For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven

For us men? The Greek ‘anthropos’ translates to ‘human being’ or ‘mankind’ in a gender-inclusive sense.

A Greek-speaking person in the first century saw almost no male connotation in ‘anthropos,’ since ‘aner’ was the word used precisely for a male human.

The Latin wording is “propter nos homines,” and in Latin, the word “homo” is generic, meaning “person” or “human being.”

So, for us, humans, the Son of God became the Son of man. The purpose of the Incarnation is our salvation. 

Through original sin and our personal sins, we were separated from God, and we could do nothing to bridge the gap between God and humanity.

We needed a savior to restore our relationship with God. To fulfill God’s plan for our salvation, Jesus came down from heaven and took on human nature.

The crucifixion paid the penalty for our sins. The Resurrection opened the path to Paradise. 

And the Incarnation paved the way for both the crucifixion and the Resurrection because Jesus could not die for our sins and be resurrected from the dead if He did not assume our human flesh.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us four reasons why Jesus became man:

To save us by reconciling us to God; that we might know God’s love; to show us the way to Heaven, to be our model for holiness; and to make us partakers in God’s divine nature through grace and the Sacraments.

In particular, concerning those who denied the true humanity of the Son of God, the soteriological argument was presented in a new way: for the whole man to be saved, the whole humanity had to be assumed in the unity of the Son.

The Incarnation is the descent of God into the world. The ancient tradition of the Church described it in two ways:

The Alexandrian theological school used the Logos – Flesh (Sarx in Greek) pattern, as seen in the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John: “The Word became flesh.” 

However, this approach can be misleading. The eternal God not only took flesh from the Virgin Mary; but fully embraced human nature, including the human soul, will, reason, and psyche.

Therefore, the Antiochian school preferred the Logos-Man (Greek: Anthropos) pattern ("the Word became man") to more fully describe the Incarnation.

The comprehensiveness of Christ’s assumption of human nature is astounding. In Christ, God united himself with the concrete realities of human existence—developmental stages, emotional experiences, intellectual processes, volitional struggles, and physical limitations.

If Christ did not assume some aspect of human nature (mind, will, emotions, flesh), that aspect remained unredeemed.

He came down from heaven. The Incarnation is the descent of God into the world. In the words of St. Augustine, “Man fell miserably, but God descended mercifully.”

In Jesus’ own words: “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me,” and “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven – the Son of Man.”

St. Paul explains, “Though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance.”

“Coming down” does not mean that he ceased to be God. In becoming man, he did not forsake his divine nature. Rather, what it means is that he became man by taking on human nature in addition to his divine nature. Addition, not subtraction.

Saint Irenaeus said, ‘God took our humanity in order that our humanity might become divine.’

For us, and specifically for me, Jesus came down from heaven. He subjected himself to the limits of time and space, took on corruptible human flesh, and pitched his tent in our world. He experienced hunger, thirst, temptations, and pain, all to teach and guide us on how to elevate humanity to its full potential, to receive freedom from sin and death, and to gain divine life.