Van Vugt: The Incarnation

Saturday, January 28, 2012

AT CHRISTMAS we celebrate the feast of the Incarnation. The word incarnation is derived from the Latin word caro which means flesh. It expresses the stark truth of what happened on that first Christmas day when the Child Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem. That child was God Himself becoming flesh, becoming one of us, God taking on Himself a human body, our flesh and blood.

This is a mystery that is beyond our imagination. God, the Creator of the universe, becoming one with the world, one with us. God became an infant but there is nothing infantile about the infant. Because that helpless child is the powerful God Himself. That innocent child has the power of God the Father Himself, filling the hearts and souls of his beloved and broken people with hope for the eternal life of his love and affection.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

Christmas for me has always been a romantic feast since I was standing as a child in front of the Belen watching that tender scene of the mother and her child. Many years later I realized that there is nothing tender about that happening: a mother giving birth to a child that is inside her womb, that is no picnic at all, that is a terrible struggle.

I realized that when my wife herself delivered her baby, my daughter, who is now 20 years old. I saw how painful that is, the delivery of a baby. Mary has put up with that struggle, not in a delivery room and lying on a hospital bed, but in a stable where animals were rubbing themselves against her. God Himself had become a baby and started to live in our world.

When I had grown up from that world of my childhood and had become a priest, I volunteered to go as a missionary to the Philippines, a country that was for me at the other side of the world. What I discovered there was a different world altogether, a country with so much poverty I never had experienced in the world of my youth, a poverty in contrast with the extreme wealth of so many other people. That was in Negros, a world dominated by landlords and hacienderos who exploited their workers to death.

But there I experienced also the true spirit of the Filipino people, full of friendliness and beauty in spite of their sufferings, a wounded world because of its ugliness and evil but fully alive with love.

Today I realize more than ever that the world in which we live is the precious body of God. As Christians, we must believe in that. God is with us and is part of our world in order to save us and deliver us from all evil.

On Monday last week, we celebrated Chinese New Year. For the Chinese, 2012 is the Year of the Water Dragon, a year to fight the Dragon of greed and corruption. The Water Dragon is believed to bring luck and good life. That is what the stars are saying. Let us not spoil their illusions.

But we Christians believe in the Year of the Lord (Anno Domini – AD). God is not an illusion. He is real in our world today. In 2012, He will be there to save us and bring us real life despite our miseries and problems.

(For your comments, email nolvanvugt@gmail.com)