Although Christmas decorations and trappings have been removed and replaced with Valentine’s Day merchandise in the secular square, the Catholic Church is still in the midst of the Christmas season. In our liturgical calendar, we do not transition to so-called “Ordinary Time” until after the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord.

Each Christmas, we celebrate a profound mystery of our faith that we tend to take for granted: The eternal God who holds the cosmos in existence was born as a little baby. As a human, like us, Jesus did all of the things that humans do: He ate, he slept, he cried, and – yes – he even filled his diaper, all without ceasing to be the Almighty God. If you pause to consider the mystery of the Incarnation, of God becoming flesh, it’s really quite astonishing. Why did God become one of us, anyway?

While taking a course on the History of Christianity from its Origins to the Reformation at UMBC way back in the Fall of the year 2000, I was assigned to read the classic book On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius. Written around 318 AD, the book is a short treatise written to a young convert named Macarius about the Incarnation of the Son of God. Twenty years after first reading this book, I still find myself occasionally taking it from my bookshelf to meditate on these words:

You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material. Even so it was with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself, and seek out His lost sheep, even as He says in the Gospel, “I came to seek and to save that which was lost.” (De Incarnatione, 14)

The analogy used by St. Athanasius, who was a deacon at the time, is a powerful one.

As all good Catholic school children know, you and I are created “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). What first struck me twenty years about this passage from St. Athanasius, however, is the idea that you and I are created more specifically in the image of the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. St. Paul makes a similar point in his letter to the Colossians:

He [Jesus Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17)

To borrow the imagery of St. Athanasius, imagine God the Father at the beginning of creation gazing at the beauty of his eternal Son with love, then bringing forth all of creation as a masterpiece of art to reflect that glory. With the “brush” of the Holy Spirit, the Father sprinkled stars and galaxies throughout the universe, spread mountains, valleys, oceans, and rivers across our planet, fashioned the plants and animals, then formed man and woman as the “crown of creation.” As created children of God, our relationship with God would mirror the eternal relationship between God the Father and God the Son.

But then sin happened.

It’s hard to adequately describe the ugliness of sin – As God gives himself in love to us, we are meant to give ourselves to him and to one another; instead, sin turns us in on ourselves in selfishness, rejecting communion with God in favor of self-enclosed, self-assertive autonomy. Instead of reflecting the humble surrender of the eternal Son, sinful humanity imitates the arrogant rebellion of Satan. Each sin is a stain on the beauty that God intends for humankind, like smearing excrement on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Rather than casting us aside, however, the divine Artist desires to restore humanity to the image of his Son. God the Son became one of us, Jesus Christ, “like us in all things but sin” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 467, cf. Hebrews 4:15), so that his likeness might be “redrawn” in our souls through grace. Through faith and the sacraments, the stain of sin can be removed from our souls and replaced by the breathtakingly beautiful charity of Jesus Christ.

As we conclude our annual celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, then, let us recall that the Christian life itself is an invitation to be remade in the image of the Child of Bethlehem. He is not only a cute baby in a manger, but is the very pattern of our existence, the one in whose image we have been made and in whose image we are called to be remade.