The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Preparing for Christmas with Newman: Christ, the Divine Captive

Categorised as Featured and published Saturday, December 20th, 2008
Advent Meditation: Mary, Mother of Christ
Christmas: the ‘beginning of our birth in the Spirit’

In this extract from the 1857 sermon ‘Omnipotence in Bonds’, Newman comments on the text “And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth; and was subject to them” (Lk 2:51), reflecting that the omnipotent God, in the incarnation, lowered himself so far as to become a ‘prisoner’ and ‘captive’ of his own creatures:

It is, not merely that God became man, not merely that the All-possessing became destitute; but … that the All-powerful, the All-free, the Infinite, became and becomes, as the text says, “subject” to the creature; nay, not only a subject, but literally a captive, a prisoner, and that not once, but on many different occasions and in many different ways.

Now, observe, my Brethren, when the Eternal son of God came among us, He might have taken our nature, as Adam received it, from the earth, and have begun His human life at mature age; He might have been moulded under the immediate hand of the Creator; He need have known nothing of the feebleness of infancy or the slow growth of manhood. This might have been, had He so willed; but no: He preferred the penance of taking His place in the line of Adam, and of being born of a woman.

This was the very scandal of the ancient heretics, as it has been of free-thinkers in all ages. They shrank from the notion of such a birth from Mary, as a something simply intolerable and past belief; and truly in that belief is the commencement of the wonderful captivity of the Infinite God, on which I am to dwell.

Yet I will not do more than suggest so much of it to your devout meditation. I mean the long imprisonment He had, before His birth, in the womb of the Immaculate Mary. There was He in His human nature, who, as God, is everywhere; there was He, as regards His human soul, conscious from the first with a full intelligence, and feeling the extreme irksomeness of the prison-house, full of grace as it was.

At length He sees the light, and He is free; but free only in that His imprisonment is changed. The very first act of His Mother’s on His birth, is both an example and a figure of His life-long captivity. “Mary brought forth her first-born Son, and wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger.” [Lk 2:7] It is the custom in those southern parts to treat the new-born babe in a way strange to this age and country. The infant is swathed around with cloths much resembling the winding-sheet, the bandages and ligaments of the dead.

[...] So was it with that wonder-working Lord Himself in His own infancy. He submitted to the customs, as well as to the ritual, of His nation; and, as He had lain so long in Mary’s womb, so now again He left that sacred prison, only that her loving hands might manacle and fetter Him once more, inflicting on Him the special penance which He had chosen. And so, like some inanimate image of wood or stone, the All-powerful lies in the manger, or on her bosom, doubly helpless, both because His infancy is feeble, and because His bonds are strong. [...]

My Brethren, it is plain that, when we confess God as Omnipotent only, we have gained but a half-knowledge of Him: His is an Omnipotence which can at the same time swathe Itself in infirmity and can become the captive of Its own creatures. He has, if I may so speak, the incomprehensible power of even making Himself weak. We must know Him by His names, Emmanuel and Jesus, to know Him perfectly.

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(Picture: Annunciation, attr. Melozzo da Forlì (c. 1438-1494), Pantheon, Rome)