#hypostatic union

Numbers 6:22-27; Ps 66; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

The coming of a new year always brings with it optimism, hope, and much promise. Although the Jubilee of Hope has now concluded, nevertheless that year-long celebration in Rome only served to remind us Christians that our hope is well founded. For, like Mary our Mother, we place our hope, ultimately, in God who we ask to “be gracious and bless us” (Ps 66:2). 

But this first day of the secular new year is for us Christians, the eighth day of Christmas, the octave day. And, as St Augustine says, the number eight is that of new beginnings coming after the completion of the week, and returning to the beginning, the origin. We return to the source of our hope, which is the Incarnation of Christ the Eternal Word of God who, “when the fullness of time had come”, was “born of woman”, and was found by poor shepherds “lying in a manger” at Bethlehem under the adoring gaze of Joseph and Mary. On this eighth day, therefore we return to that which is the origin of our Christian life and the source of our hope, namely, God-with-us, present in the Eucharist. For the Word who becomes flesh and is born of Mary is substantially with us in the most holy Sacrament of the Altar. Christ unites himself to our flesh, so as to make of our hearts and our lives a true Bethlehem, a living House for him, the living Bread that has come down from heaven. So, we Christians base our hope on the promises of Christ, indeed, on the promise that is Christ; with Mary our mother we silently and contemplatively “treasure up all these things, pondering them in our heart”. The Rosary, Mary’s gift to us, is still the most beautiful way to ponder the mysteries of our salvation, with the Incarnation at the very heart of them all. 

Today’s Gospel also leads us to ponder Christ’s saving mission, for this is why he is born for us, so as to redeem us in the flesh. Thus, on the eighth day, Christ is circumcised, and this initiated a new covenant between God and humanity. For at his circumcision, Christ first shed his blood for us, to redeem us, both Jews and Gentiles alike, and this becomes a pledge of his sacrifice on the Cross, where his precious Blood was shed for the salvation of all. St Thomas observes that “[Christ] took upon Himself circumcision… [in order] to accomplish a spiritual circumcision in us”. (ST IIIa, 37, 1 ad 3) Hence Christ was circumcised so that we are purified from our sins; so as to cut us off from our sins, setting us apart by his grace from all those things that hold us back from following God fully. This is the promise he makes to us year after year: that his precious Blood is sufficient to forgive us and convert us. So, our hope for a better new year is founded on this promise of God’s grace for without him we can do nothing. The acknowledgment of God’s grace and salvation is made manifest when the babe of Bethlehem is named ‘Jesus’ which means ‘God saves’. So, to call upon Jesus’s name, which we do repeatedly when we pray the Rosary, is to call on God to save us,  to be our salvation; to come to our aid in our weakness, and to sanctify us by making us become like Christ in his virtues. And in that same prayer we repeatedly seek the intercession of the Mother of God that we might become more like her divine Son. 

For Christ, by his Incarnation, has hypostatically united himself to our humanity; God is married to Man, and he has thus forever changed our human destiny. No longer shall we  called ‘Desolate’ and ‘Forsaken’, as Isaiah says, but we shall be called ‘Married’ and ‘God delights in us’. Artists and poets and theologians have all marvelled at how Our Lady exemplifies the delight that God has in a human person, she who is immaculate and thus the most beautiful creature he has ever made. And yet, today’s feast which gives to Our Lady the title Theotokos which was dogmatised at the Council of Ephesus in 431, doesn’t so much focus on Mary as it does on Jesus Christ. Specifically, it draws out the implication of the Incarnation, which is to say that from the moment the Word took flesh in the Virgin’s immaculate womb, the person of Jesus Christ was always both God and human because the human and divine natures were hypostatically united in him. As St Cyril of Alexandria said: “We must not think that the holy Virgin gave birth to some unspecified man, into whom the Word descended later; no, we must believe that there was one single reality from the first moment in his Mother’s womb… This is why we do not hesitate to call the holy virgin Theotókos, not in the sense that the divine nature of the Word took its origin from the holy Virgin, but in the sense that he took his holy body, gifted with a rational soul, from her. Yet, because the Word is hypostatically united to this body, one can say that he [the eternal Word] was truly born according to the flesh” And, indeed, as St Paul says, “born of woman, born under the law” in order to redeem us, and give us a share in his divine sonship. 

These essential truths help us better understand the “hypostatic union” – the message of the Incarnation in which the eternal Son of God becomes flesh, adding sinless humanity to His deity, never relinquishing His deity nor abandoning His humanity.

Jesus Christ is one person possessing two distinct natures: a fully divine nature and a fully human nature. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth may rightly be called the God-Man.

Christ is the same person both before and after the Incarnation. As the writer of Hebrews notes, He is the same “yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8). The difference is that before the Incarnation, Jesus had but one nature (divine). In the Incarnation, He added a human nature, one that exists together with the original divine nature, which did not and will not disappear.

Through His divine nature, Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who shares the one divine essence fully and equally with the Father and the Holy Spirit. For example, when Jesus declares, “I and the Father are one,” He clearly means one in essence, not just purpose. The unbelieving Jews who hear these words get the meaning, for they want to stone Him for blasphemy (John 10:30-33).

Through His human nature, Jesus possesses and exhibits all the essential attributes of a true human being. He gets tired, hungry and thirsty. He feels pain, experiences abandonment and dies.

Jesus, as one person, retains all the attributes of both natures. For example, through His divine nature He is omniscient, while simultaneously and voluntarily, through His human nature, He may lack knowledge.

The union of Jesus’ two natures is a true and personal union. In other words, it is not simply the indwelling of the divine presence in a human being, as is the case with Christians whom the Holy Spirit indwells. Rather, in Jesus, the divine and the human come together in one person. In essence, as Kenneth Samples points out, we may describe the incarnate Christ as two “whats” and one “who.” That is, Jesus possesses both divine and human natures (the “whats”) in one person (the “who”).

The two natures form a perfect, complementary union. The human nature of Jesus is never without the divine nature, nor the divine without the human. To deny the deity of Christ at any point in eternity is to undermine His eternal existence as the Creator and Sovereign. To deny the full humanity of Jesus at any point after His miraculous conception in a virgin’s womb is to refuse His necessary sacrifice on our behalf as the Word who became flesh (John 1:14).

Jesus’ two natures – divine and human – are distinct and inseparably united in one person. The two natures retain their own attributes or qualities and thus are not mixed together.

The human nature is not deified – that is, Jesus’ humanity does not become divine – and the divine nature does not suffer human limitations.

 The word “nature” refers to essence or substance, and these two natures are inseparable, unmixed, and unchanged.

These truths also assist us in separating biblical truth about the Incarnation from numerous heretical views that emerged early in Christian history, many of which continue today.

1. Is Jesus the uncreated God? 2. Are Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit three coeternal persons? 3. Is Jesus fully divine and fully human? 4. Are all people born in a state of sin, inherited from Adam and Eve due to their transgression? 5. Are believers justified through faith, by the free grace of God? 6. Is the institution of marriage a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman, dissoluble only through death, abandonment, or adultery? 7. Is sexual intercourse a practice strictly for married couples?

HYPOSTATIC UNION

“The most basic explanation for the hypostatic union is Jesus Christ being both God and man. He is both perfectly divine and perfectly human.” ~God the Son, the Hypostatic Union - Systematic Theology

Top: The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator at Saint Catherine's Monastery. The two different facial expressions on either side emphasize Christ's dual nature as both divine and human.

Bottom: Photoshop composites of the two sides of the face to make it vastly easier for people to visualize the two different depictions. - by JustinGBX

“In Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, the dual nature of Christ is explored as a paradox, as ‘the ultimate paradox’, because God, understood as a perfectly good, perfectly wise, perfectly powerful being, fully became a human, in the Christian understanding of the term: burdened by sin, limited in goodness, knowledge, and understanding.  This paradox can only be resolved, Kierkegaard believed, by a leap of faith away from one's understanding and reason towards belief in God; thus the paradox of the hypostatic union was crucial to an abiding faith in the Christian God.

As the precise nature of this union is held to defy finite human comprehension, the hypostatic union is also referred to by the alternative term ‘mystical union’.” ~The Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard    

29. There is another enemy of the faith of Chalcedon, widely diffused outside the fold of the Catholic religion. This is an opinion for which a rashly and falsely understood sentence of St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (Phil 2, 7), supplies a basis and a shape. This is called the kenotic doctrine, and according to it, they imagine that the divinity was taken away from the Word in Christ. It is a wicked invention, equally to be condemned with the Docetism opposed to it. It reduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption to empty the bloodless imaginations. ‘With the entire and perfect nature of man’ — thus grandly St. Leo the Great — ‘He Who was true God was born, complete in his own nature, complete in ours’ (Ep. xxviii, 3. PL. Liv, 763. Cf. Serm. xxiii, 2. PL. lvi, 201).