Jesus Was an Embryo. We Can’t Let Anyone Hurt His Brothers and Sisters
I was once a baby. If someone had killed that baby, he would have killed me. That’s the point the director of the The Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford, England, recently made in a paper on the ethics of embryo research. David Albert Jones asked: “What then is the significance of destroying a human embryo?”
He answered with a clarity all too often missing: “It is destroying a human being at the first stage of his or her life.”
The Beginning of the Incarnation
Christians will soon celebrate Christmas. We call it the Feast of the Nativity, the birth, for a reason. It’s not the Feast of the Incarnation. The Nativity is a part of the Incarnation, but the Incarnation began with Jesus’s conception.
There was a Redeemer in the womb of Mary!
I’m not parsing words here. This is a crucial point.
John begins his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” In the 14th verse he writes, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.”
From the moment that the Word became Incarnate, His saving mission began. He was the Savior from the moment of His conception. There was a Redeemer in the womb of Mary! In the Eastern Christian Churches, the most popular icon reveals the child Jesus ruling and teaching from within His mother’s womb.
That icon points to a profound truth. Jesus lived first in every human person’s first home, his mother’s womb. This means that every human pregnancy, every womb, every child in the womb, is elevated beyond the dignity he already has. Jesus was an embryonic person and He identified Himself with all embryonic persons.
We should do the same. What does this mean?
Read the full article HERE on The Stream.
