What’s Really Happening in the Nativity?

Christ was like a man “who perceived a weak person carried away by a raging current. He knows that he himself will be sucked up by the whirlpool, wounded and lacerated by the rocks, swept away by the water. But pity for this man in danger stimulates him. He does not hesitate to throw himself into the current.” He enters, therefore, without reservations into the flow of duration. But in order to save the one who is drowning, he must “jump” from on high, that is to say, he must bring us the integrity of our own nature. It is very much a necessity that he not be born of a mortal man who is subject to the “passions” but that he bring us that nature that is antecedent to the “passions” (which, indeed, as we know, are linked in a mysterious way to sin). It is equally necessary that Mary should be a virgin, so that in this pure relationship the prodigy of the burning bush might be fulfilled: unity without blemish. It is a “new birth”, a “new order of nature”, finally a “new creation”, the “beginning of the world”. It is, in the final analysis, the “day when the true man is created … he who is in the image and likeness of God”.

— Taken from Presence and Thought – An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa by Hans Urs von Balthasar, (pp.135-136).