our salvation consists in sharing God’s divine qualities, a sharing in God’s life.

What are these qualities that we are invited to participate in? Let us look at Mary and Joseph, the two closest humans to Jesus. Mary said yes to God allowing her whole self, body, and soul, to be the bearer of Christ. Her “yes”, her receptivity and generosity brought the beauty of the incarnation to all the world. She embraced being a mother to Jesus despite knowing it would be difficult. Joseph was entirely obedient to God. He trusted in God’s providence in silence.  He was a noble man, who worked for and protected his family, always listening to God and obeying his commandments. He knew his purpose was to love and protect Jesus and Mary so that the world would know them.

When we attend Mass and receive the Eucharist we participate in the beauty and splendor of God with the angels and saints. When we receive the true flesh of Christ, we become one substance with God. Jesus transmits something of His divine life into our very souls. St. Paul says, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?” [1 Cor 3:16]

When we practice the virtues and avoid sin, when we live our lives according to God’s design for the human person, we become adopted sons and daughters who share in the divine life of the Trinity. 

When we worship God acknowledging His authority over our lives, we gain interior peace.  Allowing the incarnate God to encounter us, live in us, and penetrate us, fulfills our humanity, each of us individually and wonderfully made by God for His purpose. To achieve this is not an exercise in conformity robbing us of our individuality; instead, it is enables us to become fully human and fully alive as children of God. Catherine of Sienna says, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on Fire!”

This Christmas Season, remember the words of St. Bonaventure and in the birth of Jesus may you contemplate the Author of all beauty and splendor at its very source.