A Divine Scandal
This weekend the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Corpus Christi—let's reflect on the beautiful audacity of our God.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be… // John 1:1-3
I never fail to be taken aback by the prologue of the Gospel of John—in just a few sentences, we receive such a rich, abundant, and intriguing picture of who God is: From the beginning, there is the Eternal Word, through Whom all things are made and Who is completely one with the Father. Together with the Spirit, this is the one, ineffable, Triune God: a creative and intimate dynamism of life and love.
Let’s keep reading: And the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth. // John 1:14
Wait, what? The Word, the Eternal Word, the second Person of the Trinity, Who is completely one with God the Father and through Whom all things are made, this Word became flesh? This Word dwelt among us??
The stellar opening of John’s Gospel forces us to gaze upon and seek to understand the depths of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. This Jesus—He is the Eternal Word, the second Person of the Trinity. He is with God, and He IS God, and He has come in the flesh. Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate. John wastes no time in telling us. And now we are tasked with reckoning with it.
How can we even begin to fathom the meaning of this? That God has become like His creation? That we who are made in the image and likeness of God can now behold that very God, Who has a human countenance? This is unheard of. It’s confounding.
Consider—all throughout salvation history, the people of God again and again begged the Lord for justice, for deliverance from every manner of oppression and evil. Even from their own unfaithfulness and idolatry. They knew they needed God to come to them, they knew they needed His saving power. “O, that You would rend heaven and come down, so that the mountains would quake at Your presence…” the prophet Isaiah cries out (Is 64:1). For generations upon generations, the coming of the all-powerful Lord of Hosts was awaited, longed for, and hoped in.
Well, heaven was indeed rent, as Isaiah pleaded, and God did indeed come down. But not in the way that we would suppose to be fitting and proper for the Almighty. There were no earthquakes, no thunder, no lightning. No mountains melting before Him, rocks splitting in two, battle cries, or pillars of fire. The coming of our God decidedly did not put on display His awesome and terrible power.
Instead, it put on display His audacity.
How so? Because He came as one of His creatures—He came incarnate. The Eternal Word took on flesh and blood, and in the womb of the Virgin became the weakest, smallest, most helpless of creatures: an unborn child. God’s becoming man was so humble, so hidden, so quiet. It is all but wholly unfathomable that He would do such a thing—that He would come to us in this way. But He does! He takes on flesh, willing to be totally dependent on His own creation, and enters entirely into human experience and human life.
Why? So that He can take upon Himself the consequences of human rebellion. He allows Himself—actually, He offers Himself up—to be mocked, tortured, and put to death. God allows Himself to be killed! Killed by His own creation. A divine scandal indeed!
Why?? Why does He do this? Because the wages of sin is death. We were all doomed to die. And so He came to set us free. Death has no power, no sting anymore.
What audacity our Lord has! To be the Source of all, the Creator of the universe, sustaining all things in being, and also to will Himself weak and small and vulnerable. We could never expect this. We cannot fathom that the all-powerful is also the all-meek; that He who IS allows Himself to be betrayed, arrested, beaten, and executed.
And yet, it is so.
And yet, the audacity of our God goes further still. The willingness of Jesus to be weak, to be small, to be vulnerable: it didn’t end on Calvary. Because now, every day, in every tabernacle in every chapel in the world, this Jesus, this Word-made-Flesh, this God Incarnate, He comes to us. He comes under the appearance of mere bread and wine.
This God of ours who humbles Himself in taking on flesh, an act of His will already so confounding to us, humbles Himself even further. He becomes so little, so vulnerable, so unassuming, that He can be forgotten. He can be ignored.
I think if we ponder this audacious mystery long enough, we might discover that we are indeed scandalized by this littleness of our God. Why? Perhaps, because we’d like to keep Him from getting too close to our own littleness.
We say, with a sort of indignation, no Lord! You are great and mighty and holy, and I am not. I am the small one, the weak one, the sinful one.
And the wild thing is, we are right! We are right about God. He is great, mighty, holy. More than that, He is omnipotent and omniscient: He knows all, sees all, has His hand over all. He is the one Necessary Being—truly, He is Being itself, and He holds all creation in existence.
We are right about ourselves, too: we are weak and small and sinful. We are in such dire need of help and healing. But we stop short of allowing our God to become near enough, vulnerable enough, humble enough, to meet us in that place of weakness and suffering and inadequacy. We say with Ahaz, “I will not ask! I will not tempt the Lord!” (Is 7:12).
Are we afraid to let our Lord be humble—to let Him be small? Are we afraid to allow Him the humility of station of tending to our wounds? Of seeing us at our messiest and most broken? Like Peter, do we cry, “you will never wash my feet!” (Jn 13:8)?
The audacity of God is that He wills His own weakness out of love for you. So desperately does He want you to share in His blessed Life for all time and eternity that He came in the flesh, born of a woman, born under the law, to free you from the shackles of sin and death. And He is the only one who can do so! Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me (Jn 13:8).
He comes to you every day, at every Mass, under the disguise of bread and wine, in all littleness and silence and humility, so that you will not be afraid to draw near, and to let Him draw near to you.
He takes on so lowly a form and risks our forgetting or (worse?) not caring that He is there, truly present in every tabernacle, all so that He can offer His very Life, His in-the-Flesh presence, to you.
God wills this truly divine scandal so that you just might take Him up on that offer.
And the most audacious, most beautiful act of all? He leaves the choice up to you.
For further reflection: Meditate with St. Thomas Aquinas’ profound and poetic Eucharistic hymn, Adoro Te Devote (in English, most often translated to Godhead Here in Hiding).
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I'm glad you've noticed this too! Christ's humility in coming to us in bread and wine is truly something to be in awe of. Even though he already resurrected, has been glorified, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father He is still humble. I still can't wrap my head around it.