"To proclaim a year of the Lord's favor."
This is the Great Jubilee Year of the Lord's favor for his people. It is a time to recall God's great love for us throughout salvation history: from Creation to Redemption; from Redemption to Eternal Glory. The apex of salvation history is the Paschal Mystery: the Incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. The Word became flesh to exchange his life for our life. God, who cannot suffer or die, became Man so as to suffer and die, to destroy eternal death and to give eternal life. The Spirit poured himself upon us so that God's love will empower us and sustain us.
In the words of John Paul II in announcing this Great Jubilee observance: "The Jubilee, 'a year of the Lord's favor,' characterizes all the activity of Jesus; it is not merely the recurrence of an anniversary in time."
In the Incarnation the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son; the Son so loved us that he gave his life for us; the Spirit so loved us that in conceiving Jesus in the womb of Mary, he foreshadowed his own indwelling presence within us. What mystery! What revelation!
Paul, using one of the early hymns of the Church expressed it thus: "Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross." (Phil 2: 6-8) Centuries later, reflecting on the same mystery of the Incarnation, St. Theresa of Liseux wrote: “Love is the ineffable mystery that exiled you from your Heavenly Home…”
The Incarnation signals sameness and change, a newness, something different, affecting not only the Word Incarnate but all the world. The Word remains God but takes on the limitation of the human condition. God is invisible and invincible, but the God/Man, Emmanuel, is visibly present and vulnerable. God is Almighty but the God/Man is intentionally powerless before his enemies. He became one with us that we may become like him. His Incarnation points to our divinization. In the words of St. Augustine: "God was made man that man might be made God."
In reflecting on the comparison between the creation of man and the Incarnation, St. Gregory of Nanzianzen waxed eloquently: "O new commingling; O strange conjunction! the Self-existent comes into Being, the Uncreated is created, That which cannot be contained is contained by the intervention of an intellectual soul mediating between the Deity and the corporeity of the flesh. And He who gives riches became poor; for He assumes the poverty of my flesh, that I may assume the riches of His Godhead. He that is full empties Himself; for He empties Himself of His Glory for a short while, that I may have a share in His Fullness. What are the riches of His Goodness? What is this mystery that is around me? I had a share in the Image and I did not keep it; He partakes of my flesh that He may both save the Image and make the flesh immortal. He communicates a Second Communion, far more marvelous than the first, inasmuch as then He imparted the better nature, but now He Himself assumes the worse. This is more godlike than the former action; this is loftier in the eyes of all men of understanding."(Gregory of Nanzianzen, Second Paschal Oration)
