CHRISTIANS AND ANTICHRISTTS

7TH DAY WITHIN THE OCTAVE OF CHRISTMAS

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

The Incarnation causes our Love for God

Many biblical scholars agree that Saint John gave us a summary of his Gospel in the Prologue. We cannot fully understand or comprehend the depth of the mystery or the theology that the Evangelist embedded in the Prologue to his Gospel. We have presented love as the means or path that would lead a soul to grasp the impossible and commune with the One who existed from the beginning. We have also come to understand that our human nature has a natural affinity or facility for love. We have seen two species of love, one genuine and the other counterfeit. The difference between the two species of love is their causes. God, our Creator and Redeemer, is the only one who can call forth a love that is genuinely human and connatural to our nature; creatures, outside or without God, call forth a mimicry of love, which is a sprouting of the seed of evil sown in us by the ancient serpent. This counterfeit love is at best understood as lust or craving for creatures. After the fall of our first parents, when God noticed that the serpent had sown his evil seed in man and woman, he promised to put enmity between the woman, who represents our nature, and the serpent, between her offspring and the serpent’s offspring. The real nature of the divinely created enmity is love for God, which excludes love of creatures or the world without God.

The genuine and concrete love for God is first found or located in our nature, without any admixture of error or counterfeit, in the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the Woman, God made good his promise to create enmity between our nature and the serpent. What proved that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Woman of promise is her conception of the Eternal Word. In her, the Word became flesh, which fulfilled the second part of the promise, that is, God, putting enmity between her offspring and the serpent’s offspring. Thus, that the Word became flesh is the cause and result of the enmity God put between the woman and the serpent, between her offspring and the serpent’s offspring. Subsequently, the Incarnation of the Word is the cause of the genuine love of God in us who believe the Good News. In Saint John’s Gospel, the Incarnation is the cause of the bridge or path linking the impossible ends. After giving us the details of the eternal existence of the Word and our connection to Him as rational creatures, the Evangelist explains how the Word comes to us naturally, non-physically; then he offers us the Good News of His coming in physical form. “The word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.” John and others who saw Him believed that the Word became flesh.

To see Him as the One who existed from the beginning, we must believe that he is the one who gave us life and light; we must believe that the Word became flesh. This faith receives the Word in our human flesh and causes the love of God in our hearts that would drive away every counterfeit love of the world in us, which is the seed of the serpent. Those who joined the company of the disciples and never believed remained outcasts from the body of Jesus Christ, the Offspring of the Woman. Saint John called them ‘antichrists.’ “Children, these are the last days; you were told that an Antichrist must come, and now several antichrists have already appeared; we know from this that these are the last days. 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.” They remained distinct and separated from the body of Christ by their counterfeit love; love for the world and never for God, making them offspring of the serpent, because they never believed that the Word became flesh and lived among us. To believe that the Word became flesh and lived among us and internalise the reality and the truth of the Good News is to receive a new birth in the Holy Spirit, who is Love. According to Saint John, “But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and have all received the knowledge.” Let us therefore sing a new song of love and praise to the Lord, for he has made us children of the Woman, members of Jesus Christ.

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.