Luke 2:40

filled Rather, being filled. The growth of our Lord is here described as a natural human growth. The nature of the -Hypostatic Union" of His Divine and Human nature what is called the Perichoresisor Communicatio idiomatumis one of the subtlest and least practical of mysteries. The attempt to define and enter into it was only forced upon the Church by the speculations of Oriental heretics who vainly tried "to soar into the secrets of the Deity on the waxen wings of the senses." This verse (and still more Luke 2:52) is a stronghold against the Apollinarian heresy which held that in Jesus the Divine Logos took the place of the human soul. Against the four conflicting heresies of Anus, Apollinarius, Nestorius and Eutyches, which respectively denied the true Godhead, the perfect manhood, the indivisible union, and the entire distinctness of the Godhead and manhood in Christ, the Church, in the four great Councils of Nice (a. d. 325), Constantinople (a. d. 381), Ephesus (a. d. 431), and Chalcedon (a. d. 451), established the four words which declare her view of the nature of Christ alethôs, teleôs, adiairetôs, asunchutôs-truly" God; -perfectly" Man; -indivisibly" God-Man, -distinctly" God and Man. See Hooker, Eccl. Pol.v. Leviticus 10.

the grace of God was upon him Isaiah 11:2-3. "Full of grace and truth," John 1:14. "Take notice here that His doing nothing wonderful was itself a kind of wonder … As there was power in His actions, so is there power in His silence, in His inactivity, in His retirement." Bonaventura. The worthless legends and inventions of many of the Apocryphal Gospels deal almost exclusively with the details of the Virginity of Mary, and the Infancy of Christ, which are passed over in the Gospels in these few words.