The Incarnate Son, a Sufferer and Sacrifice

When we consider the Passion of Jesus Christ we must reflect on the fact of the Incarnation to begin to enter into the mystery.

God Took Human Nature in Christ

Newman opens his sermon The Incarnate Son, a Sufferer and a Sacrifice pointing out that this is a truth so immense that the mind can barely hold it: the One who “humbled Himself unto death, even the death of the Cross” was the same One who from eternity existed “in the form of God,” equal with the Father. This is not poetry. It is the literal claim of Christian faith.

What does it mean that God took human nature? Newman is precise: when the Word became flesh, He did not put on humanity as a costume and lay it aside. He added human nature to Himself — body, soul, nerves, blood, weariness, pain — so intimately and permanently that it became, in every sense, His own. “He became man, yet so as not to cease in any respect being what He was before.”

Think of how the soul acts through the body — not beside it, not above it, but through it, so that what the body experiences, the person experiences. Newman says that in a still more perfect but equally real way, the eternal Son of God acted through the humanity He assumed. When He spoke, it was God speaking. When He wept, it was God weeping. When He grew hungry in the desert and thirsty on the Cross, it was God who hungered and thirsted. Not that the divine nature could suffer in itself — but that the Son, having made human nature wholly and personally His own, truly suffered in and through it.

This is what the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son of God teaches us.

In His Passion, Man Struck the Face of God

With this foundation laid, Newman turns to the Passion narrative — and he does so with a deliberate, almost unbearable directness.

He quotes the Gospels simply: the officer’s slap, the spitting, the blindfolding, the mockery, the crown of thorns, the scourging, the nailing, the piercing. And then he pauses and makes us look at what we have just read.

“That Face, so ruthlessly smitten, was the Face of God Himself. The Brows bloody with the thorns, the sacred Body exposed to view and lacerated with the scourge, the Hands nailed to the Cross, and afterwards the Side pierced with the spear — it was the Blood, and the sacred Flesh, and the Hands, and the Temples, and the Side, and the Feet of God Himself.”

Newman insists this is not a figure of speech. It is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is, he says, “a literal and simple truth” — “a great Catholic doctrine.”

He presses so hard because we hear the Passion story every year and we manage, somehow, to keep it at a comfortable distance. We file it under “historical event” or “religious mystery” and we go on with our week. Newman refuses this. He wants us to feel the vertigo of it: that the creature raised its hand against the Creator. That the hands God had fashioned struck the face God had taken. That the cosmos, in a sense, turned on its Maker. The saints remind us that we have a part in the Passion of Christ. We can think how we have raised our hand against Christ, against God.

Within this mystery there is yet another – the humility of Christ— He was silent. Pilate marvels. Herod is baffled. The high priest demands an answer and receives none. The One with every power to speak, to overwhelm, to escape, chooses silence. Not the silence of weakness, but the silence of One who knows exactly what He is doing. “He answered him nothing.” In that silence is all the dignity of God, and all the tenderness of a love that will not withdraw.

Newman ends this movement with a glimpse forward: “Behold He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see Him, they also which pierced Him.” The same Face. The same Hands. We will all one day look upon what the soldiers looked upon — and it will be the face of the Living God.

In Christ’s Nature, We Have Suffered, Died, and Risen

With this understanding of the Incarnation and Christ’s Passion, Newman brings us into the very heart of why all of this matters for us.

He explains: humanity, fallen since Adam, stood under a debt it could never pay. It needed to pass through suffering and death — but no merely human suffering could carry the weight of what was owed. So the Son of God took our nature, carried it through a life of pain, bore it into agony and death — and in doing so, He did in our nature what our nature could never do alone.

“We believe, then, that when Christ suffered on the cross, our nature suffered in Him….In Him our sinful nature died and rose again. When it died in Him on the Cross, that death was its new creation.”

This is the logic of the Incarnation brought to its conclusion: because the Word genuinely took on human nature, what happened to Him in that nature happened, in a real sense, to the nature He carried. “If one died for all, then all died.” Paul’s words, which Newman quotes, are not a metaphor. Our old condition — the one we inherited from Adam — was taken up into Christ, brought to the Cross, and there, in Him, it died. And then, in Him, it rose.

This is why baptism has its power — not as a ritual that washes the outside, but as a participation in that death and resurrection. This is why the Eucharist matters: “he that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood dwelleth in Me, and I in him.” We receive the very humanity that passed through death and came out the other side, glorified, whole, the “first-fruits of a new man.”

Newman asks us, with urgent pastoral force: does the world look any different to you in light of this? The great mass of humanity rushing after gain, comfort, status, security — do they look different when you hold them up against a God who entered our nature to the depth of death? The Cross is not one religious option among others. It is, Newman says, “a mysterious and supernatural subject, as distinct from any thing that lies on the surface of this world, as day is from night and heaven from earth.”

Newman’s beautiful sermon is like three movements of one great act.

The first one – God took our nature — fully, permanently, to the last sinew and the last breath. In His Passion, our race did its worst to the Face it had never deserved to see. And in His dying and rising, He carried our nature through the door that was closed to us and opened it from the other side.

The second one is Christ’s action. This is not a story about a holy man who died bravely. It is the story of God entering the wound of the world — from the inside — and healing it from within.

The final movement follows after Christ’s words on the Cross: “It is finished.” And from that moment, Newman writes, “the virtue of the Highest went forth through His wounds and with His blood.” It still goes forth. It goes forth for us, here, now, in this Holy Week.