Christmas 2025 Reflection: The Incarnation and the Dignity of the Human Person

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” ― John 1:1, 14

With these words St. John does not merely narrate the opening of the Christmas story, he announces a revolution in how humanity understands itself. The Incarnation – God becoming man – stands at the center of Christian faith not only because it reveals who God is, but because it reveals who we are.

As the fathers of the Second Vatican Council put it: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (Gaudium et spes, no. 22).

The Incarnation is not one doctrine among many. Rather, it is the definitive answer to humanity’s deepest questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose and end? What does it mean to be human? The Christian response is not an abstract philosophy, but a Person – Jesus Christ, true God and true man.

By assuming a human nature, the Son of God did not merely pass through humanity as a visitor. He united Himself to it. “By His Incarnation, He, the Son of God, has in a certain way united Himself with each man” (Pope St. John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, no. 8).

How the Incarnation Changes How We Understand Humanity

This astonishing claim lies at the heart of Christian anthropology. Human dignity is not a social construct, not a legal invention, not a privilege granted by usefulness, productivity, or autonomy. It is grounded in God’s irrevocable choice to become one of us.

And it is this truth, so fundamental to the entire pro-life and pro-family enterprise, that we find encapsulated in a single image: a little baby, lying in a manger.

One of the most striking features of the Nativity is not simply that God became man, but how He became man. The eternal Word entered the world not as a ruler or philosopher, but as a helpless infant, born into poverty, laid in a manger, and dependent on the care of a young mother and her husband. He chose obscurity over prominence, vulnerability over power, ordinariness over grandeur.

This choice reveals something essential about both God and humanity.

The Incarnation tells us that contrary to the mythologies of the pagans, God is not partial to the rich, the powerful, or the elite. God is, first and foremost, a lover of humility, simplicity, innocence, weakness, and poverty. This is what the Incarnation teaches us about God.

But by embracing the lowliness of human existence, Christ also reveals something crucial about man, i.e. the intrinsic dignity of every stage and circumstance of human life. God chose to enter into the concrete realities of human living, the monotony of daily labor, the intimacy of family life, the limitations of a physical body.

God-Given Worth of Every Human Life

Jesus grew, learned, worked, suffered, and ultimately died. He experienced hunger and thirst, joy and sorrow, friendship, and betrayal. He knew fear and anguish. He did not exempt Himself from the drudgery of ordinary life. Rather, he sanctified it and revealed its intrinsic and inestimable value.

As Gaudium et spes teaches, “Since human nature as he assumed it was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too” (no. 22). The Creator becomes the creature and thereby sanctifies the created order. Flesh is not something to be overcome or discarded, it is the very place where God chose to dwell.

Why would God choose this path? The Catechism of the Catholic Church offers a simple but profound answer: “Christ’s whole life is a mystery of redemption” (CCC, no. 517). Every aspect of Christ’s human life – His birth, His hidden years, His public ministry, His suffering and death – reveals God’s saving love, and the profound dignity and worth of human life.

If the Incarnation reveals the dignity of the human person, it also exposes the tragedy of the denial of this dignity.

Why God Became a Helpless Child

The contrast between the beginning of the life of Christ and its end could not be more stark. Christ, the newborn infant, is the picture of perfect human innocence. Unlike the rest of us “born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin (CCC, no. 1250), Christ – as true God and at the same time as true man (CCC, no. 467) – has not inherited the stain of original sin, and so never loses the state of innocence He possessed from the first moment of His conception.

In every moment of His life, He did nothing but act out of perfect, boundless love. Among those He loved with an infinite love are not just those who were closest to him, His Blessed Mother, His apostles, and His friends like Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. No, among those whom He loved with a perfect love were His bitterest “enemies.” Christ’s love extended to the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the soldiers who scourged Him and put Him to death, and, yes, Judas.

The Gospels could not be clearer on this. Even as Christ was dying an excruciating death on the cross, He looked down upon those who had driven nails into His hands, who had spat upon and mocked Him, who had placed a crown of thorns on His head, and He did so with compassion. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34), He said.

And yet, despite this innocence, or perhaps even because of it, He was hated. The culture of death targeted Him. The spotless lamb was seized by the powers of this world, who only think in terms of power, prestige, comfort, convenience and wealth, and was executed because Christ threatened them and their view of life. The Child in the manager is nailed to the cross by those who do not value the intrinsic dignity of every human person, and who are willing to treat a human being with the most brutal contempt if he gets in their way.

The Church speaks plainly about the consequences of this error. An improper or deficient understanding of human nature – of man’s inviolable right to life, his intrinsic dignity, and his transcendent purpose – has resulted in a profusion of horrifying effects: contraception that treats fertility as a disease, abortion that denies personhood to the preborn, euthanasia and assisted suicide that redefine compassion as killing, embryonic research and cloning that instrumentalize human life, and human trafficking that reduces persons to commodities. These are not isolated issues. They share a common root, i.e., the reduction of the human person to something rather than someone.

The Redemption of the Created Order

Christmas stands as a rebuke to such dehumanizing reductionism. God did not redeem humanity from a distance. He did not save us by issuing a decree or offering a theory. He saved us by entering our condition and bearing its full weight. If God saw fit to assume human flesh at its most vulnerable, then no stage of human life can be dismissed as expendable.

The Incarnation also transforms how we approach human suffering, illness, and death. In a culture that often sees suffering as meaningless and death as the ultimate failure, Christmas proclaims a different logic. God Himself entered into suffering. He did not eliminate pain from the human condition. He redeemed it from within. In Christ, suffering is no longer a sign of worthlessness, but a place where love can be revealed.

This has profound implications for how we care for the sick, the disabled, the elderly, and the dying. Their dignity does not depend on autonomy, productivity, or comfort. It rests on the same foundation as everyone else: their union with Christ, who has united Himself to every human being.

Gaudium et spes declares that Jesus Christ is “the key, the focal point and the goal of man, as well as of all human history” (no. 10). In Him, we see both where we come from and where we are going. Created in the image and likeness of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ, and called to share in divine life, the human person is destined for far more than survival.

The Catechism summarizes this vision beautifully: “The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God; it is fulfilled in his vocation to divine beatitude” (CCC, no. 1700). Human life is sacred not only because it is created by God, but because it is called to communion with Him.

Pope St. John Paul II articulated this truth with characteristic depth in Christifideles laici.

The Child in the Manger and the Defense of the Vulnerable

The dignity of the person is manifested in all its radiance when the person’s origin and destiny are considered: created by God in his image and likeness as well as redeemed by the most precious blood of Christ, the person is called to be a ‘child in the Son’ and a living temple of the Spirit, destined for the eternal life of blessed communion with God. For this reason, every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the Creator of the individual (no. 37).

We are not accidents of nature or temporary arrangements of matter. We are sons and daughters of God, temples of the Spirit, heirs to eternal life.

This is why Christmas is so precious to the pro-life and pro-family movement. It says in a few words, with a single image, what it takes philosophers and ethicists whole books to say. The Christ child in the manager is the single most potent affirmation of the dignity of human life in all of history. This image demands that we defend life where it is most threatened and honor it where it is most fragile.

In the quiet humility of the manger, God reveals the astonishing truth about humanity: that every human life, no matter how small, weak, or hidden, is worth entering the world for. And if that is true, then every human life is worth protecting, loving, and serving, without exception.