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Homily
Preached January 2, 2020 by Fr. Cassian
Throughout the Christmas season we are confronted with the mystery of God incarnate, God taking flesh in a man who is both fully human and fully divine.
What was it like for Jesus, to be both ordinary and extraordinary, to be fully human and fully divine? Psalms tell us that human knowledge is vastly limited in relation to God’s knowledge and Jesus was fully human.
Being fully human, his intelligence would change in relation to experience, accommodating to things and people in the world, making sense of the world with terms supplied by the language of his time and place, reaching certain limits beyond which he could not go.
At the same time he is fully divine, God from God, light from light, true God from true God.
His human intelligence is part of that humiliation Paul articulates in his letter to the Philippians: not only is he humiliated to the point of death on a cross, but he is also humiliated to the limits of a human mind.
How can these two natures fit together without confusion, yet still be distinct? It is a mystery, about which I can only wonder, knowing nothing. And, wondering, I use my own experience to guess at what Jesus experienced.
All of us have a connection with God. Some of us are more aware and alert to it than others. We all receive grace, some of which we discern accurately and choose to follow as closely as we are able; some of which we are completely unaware; some of which we misinterpret drastically to find ourselves wandering away from God’s will. Yet, no matter how we understand and respond, we are assured of a connection to the divine.
Jesus, too, as someone fully human, had this connection. However, I suspect that, in his case, the connection was surer, clearer, and more insistent than mine. He, in all humility, was able to respond sensitively, accurately and completely to divine promptings.
Jesus’s divine nature, hinted at by angels, flowed within the normal course of a human life. He was a man, alive to the world, interacting with all around him, maturing within human limits and responding with docility to the fullness of divinity within.
