A virgin conceived, bore a son,
and yet remained a virgin. This is no common occurrence, but a sign; no reason
here, but God’s power, for he is the cause, and not nature. It is a special
event, not shared by others; it is divine, not human. Christ’s birth was not
necessity, but an expression of omnipotence, a sacrament of piety for the
redemption of men. He who made man without generation from pure clay made man
again and was born from a pure body. The hand that assumed clay to make our
flesh deigned to assume a body for your salvation. That the Creator is in his
creature and God is in the flesh brings dignity to man without dishonor to him
who made him.
Why then, man, are you so
worthless in your own eyes and yet so precious to God?
Why render yourself such dishonor
when you are honored by him?
Why do you ask how you were
created and do not seek to know why you were made?
Was not this entire visible
universe made for your dwelling? It was for you that the light dispelled the
overshadowing gloom; for your sake was the night regulated and the day
measured, and for you were the heavens embellished with varying brilliance of the
sun, the moon and the stars. The earth was adorned with flowers, groves and
fruit; and the constant marvelous variety of lovely living things was created
in the air, the fields, and the seas for you, lest sad solitude destroy the joy
of God’s new creation.
And the Creator still works to
devise things that can add to your glory. He has made you in his image that you
might in your person make the invisible Creator present on earth; he has made
you his legate, so that the vast empire of the world might have the Lord’s
representative. Then in his mercy God assumed what he made in you; he wanted
now to be truly manifest in man, just as he had wished to be revealed in man as
in an image. Now he would be in reality what he had submitted to be in symbol.
And so, Christ is born that by
his birth he might restore our nature. He became a child, was fed, and grew
that he might inaugurate the one perfect age to remain forever as he created
it. He supports man that man might no longer fall. And the creature he had
formed of earth he now makes heavenly; and what he had endowed with a human
soul he now vivifies to become a heavenly spirit. In this way he fully raised
man to God, and left in him neither sin, nor death, nor travail, nor pain, nor
anything earthly, with the grace of our Lord Christ Jesus, who lives and reigns
with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the
ages of ages. Amen.
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