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How does the Father "send" the Son into the world to become man? (III, 2; I, 43)
One of the great insights of Aquinas's understanding of Christ is to think of the Incarnation
--God becoming man, the Son being sent into the world--
as one of the divine missions;
to see it as the way God reaches into the world in order to draw the world back to himself.
So, in the Incarnation the Father sends the Son, who proceeds eternally from the Father:
He sends the Son to become man.
Now, what does that mean?
For Aquinas, for the classical Catholic understanding,
that means that, in becoming man the eternal Son does not lose anything of what he had, of what he has eternally,
he remains the all-powerful eternal Son of God,
but he joins to himself, he assumes into a unity of being in his person, a complete human nature.
So, in practical terms, that means that this man, Jesus, is the eternal Son according to his very being.
That is different from the way the Son and the Holy Spirit are sent into our hearts, for example, invisibly by divine grace.
There we receive some supernatural gift, like the gift of faith or the gift of charity,
which makes us like the Son or like the Holy Spirit,
--which gives us a new relation to the Son and the Holy Spirit,
makes them present in our souls--
but we don't become the Son or the Holy Spirit.
In the one unique case of the Incarnation, God takes a human nature and unites it to the person of the Son,
so that Jesus Christ is the Son in person.
And that means that what he does as man,
and what he suffers as man,
he also does and suffers as the eternal Son of God.
And this may sound technical, but it is extremely important for understanding what we profess as Christians.
We profess that the Son became man and suffered and died on the Cross for us.
We don't profess that the man Jesus suffered, but not the Son of God.
No, the Son of God as man suffered for us.
It is the heart of the Christian faith
and it is a central truth that Aquinas explicates very beautifully in his theology.