The Incarnational Principle: Why Matter Matters

The picture above shows the moment when everything changed. When Mary gave her assent to the will of the Father by saying to the Angel Gabriel, “Let it be done according to your word”. At that moment God broke into time and space with a material form. The unborn Jesus was 100 percent human and 100 percent divine. We call it the Incarnation. Through it, our material world is blessed and called to a newness beyond anything we can imagine. 

When we break up the word, we can see the meaning embedded within… In-carna-tion or En-flesh-ment of God. When I look at it this way, I always remember that in spanish, carne is meat or steak. The root, carna is where we get the english word, carnal ( having to do with thee flesh).  This material that Jesus took unto himself, by becoming man, changed how we look at matter. Before the incarnation he existed as the eternal Word of God, purely spirit. 

“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…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”(Jn 1). 

Catholics believe the Word of God became matter (the human body is mostly H2o and Carbon) in the person of Jesus. Consequently, we believe that matter can become divine, sanctified, and a source of sacramental grace. This is called the Incarnational Principle. It is a foundation for Sacramental Theology. In the sacraments, and through the blessing of a priest, words, gestures, bread, wine, water, oil, and people all have the potential to be sanctified, consecrated and channels or instruments of grace.  

The Incarnational Principle (IP) is meaningful only because of the doctrine of the Fall. If this were still Eden (reality) then there would be no need for blessings over things since they would already be good. While matter, in the fallen world (sub-reality), may still retain the original goodness to a lesser degree, it only has the potential to be sanctified and therefore a part of what Jesus referred to as ‘new’, “Behold I make all things new”. There is an eschatological dimension to the IP as well. The Newness that Jesus refers to in the Book of Revelation is described as a New Heaven and a New Earth which is a new order (super-reality) that the resurrected Christ has revealed in his body.

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, the old order has passed away.” The one who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” Then he said, “Write these words down, for they are trustworthy and true” (Rev 21:1-5).

Jesus promised that we too would have a resurrected body. We talk about it every Sunday when we recite the Creed,  “We believe in the resurrection of the dead”. The word dead there is plural. What will we be like in this New Heaven and New Earth? We will be like the resurrected Christ who was able to emit light, change his appearance, bi-locate, levitate, eat food, touch and be touched, speak, appear and disappear. We will realize that while we were in our earthly, fallen bodies our five senses were very limted in what we were able to peceive. We will be unshackled from those limts as well as the limits of time and space. Pain, ignorance, inclination to sin and death will also pass away. In the New Heaven and New Earth, Christ is the great liberator and we will be finally free. 

We will have to the full is what all the sacraments currently can only give us partially. Now we have partial union with God, partial healing and wholeness, partial nourishment and fulfillment, partial knowledge and virtue. In the New Heaven and New Earth, a physical paradise, we will be complete and immersed in the love, light and beauty of God. The sacraments will cease, because what they were pointing to is what we will have in totality. 

What we are in store for will blow us away. But the key to attaining this super-reality is to begin living in Christ and participating in the divine life now in the sacraments. Stay in a state of grace and you will know that you are on the way to becoming sharers in the divinity of Christ. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 Jn 3:1).

“O marvelous exchange! Man’s Creator has become man, born of the Virgin. We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” —(Liturgy of the Hours, Antiphon I of Evening Prayer for Jan. 1)

At mass, what Jesus does to bread and wine through the priest, he desires to do for me and you. This may be why so many people doubt the Real Presence. In the end, it may have something to do with self-doubt.

Of course I'm not talking about becoming divine in the same measure that the Trinity is God, but when we are in the New Heaven and New Earth it will be as close as you can get. This change will involve our whole being, body and soul into something new.

The Eastern rite Catholics have a special name for this. It's called theosis. Theosis, or deification, is a transformative process whose aim is likeness to or union with God. Though he was not Roman Catholic, C.S. Lewis has a very good description of this Theosis process of sanctification...

“He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has – by what I call ‘good infection.’ Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else”

“The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him – for we can prevent Him, if we choose – He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”