THE INCARNATION AND FULLNESS OF RELIGION

THE 7TH DAY WITHIN THE OCTAVE OF CHRISTMAS    

1 Jn 2:18-21; Ps 96:1-2,11-13; Jn 1:1-18

The Word Teaches True Religion

Today’s opening prayer of the Church is insightful and gives a direction for our reflection. She notes that the Incarnation of the Son of God is the Father’s revelation of true religion to man. The insight follows from the reasoning that the true religion acceptable to the Father must follow God’s will. Since nobody knows the Father, less the Son, it would only follow that the fullness of the revelation of the Son that occurred at his Incarnation is the beginning of true religion on earth. Religion is rooted in God’s desire to relate with man, whom he made in the divine image, and desires to fashion into his likeness. The cognate of the divine desire in man is his desire to know God and relate with him, his Creator and benefactor. Our desire to be like God corresponds to God's intention to fashion man in divine likeness. Thus, religion is this holy desire that God initiates in each of us to know, love, and serve him. Hence, we read from the Catechism that God made us to know, love, and serve him in this life, to be happy with him in the next. Thus, the aim of religion is for us to be like God. Understood this way, it follows that the only true religion is the one God reveals to us. So, God’s gift of his Son is the revelation of true religion to us.

It is on this understanding of true religion that Saint John’s first letter identified some people as antichrists. It has been the intention of the evil one to counterfeit the religion God intended for man and woman he created in his image. He achieves this right from the beginning in the Garden of Eden by corrupting the desire of man to know and do the will of God. He raises doubt about the word of God and makes us desire a different god from the Creator. Once man desires a different god or good apart from the Creator and our supreme Good, a false religion starts in him. So, he is the Antichrist, who raises doubt on the Incarnation of the Word and falsifies the true religion Jesus Christ founded in his humanity. John reminds us that the tempter will come, and he is already at large in the world through his agents. “Those rivals of Christ came out of our own number, but they had never really belonged; if they had belonged, they would have stayed with us; but they left us, to prove that not one of them ever belonged to us.” We must note that the agents come from our members; they separate from us and refer to themselves as the ‘enlightened.’ We must be careful of the subtility of the devil, for he gave a slightly different perspective to Eve's understanding of the word of God, and true religion disappeared in her, Adam, and their children. Everything the Church does is according to what she received from her Lord and heavenly Bridegroom.

The Church puts forth the Prologue of John’s Gospel again to remind us of the origin of true religion we have explained above. The embodiment of true religion is the Incarnate Word, who is God from God and Light from Light. “In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” The Word revealed the true religion in the Trinity from creation to his Incarnation. “Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him. All that came to be had life in him and that life was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower.” The Church, the bulwark of revealed truth, embodies the true religion as the body of Christ. Jesus Christ posited that the gate of the underworld can never overcome his Church, just as John states above. Let us revisit the Nativity scene and take in the awesome sight of the Eternal Word in human flesh, the baby in the manger. In believing this simple but mysterious truth, we start receiving graces from the fullness of his graces. “Indeed, from his fullness we have, all of us, received—yes, grace in return for grace, since, though the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ.” This is true religion.

Let us pray: Almighty ever-living God, who in the Nativity of your Son established the beginning and fulfilment of all religion, grant, we pray, that we may be numbered among those who belong to him, in whom is the fullness of human salvation. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.