The Word Became Flesh
Lenten Reflection: John 1:1-18
This Lent, I’m hoping to write a short reflection each day on my reading through the Gospel of John. I hope you enjoy it.
The Christian faith is an incarnate faith. It does not reject the spiritual as the materialist does, nor does it elevate the spiritual over the material as the New Age does. Christianity is not mere belief. It is a participation in the divine that is only made possible through the divine entering our world and bodies.
And the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14
There are obvious eucharistic images in this passage, but those will be reflected on later in the series. For now, I want to focus on the phrase “…full of grace and truth.” We have heard this phrase mentioned by another important figure in the Bible. In Luke’s Gospel, we see that Mary is “full of grace”, or as modern translations state it, Mary is the “highly favored one”. 1
The translation is difficult, but according to Fr. Charles Grondin, this is a title given to Mary.
The angel did not say, “Hail Mary, you are kecharitomene” but rather, “Hail kecharitomene.” Therefore the word is not simply an action but an identity.2
For me, Mary was not the biggest hurdle blocking my entrance into the Catholic Church. It was the Eucharist. If it was true that Jesus was truly present in the Catholic Church, then it was clear that is where we should all be. But since becoming Catholic, I have been overwhelmed by the significance that Mary has in the Gospels. After all, the flesh that Christ received was the flesh he received from Mary.
It is precisely because we have an incarnate faith. She carried and nourished the Word of God; she held eternity, not just in her heart, but in her very body. It is a mystery, but the woman who was nourished and persevered by God’s grace is now giving what she has received from God back to him. In this way, she is a prefigurement of Christ’s dwelling in us through the reception of the Euchist. Every time we kneel before our Blessed Lord and receive Him, body, blood, soul, and divinity, we are echoing Mary’s fiat, “Let it be done to me according to your will.” This is why when we meditate on Christ, we must also meditate on Mary. We also should not be surprised that when Christians reject the Eucharist, they also tend to reject Mary’s significant role in both the Gospels and the Kingdom of Heaven.
Before the foundations of the world, God chose Mary for a specific purpose: to be the New Ark of the Covenant. God created her immaculately so that he would have the perfect vessel from which he would receive human nature. In the same way that Eve came from Adam, now the New Adam comes from the New Eve. It is in the incarnation that we see both grace and truth, but it is in Mary that we see what happens to the life of the believer when they encounters this grace in the truth of the Mass.
God becomes our Father, and Mary becomes our mother.
But to those who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name…
— John 1:6 —
—DR
Ibid.