Incarnation & Kenosis — Lessons on the Sacred Heart
When to read this: When you’re comparing yourself to others and feeling inadequate or when you need to understand what humility actually looks like in practice, not just in theory.
Incarnation & Kenosis
God emptying Himself for us — the supreme act of humble love
At the birth of Christ, all the other attributes of God were obscured and hidden from view, except one: His love. His power is scarcely visible, in that He became a helpless child. Or better, He became a child in order to become helpless. His wisdom is hidden, because He seemed unable to speak. His goodness, that is His virtue, His moral goodness, was hidden, because He was made like a sinner and subject to the penalties of sin. His dominion over creation couldn’t be seen, because He took the form, as we are told by the Apostle, of a slave, and the word is not servant, but slave. His happiness He withheld, because He became filled with our miseries. And His majesty, because He chose to be born like an outcast, in the company of witless beasts.
The Barn Joke (that’s not really a joke)
“Have any of us been born in a barn?” Usually I feel safe asking. But the point stands: God became a helpless infant in a barn so that we would understand (not intellectually, but viscerally) how much He cares.
No matter how poor we are — though I’m never sure, depending on the size of the audience, how safe the question is — have any of us been born in a barn? Usually I feel safe.
In any case, this is what God did to show us how much He cares. In proportion, and this was really His purpose, to allow all His other attributes to be not only obscured, but almost totally hidden from view, in order that the greatness of His one attribute of love might be correspondingly more clear.
So much for God’s side of the picture. If the Incarnation, then, is the great proof, the greatest, of God’s love for us, we ask then: what should be our devoted love in return?
The God Who Chose to Be Hidden
At the birth of Christ, all of God’s attributes were obscured, His power, His wisdom, His majesty, except one: His love. He hid everything else so that love would be the one thing you couldn’t miss.
God’s love for us in the Incarnation is meant to be a pattern of how we are to love Him in a way that corresponds to His goodness in becoming man.
The master idea is God’s emptying Himself for us. The Incarnation is God emptying Himself for us. If we are to love God correspondingly, we are to empty ourselves for love of Him. The biblical word is kenosis. He emptied Himself, insofar as it is possible for God, without ceasing to be God, to hide His divinity: God did it in becoming man.
The Master Idea
Kenosis. God emptied Himself for us. If we are to love God correspondingly, we are to empty ourselves for love of Him. The Incarnation is God’s ultimate lesson in humility, and the pattern for how we are to love.
June 5 — The God Who Chose to Be Hidden
All Attributes Hidden, Except Love
In the Old Testament, men dared to say of the Lord: “What does God know? He judges us as through a mist. The clouds are His covering, and He does not consider our affairs, for He walks about the poles of heaven.” Any guess where that comes from? The Book of Job. So there is God in heaven, enjoying Himself, and look at me.
But with the Incarnation, all of that has changed. As the masters of spirituality tell us, no longer does God walk about the poles of heaven. He now lies on a manger bed of straw. And more than reflecting on or looking at the evils that men suffer, He now suffers along with us. Until God became man, He had really not known what it means to wander about at night, to be homeless, with no one to take Him in. Well, He knows now, and much more besides. Hunger and thirst and cold are no longer strangers to God, and this is not rhetoric. It’s our faith. It began in Bethlehem, in a stable, or as I prefer, in a barn, and it ended in Jerusalem on the cross.
At the birth of Christ, all the other attributes of God were obscured and hidden from view, except one: His love.
In proportion, and this was really His purpose, to allow all His other attributes to be not only obscured, but almost totally hidden from view, in order that the greatness of His one attribute of love might be correspondingly more clear.
June 6 — Kenosis: God Emptying Himself for Us
The Master Idea
If the Incarnation, then, is the great proof, the greatest, of God’s love for us, we ask then: what should be our devoted love in return?
The method, or the pattern, or the model, of how God loved us in the Incarnation is the focus of our question: how should we then love Him in return? What is the design in the pattern? What’s the theme? What’s the master idea in God’s love shown in the Incarnation?
The master idea is God’s emptying Himself for us. The Incarnation is God emptying Himself for us. If we are to love God correspondingly, we are to empty ourselves for love of Him. The biblical word is kenosis. He emptied Himself, insofar as it is possible for God, without ceasing to be God, to hide His divinity — God did it in becoming man.
I thought for some time as to how I might approach this vast subject, and decided, you’ll never guess, that I would share with you what Saint Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, we might say the father of Western spirituality, teaches in his famous Rule about the practice of humility.
What do I mean? I mean that the one basic quality of our responsive love of God, in imitation of His love for us in becoming man, is the practice of humility. Or, as we may better call it, the practice of humble love. Love has many qualities. It must have this one; otherwise it is not born of God. It must be humble.
As Saint Benedict viewed humility, it covers, if you please, twelve steps. These are not necessarily dependent one on the other — which we get from the word step — but they are, in a way, stages, indicating that there is progress as a person goes from the one to the other. But more accurately, that taken together, they offer a clear and, let me stress, practical norm of how to grow in humble love.
That’s what the Incarnation is: it is the humility of God.
June 7 — The Fear of the Lord and Submission to God’s Will
Benedict’s First Two Stages of Humility
The first of these stages of humility, having to do with interior dispositions, is the fear of the Lord. Now you might say to yourselves: I thought Benedict was a smarter man than that. Well, yes, he was all that smart. You see, that’s what Revelation says, doesn’t it? The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.
We then humble ourselves — not with a craven fear of God’s punishments, as though, because we’re talking about love, we are mainly fearful of what God will do to us if we don’t obey Him. No. It is that fear that only great love can produce: the fear of offending the one we love. How sensitive we are about the feelings, about the least desire or wish, when we love, right? How we fear to hurt, how we dread to cause the least pain, how we hesitate doing anything that might possibly displease the one we love.
Second: submission to God’s will. Now again, you might say to yourself: is this love or is it fear? Oh, it’s love, all right. Because why? We love, and we should grow in this love, but we never forget that the one we love is our God. We are not here loving our equal. We are loving Infinity, and Infinity, being God, has a right to, well, tell us how we are to love. And He does. You love me if you do My will. You love me as much as you do My will, no more and no less.
June 8 — Obedience and Patience: God’s Humble Love in Action
Benedict’s Third and Fourth Stages
Third stage: obedience to superiors out of love for God. You wonder: when is Benedict going to get sublime? Well, he knew. This is sublimity, because that’s what God did when He became man. He became man in order — listen — in order that He might, as man, obey other human beings. What an invention of infinite wisdom! That’s why religious life was invented — except God did the inventing. Remember, we’re talking about humility, let’s not forget, and we’re matching our humility against God’s. And we’ve got a lot to live up to.
Fourth stage: patience, submission to humiliations from others. Dear Lord, why did you ever inspire Benedict to say this? After all, a better number would have been ten stages. It would have been more even. Why make it twelve? Why not skip this one? Well, it’s right there. Notice: patience, submission. The implication always behind patience is suffering. That’s what pati in Latin means: to suffer, and to suffer submissively.
Now, this kind of submissiveness would be craven slavery and unworthy of man, as it would have been unworthy of the man Jesus, unless it is animated by the love of God. Hear it, because we can’t hear it too often. This is one of the main reasons that God, to humble Himself, became man. In order — Lord, do You mean it? I mean it — in order that He might endure humiliations. This is God with lips and eyes and hands. We can say this: His fellow men. What a statement to make about God!
God With Lips and Eyes and Hands
Benedict’s fourth stage of humility: patience, submission to humiliations from others. “This is one of the main reasons that God, to humble Himself, became man. In order — Lord, do You mean it? I mean it — in order that He might endure humiliations. This is God with lips and eyes and hands.”
June 9 — The Humility of God
What the Incarnation Teaches Us About Love
The Incarnation is God’s ultimate lesson in humility. God did not come to us in power and majesty. He came as a helpless infant, dependent on human parents, subject to human limitations, and ultimately obedient to the point of death on a cross.
Saint Benedict identified twelve stages of humility that correspond to this divine pattern. The first six refer to internal dispositions we must cultivate: the fear of the Lord, submission to God’s will, obedience to superiors, patience in suffering, the rejection of self-will, and humility of heart. The last five refer to external actions: speaking with gravity and sobriety, being quick to obedience, hiding oneself under obedience to a superior, loving only God, and not conceiting oneself in one’s own obedience.
Taken together, they offer a clear and practical norm of how to grow in humble love. And the one basic quality of our responsive love of God, in imitation of His love for us in becoming man, is the practice of humility.
Love has many qualities. It must have this one; otherwise it is not born of God. It must be humble.
That’s what the Incarnation is: it is the humility of God.
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. Ignatian Retreats on Sacrifice and Love
