When John uses the formulation: "And the Word became flesh" ("flesh" refers to mortal man), he expresses the transition from the Old Covenant, made with one chosen nation, to the New Covenant, made with "all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages," which includes and reaches every body and every person. We must take this formulation seriously enough to acknowledge that all of Jesus' humanity - his speaking and silence, joy and tears, anger, zeal and fatigue, indeed even weariness from being among people - is an expression of God's inner thinking, which was already described to a large extent in the Old Covenant "anthropomorphically." We must acknowledge that the Word of God truly takes on human form so that we can really "see, hear, and touch it." And we must finally be mindful that what Jesus speaks, does, and represents is always a passing on of what it is meant to represent: "My teaching is not mine, but of him who sent me."
(Hans Urs von Balthasar /1905–1988/, excerpt from the text Priestly spirituality)
