Why did Christ need to be circumcised?
The Eternal God, needing no remedy for sin, validated the ancient rite by submitting to it – and thus abolished it forever.
The Eternal God, needing no remedy for sin, validated the ancient rite by submitting to it – and thus abolished it forever.
Editor’s Notes
In this passage, Fr. Coleridge tells us:
How Christ’s circumcision gave retroactive power to all past circumcisions under Abraham’s covenant, and ended the rite forever
That He fulfilled legal obligations not for Himself, but to validate past dispensations and transfer their grace to Christian Baptism
Why the sinless Lawgiver submitted to ordinances meant for sinners, because all their saving power flowed from His future touch
He shows us that Our Lady and St. Joseph grasped this mystery, understanding that the Infant God needed no cleansing – but was redeeming others by fulfilling what they could not.
For more context, see Part I.
The Circumcision
The Thirty Years – Our Lord’s Infancy & Hidden Life
Chapter VII
St. Luke ii. 21; Vita Vite Nostræ, § 10.
Burns and Oates, London 1885 (1915 edition).
Reasons why our Lord should be circumcised
He came to redeem all mankind, and it was fitting that He should take up and ratify and give life to, in His own Person, all the conditions and dispensations under which the efficacy of His Redemption had been administered before He came.
God always required faith as a condition of being pleasing to Him, and the human race started from Paradise with the revelation of a future Redeemer, the Seed of the Woman, on which its faith had to fasten, and by which it was to live in hope, reconciled to its God. The Sacrifice on the Cross was the fulfilment of this original promise, and it gave efficacy to all the acts of faith and sacrifice and penitence by which it had been applied to souls under any dispensation.
As Circumcision had been chosen as the sign and seal of the covenant with Abraham, our Lord was circumcised, and thereby gave to the rite the efficacy which had been assigned to it. His Circumcision fulfilled and gave power to all the circumcisions which had been administered under the covenant with Abraham, and then took away the rite once for all, the regenerating power with which it had once been connected being transferred to the new Christian Sacrament of Baptism when our Lord was Himself baptized.
So also our Lord fulfilled and then took away the Law, bearing, as St. Paul says, the curse threatened on those who disobeyed it, by dying the death on the tree to which the curse was attached.
Fulfilment of the Law
In all these things we see, in the first instance, how our Lord was not bound to these observances and rites, as being Himself the Lawgiver, and as having in Himself no vestige of the conditions for the remedy of which they were ordained.
And we see, in the second place, how a higher necessity, as it were, bound Him to their fulfilment, because all their value was derived from Him in the past, and because He was to fulfil them in order to take away their obligation on others for the future. The Jews, who lived and died in covenant with God, by virtue of these ordinances, received all the benefits which they administered, because He was to touch them.
They do not bind on the children of the New Covenant, because their obligation has been fulfilled and taken away by His having touched them, and because He has enshrined the efficacy of His Precious Blood in other ordinances which have taken their place with new, far greater, and inherent powers.
Importance of the mystery
Thus the Circumcision of our Lord was a mystery, very different indeed in its import and efficacy from the circumcision of an ordinary descendant of Abraham.
And, when we ask ourselves as to the intelligence of this Divine mystery which may have been possessed by our Blessed Lady and St. Joseph at the time, we cannot fail to see that it must have been very great and penetrating indeed. We cannot suppose that two persons so highly trusted by God with the execution of His designs for the redemption of the world, were ignorant of the truths which related to the Divine Person of the Incarnate Son.
They knew Who the Messias was to be, they knew that the Child in the womb and in the cradle was the Eternal God. Yet in this simple personal truth the whole doctrine of the details, so to speak, of Redemption, was contained. The Incarnate God could not need Circumcision for Himself, He could not have in Him any of the stains or disabilities which were removed by Circumcision, and He could not but be in His own Person the one fountain of cleansing, redemption, elevation, sanctification to others.
To say this is to say that the blessed pair who knelt by our Lord in His Infancy must have understood how it belonged to the office of Redeemer to submit to Circumcision, as to other legal obligations which followed upon it in due course of time. And we may gather from the words of St. Luke, twice repeated, that “His Mother kept all these things in her heart,” that the intelligence which she, and therefore in all probability St. Joseph, possessed, was not so much flashed into their souls by direct revelation, as fostered by the silent quiet process of thoughtful musing on the words and acts of God.
The Circumcision
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