Why We Bow at “and Became Man”

Fr. John Riccardo

July 21, 2021

Of all the places one would think we would bow during the recitation of the Creed on Sundays and Holy Days of obligation, it would be at “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” We don’t, though. Instead, we bow as we say the words, “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.” As both the words and the gesture are so familiar to us, it’s worth pausing a moment and reminding ourselves why and to ask the Lord God to overwhelm us anew with awe. 

The One through whom a universe 46 billion light years across was created (that’s 46 billion times 5.88 trillion miles!) took flesh as a zygote in the womb of a young woman He Himself created. 

For you. And for me. Because, for some unimaginable reason, we matter to God who is Love. This is an event—the Incarnation—to be pondered in silence. Lingered over. Reflected on at length. The Author of history leaps onto the stage… 

“Before continuing to relate the events that followed on Mary’s embrace of God’s plan, it will be important to stop a moment, to attempt to understand something of this mysterious action of God and to share at least a portion of the amazement felt by the angels as they looked on, astounded by what God was doing to reclaim and exalt the human race.

“It is easily enough said that in the child that was conceived in Mary’s womb, ‘God became man.’ But the meaning of that short phrase has not been exhausted, the depths of it hardly pierced, by two thousand years of prayerful thought.

“It would have been a reasonable expression of God’s majestic rule and a sign of his merciful nature that he might intervene in human history by sending some among his loyal angels to aid the human race and to deal with the rebel angels who were oppressing them. Such an act would have been beyond human hope, but it would have had a certain fitness to it; it would have been in keeping with God’s honor and nature. Yet in an act of extraordinary condescension, God chose to come and do battle for his wayward creatures himself, the Father sending his Son, the Word, to our aid. That decision alone would have conferred a tremendous importance on this lowly rebellious race. For a great King to put on his own armor and come to fight on behalf of a portion of his realm that had spurned and despised his rule would show a degree of concern hardly to be believed. Yet that isn’t the half of what God actually did. Not only did he determine to fight humanity’s ancient foe himself, but he took on the very nature of the race he had created, and he came among them as one of them, in a kind of veiled disguise. He who was the fountain of all existence took on the limitations of created human nature, even to the point of sharing in the consequences of sin’s corruption. He who was changeless and could not suffer became a man so that he would be able to suffer for his lost children. He who was the source of all abundance took on the poverty of fallen humans so that he could make them rich. He who was Lord of life and could not die took on a mortal nature so that he might experience death in place of those who had brought death upon themselves.

“It could be said that in his plan to save the human race, God faced a kind of dilemma. His problem was not one of simple power or force. God could easily crush Satan and destroy his external rule. But that alone would not save humanity. Men and women had been caught not only by the Devil’s bondage but by the guilt of their own sin. Death and the Devil had power over humans because of their willing rebellion, and there were claims of justice against that rebellion that could not be ignored. Herein lay the dilemma: how was God to give these humans the opportunity of willingly turning from darkness, and how was the guilt of their sin to be justly done away with? An invasion in force might compel obedience, but that would leave humanity in the posture of the demons: hating the one they were forced to obey and facing the stern sentence that their behavior had merited. How was God to spark genuine love and faith among those who desired it without compelling their allegiance and destroying their gift of freedom? And how was their guilt to be removed? How were both mercy and justice to be rightly honored? Nothing less would serve the need. 

“The solution God hit upon was to take on himself the whole of humanity’s destiny by joining himself to them, such that what they needed to accomplish but could not—a way to regain their innocence and overthrow their oppressor—he would do on their behalf as one of them. By this act, God forever changed the fortunes of humanity, drawing us into the very heart of the Trinity and, to use a traditional phrase, divinizing the human race. God offered humanity an entirely new start by providing a new Adam, as human as the first Adam, but now united to the divine Logos and extending his participation in the divine nature to all who followed him. In the words of many ancient teachers of the faith, God became man so that men might become God.

“The Incarnation of the Logos is the most astounding belief ever (seriously) held by humans. There is no other religion whose beliefs come close to it, no other person in history who has ever claimed to be, or has ever been revered as, the fullness of the one transcendent creator-God in human form. No news so riveting and momentous has ever come to the ears of humankind. If the claim is true, if God really did become a man and join himself forever to humanity, then it is by many orders of magnitude the most important thing that has ever happened. If it is true, then the Incarnation becomes the interpretive key that unlocks the inner meaning of all human history and reveals the purpose of every human life. If it is not true, then the Christian narrative, along with the whole of the Christian religious tradition, is a lie and a