INCARNATION

See also: Christmas

More light than we can learn,

More wealth than we can treasure,

More love than we can earn,

More peace than we can measure,

Because one Child is born.

Author unknown

I think that the purpose and cause of the Incarnation was that God might illuminate the world by his wisdom and excite it to the love of Himself.

Peter Abelard

By his divine nature, Christ is simple.

By his human nature, he is complex.

Thomas Aquinas

He built himself a temple, a body that is, in the Virgin, and so made himself an instrument in which to dwell.

Athanasius

Our Lord took a body like ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize him in his superintendence and captaincy of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works he did here below in the body, that what dwelt in this body was the Word of God.

Athanasius

He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.

Athanasius

Maker of the sun,

He is made under the sun.

In the Father he remains,

From his mother he goes forth.

Creator of heaven and earth,

He was born on earth under heaven.

Unspeakably wise,

He is wisely speechless.

Filling the world,

He lies in a manger.

Ruler of the stars,

He nurses at his mother’s breast.

He is both great in the nature of God,

and small in the form of a servant.

Augustine of Hippo

He was created of a mother whom he created. He was carried by hands that he formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, he the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.

Augustine of Hippo

God is away beyond everything.

Celsus

He comes down to our level, adapting His Godhead to our power to comprehend.

The Cloud of Unknowing

On Christmas Day two thousand years ago, the birth of a tiny baby in an obscure village in the Middle East was God’s supreme triumph of good over evil.

Charles Colson

Even when a baby seen in swaddling clothes at the bosom of the Virgin who bore him, Christ still filled the whole creation as God and was co-regent with his Father – for deity is measureless, sizeless, and admits no bounds.

Cyril of Alexandria

The Only Begotten Word of God has saved us by putting on our likeness. Suffering in the flesh, and rising from the dead, he revealed our nature as greater than death or corruption. What he achieved was beyond the ability of our condition, and what seemed to have been worked out in human weakness and by suffering was really stronger than men and a demonstration of the power that pertains to God.

Cyril of Alexandria

The Son of God is also known as the Word of God. Once He incarnated Himself, He became known as the Christ.

Cyril of Alexandria

The Word introduced Himself into that which He was not, in order that the nature of man also might become what it was not, resplendent, by its union, with the grandeur of divine majesty, which has been raised beyond nature rather than that it has cast the unchangeable God beneath its nature.

Cyril of Alexandria

Christ did not pass through the Virgin as through a channel, but actually took flesh and was actually fed with her milk. He really ate as we eat and drank as we drink. For if the incarnation was a figment of the imagination so is our salvation.

Cyril of Jerusalem

Christ uncrowned himself to crown us, and put off his robes to put on our rags, and came down from heaven to keep us out of hell. He fasted forty days that he might feast us to all eternity; he came from heaven to earth that he might send us from earth to heaven.

W. Dyer

How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, his precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.

Benjamin Franklin

The Self-Existent comes into being, the Uncreate is created, That which cannot be contained is contained.

Gregory of Nazianzus

The fact is that the greatest mystery of all – the incarnation – comes at the very beginning and is the central reason why we believe in God. We cannot explain it: there is the beginning of the mystery of faith. But because of the evidence neither can we explain it away: there is the beginning of the rationality of faith.

Os Guinness

How can God stoop lower than to come and dwell with a poor humble soul? which is more than if he had said, such a one should dwell with him; for a beggar to live at court is not so much as the king to dwell with him in his cottage.

William Gurnall

It was great condescension that He who was God should be made in the likeness of flesh; but much greater that He who was holy should be made in the likeness of sinful flesh.

Matthew Henry

Rejoice, that the immortal God is born, so that mortal man may live in eternity.

John Huss

There is one physician, fleshly and spiritual, begotten and unbegotten, God in man, both of Mary and of God, first passible and then impassible.

Ignatius

Surely royalty in rags, angels in cells, is not descent compared to Deity in flesh!

Henry Law

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man.

C.S. Lewis

Never can man and God meet.

Plato

This little Babe, so few days old,

Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;

All hell doth at his presence quake,

Though he himself for cold do shake;

For in this weak unarmed wise

The gates of hell he will surprise.

Robert Southwell

Immanuel, God with us in our nature, in our sorrow, in our lifework, in our punishment, in our grave, and now with us, or rather we with Him, in resurrection, ascension, triumph, and Second Advent splendor.

C.H. Spurgeon

Our God contracted to a span

Incomprehensibly made man.

Charles Wesley

Christ, by highest heaven adored,

Christ, the everlasting Lord,

Late in time behold him come,

Offspring of a virgin’s womb.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;

Hail, the incarnate Deity,

Pleased as Man with man to dwell,

Jesus our Immanuel!

Charles Wesley