John C. H. Wu on the Incarnation of the Word of God

In this series of articles, we will examine some thoughts and experiences of a leading Chinese intellectual of the twentieth century who underwent a deep conversion to Jesus Christ. John C. H. Wu’s (吳經熊, Wu Jingxiong) life experiences and writings on the points of harmony between Chinese humanism and Christian spirituality have much to offer us today, especially Chinese young people, whether from the East or the West.  The second post of this series explores John C. H. Wu’s reflections on the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and its fundamental impact on Christian life, as well as the cultural and spiritual significance of motherhood, particularly Mary’s role as Mother of the Church.

As we have just concluded the Christmas season (on Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi to see the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem), it is still fitting for us to look closely (and quietly) at the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the “Word became Flesh” (John 1:14), the event John C. H. Wu called “the Mystery of Mysteries.”¹ Why did Jesus, who was with God from the Beginning (John 1:1), choose to become human? And why did he, through whom all things were created (John 1:3), choose to become dependent on his own creation, a human mother, to bear him, nurse him, and with a human father-figure, St. Joseph, to raise him? And why did John Wu believe that this, the Incarnation, was “the central event of the universe”?

In the last post, “From Law to Light: Searching for Truth Worthy of Your Heart,” we looked at Wu’s search for truth and conversion to Christ as an example of the starting point for human happiness. We can only be happy in the depth of our souls when we admit our need for truth, and turn to God, the only one who can heal us.

Once we embark on the Christian life, we are pilgrims on the arduous path towards heaven, like the protagonist Christian in Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress, or like the hobbits Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings. We are transformed (often painfully) in the process, as we strive both to walk the way of excellence (or the “via excellentiae”) by loving God and neighbor, and to renounce the attachments that weigh us down (the “via remotionis”). John Wu explains that the saints are our examples, and tells us their “secret”:

Only the Christian saints have really synthesized the via excellentiae and via remotionis. On the one hand, they have lived in this world and loved their fellow men and performed duties of their station with as much earnestness and sincerity as Confucius could ever have desired. On the other hand, they have been as free from the ties of life as the Taoists and Buddhists could ever have hoped for. What is the secret of this marvelous achievement? The Incarnation of the Word of God, and their union with him. The Incarnation is the central event of the universe; human destiny hinges on this one event. This alone makes it possible for us to live in the world and yet have our being in God. This alone unites the Transcendent and the Immanent, and clothes every thought, action and word of ours with an eternal significance. The Incarnation is the only Bridge between the via excellentiae and via remotionis.²

The Christian life is lived in real, concrete situations: the union of the transcendent and the immanent, flesh and spirit. It is at times easy for us, especially those (often in the Western world) inclined to think about theological questions in the abstract, to forget that in authentic Christianity we find the union of flesh and spirit.³ The physical world of persons and things is not separate from the spiritual world, it is the spiritual world! It contains both trials and temptations, and help and encouragement, and as we navigate our way through, we must seek God’s wisdom and strength to “depart from evil and do good” (Psalm 37:27). The “secret” to navigating this world successfully, as Wu says, is our “union with him,” and with his people (more on this in a moment).

For example, in one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s brilliant narrative strands in Lord of the Rings, the hobbit Frodo Baggins, the literary Christ-figure, carries the burdensome Ring of Power around his neck on an arduous quest to destroy it by navigating through the evil land of Mordor. Frodo and his faithful companion Sam Gamgee are constantly pursued and antagonized by Gollum, the wretched creature who is consumed by his desire to regain the ring for himself. It seems like Gollum is their worst enemy on this critical mission, and both Frodo and Sam nearly seize the opportunity to kill him. Frodo, however, who is becoming more like Christ through his sufferings, begins to see with the eyes of mercy and spares Gollum, recalling the wizard Gandalf’s words, “Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”⁴ Frodo realizes that Gollum, too, had once been a dignified creature, and in the end, Gollum plays an unexpected role in the success of the quest. It is also critical that Frodo, Sam, and Gandalf are in “fellowship” with each other. Without the awareness of their common commitment to goodness and to each other, either Frodo or Sam may have acted on the impulse to kill Gollum. It is the belonging to, and listening to each other that allow them to show mercy.

We, too, are tempted to think that the key to life is freedom from all our problems, but Wu explains that the real key is to love God, and how to do so:

Now, to Christians, there is no other way of loving God than by loving Jesus his Son, for it is through Jesus that God has revealed himself to man. The Word took on flesh in order that all flesh might take on Divinity. The incarnation of the Word has humanized the relation between the creator and the creature. For human purposes, to love Jesus is the same as to love God, for Jesus is God.⁵

It is through real human encounters, above all meeting Jesus, that we become more like him and thus step closer to heaven, when we (“all flesh”) will be finally perfected (“take on Divinity”). Even the troublesome aspects of our human lives, such as the people or situations that “interfere” with our plans like Gollum, are in some mysterious way part of God’s bigger plan.

The bigger plan involves our awareness of being bound together with others who share a common belonging. Concretely, as Luigi Giussani explains in his book Why the Church?, Christians come to view life with a new awareness, that we “possess Christ and life,”…and are “possessed by him,” and have a “unity of being with all those who are called,” a unity the New Testament calls “koinonia.” He explains,

…koinonia, the New Testament word, indicates a way of being and of life that derives from the simultaneous recognition of a bond with the Presence [i.e., Christ] constituting the meaning and destiny of the lives of every one of them. This is why they [i.e., the first Christians] conceived of themselves as being essentially bound one with the other.⁶

This belonging, ultimately, is to a family, and at the heart of the family, as we know, is the mother (sometimes, of course, the mother is absent, and when that is the case, the absence is felt as something important that is missing, as Wu says below).

Wu on Why Jesus Gave Us His Mother

Wu makes several intriguing comments about the role of motherhood in Christianity. Before mentioning those, however, as background I would like to quote the words of an Evangelical (non-denominational) missionary pastor friend of mine, named Rob, who once said in the introductory comments before his Bible study began, “Moms are great. Everybody ought to have one.” A moment later, he gave the reason for his visit home to the US: his mother had told him to come, and he added, “When your mom asks you to do something, It’s like a command.” I do not think he realized it then, but that is exactly what Jesus’ mother was doing at the wedding at Cana when she said to him, “They have no wine” (John 2:3). She did not have to command him outright. He understood that she wanted him to act, and he could hardly refuse her!

“Moms are great. Everybody ought to have one.” Even Jesus, God in the flesh, wanted to have a mother. He knew how good it would be for himself and for his future followers, to whom he gave his mother as he was dying on the Cross (John 19:26-27):

When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.

Many theologians have understood the beloved disciple John in this passage to be a representative of the Church, that is, of all the disciples, and thus Jesus, in giving Mary to John as his mother, gives her to all disciples (the Church) as their mother as well; thus she came to be known as the Mother of the Church.⁷ John Wu believes this, and then looks at it from yet another angle, seeing Jesus as demonstrating the Confucian virtue of Filial Piety: “Christ’s filial love for his Mother lasted up to the very end of his life on earth. I need only remind you of his words spoken from the Cross to St. John: ‘Behold, thy mother,’ and to his Mother: ‘Behold, thy son.’”⁸

In Beyond East and West, Wu writes of the importance of the mother in Chinese culture, and of God’s maternal dimension as one factor that caused Wu to become so enamored with St. Thérèse of Lisieux:

The Chinese respect the father, but love the mother. One of the things that attracted me so strongly to St. Thérèse of Lisieux is that she knew well the maternal quality of God’s love. As she said, “I had long felt that Our Lord is more tender than a mother, and I have sounded the depths of more than one mother’s heart… Fear makes me shrink, whereas under love’s sweet rule I not only advance—I fly.” When I read it, I said to myself, “How Chinese she is!”⁹

On the importance of the tender motherhood of Mary in his own spiritual life, Wu admits,

By nature I am a coward, but by grace I have felt in times of danger like a baby in the arms of its mother. And since Mary is my mother, how could I help feeling grateful for her ever-watchful care of me, in season and out of season?¹⁰

Bible scholar Scott Hahn writes, “Mothers are the most difficult people to study. They elude our scrutiny.”¹¹ Quoting G. K. Chesterton, he says, “A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen.”¹² In his illuminating book about Mary in the Bible, Hahn goes on to explain that the key to understanding Mary’s role in God’s plan of salvation, from Genesis to Revelation, is that God is a family, and every family needs a mother. He explains how theologically and scripturally Mary fulfills the “types” of the “Woman” who is an enemy of the serpent in Genesis 3:13-15 and Revelation 12:9-17, and of the Mother and the Queen prophesied in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New Testament: the New Eve (Genesis 3, Revelation 12), the Ark of the New Covenant (Joshua 6; Revelation 11, 21), the Queen Mother of the house of David (Isaiah 7:13-14; Revelation 12:5), and the Mother of the Church (John 19:26-27).¹³

Despite the difficulty in studying mothers, Wu does an outstanding job of articulating his, and I would add our, need for the Mother of Jesus in our own spiritual lives. Wu does it in the best Daoist way, by being humble and admitting his incompleteness. He says, that he somehow “missed the Mother” until he found her soon after his second conversion. His words offer a most fitting answer to the question of why we need the Mother of Jesus:

To whatever religion he may belong, a [Chinese] will hardly feel at home where there is no mother. This is one of the reasons why, although I was a Methodist for nineteen years, my spirit found no rest; I somehow missed the Mother. Was God not enough? Of course he is; nay, more than enough. But it is precisely his will that we should adopt the Mother of Christ to be our Mother. So long as this will of his is not complied with, our filial piety toward him is not complete. The Mother of his Son is good enough to be the Mother of his adopted children. (emphasis added)

In adopting us as his children, God has provided for all our needs, including our need for a Mother when we need her the most. It is therefore no surprise that Mary has been loved and revered most strongly in history among people who experience poverty and oppression.¹⁴ We begin to increase in wisdom ourselves when we realize that we also are poor and dependent on God, and by uniting Flesh and Spirit in Christ, he gave us both a Savior and a complete family.

1. John C. H. Wu, “St. Thérèse and Lao Tzu: A Study in Comparative Mysticism,” in Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1961; New York: Angelico Press, 2017), 116. See the Prologue of the Gospel of John (chapter 1) for the Biblical account of the Word made flesh (John 1:1-5, 14). For readers of Chinese, see Wu’s masterful translation of this chapter into classical verse at http://jesus.tw/John/1.
2. Wu, “Christianity, the Only Synthesis Really Possible Between East and West,” in Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, 168.
3. For more on this theme, please see Thomas Howard, “Spirit and Flesh: Sundered Forever or Reunited?”, in Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984).
4. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, II.
5. Wu, “The Science of Love,” in Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, 205.
6. Luigi Giussani, Why the Church? (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 96-97.
7. See, for example, St. Augustine, Of Holy Virginity, 6; Paul VI, Discourse, November 21, 1964.
8. Wu, “Water and Wine: Chinese Ethics and the Christian Faith,” in Chinese Humanism, 177.
9. Wu, Beyond East and West, 352.
10. Wu, Beyond East and West, 217.
11. Scott Hahn, Hail, Holy Queen: the Mother of God in the Word of God (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 15.
12. Hahn, Hail, Holy Queen, 15-16.
13. The scripture citations included here are not intended as proof texts. Rather, they are cited by Hahn as descriptors of roles or “types” in the Old Testament that in the context of the whole Bible are more and more clearly seen to be fulfilled by Mary, by interpreting these passages through the use of typology, a Biblical method used in the New Testament and by the Early Church to interpret the Old Testament. For a fuller explanation, see Hahn, Hail, Holy Queen, chapters 1 and 5.
14. Among many examples throughout history are Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Our Lady of Sheshan in China, and Our Lady of La Vang in Vietnam.

John A. Lindblom

John Lindblom received his MA in International Studies (China) at the Henry M. Jackson School at the University of Washington, with a focus on the Catholic Church in China. He received his PhD in World Religions World Church (theology) at the University of Notre Dame. His research examines connections between …View Full Bio

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