Monday, December 23, 2019

More astonishing, even, than the Incarnation is the fact that God is still—and for all of eternity—incarnate


     "The Ascension is ... at once [1] the seal of the salvific work of mediation effected by Christ in virtue of the hypostatic union, and [2] the commencement of a new mission of the Word incarnate in his relation to the world.  We celebrate 'the most sacred day on which your Only Begotten Son, our Lord, placed at the right hand of your glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself [(diem sacratissimum celebrantes, quo Dominus noster, Unigenitus Filius tuus, unitam sibi fragilitatis nostrae substantiam in gloriae tuae dextera collocavit)]' (Proper of the Ascension, Eucharistic Prayer I).  That humanity finds itself in [(une humanité se retrouve en; indeed at the right hand of)] God—[a wholly] undreamed-of fact perhaps still more extraordinary than [that of] a God who has become [(se soit fait)] man—has been and is, today and forever, [a] mystery of salvation.  By this fact, the exaltation of the incarnate Word has an incidence necessary to [(une incidence sur)] the transmission of the faith, [to] union with God, and [to] the beatific vision, all three submitted to the 'sublime materialism' of the Christian faith, whose sole and unique law, against every docetist temptation, is that of the Incarnation.  By confessing the Ascension of Christ, Christians proclaim that it is possible for flesh to enter into glory:  [a] scandal to those who hate the flesh, [sheer] folly [to] those who adore it for its own sake."

     Nathalie Requin, "L'ascension du Christ:  le Verbe fait homme pour l'éternité," Nouvelle revue théologique 139, no.2 (2017):  207 (192-208).  What follows is, of course, a concluding reference to the corresponding Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
     "The Word became flesh in a manner irrevocable and definitive, for eternity" (199).

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