The Incarnation Changes Everything
God became man.
When we think of the Incarnation, believe it or not, some of us–at least me–have a tendency to minimize it. What I mean is that we treat it as an event that is too localized in both space and time. The Incarnation, of course, is by definition an historical event because we human beings exist in history.
The Incarnation, however, changed everything. When Christ became a man, nothing created could stay the same and especially nothing human. Man’s relationship with God can never be the same as it was before because the perfect relationship between God and man, between the uncreated and the created, between the purely spiritual and the spiritual-material exists in the Person of Christ himself. He is our relationship with God, the perfect Mediator since he is Son of God and Son of man.
Now, we literally see God face-to-face and live. God loves us with a human heart. God was born of a woman in time. God died on the cross to save us.
The material, the contingent, the human is exalted now in dignity. All creation was made for Christ (Colossians 1:16). In the Incarnation, the gift of creation is not removed from him but he is the center of all creation and all history. Even our system of keeping time is measured in relation to this singular event.
God became man to redeem the whole man–body and soul. Christ desires a bodily encounter with each of us. That’s why he established the Church. If Christ had become man and then left man after the Ascension with only the Bible or only an invisible, spiritual Church, then what a pity it would have been. If that had been true, then those who saw Christ while he was on earth would have been the only ones to have a full man-to-man encounter with Christ, the only ones to receive grace from him in a bodily way through his touch or his words.
But not so! Christ gave us the sacraments, matter and actions that bring about grace, the Eucharist–his real bodily Presence, and the Church as his visible presence in the world and the guardian of the sacraments. Matter has been so exalted that it is now a means of grace. The power of the Incarnation continues through the sacraments. Those who were born after the Ascension lack nothing from Christ because he has honored his promise: “I am with you until the end of the age.”
From the Incarnation ripple wonderful effects throughout material creation: the Eucharist chiefly, the other sacraments, the Church, the sacramentals (especially statues, icons, etc.). None of these things were possible before Christ became man, but his Incarnation changed everything for us.