Fourth Sunday of Advent
A Reading from a treatise Against Heresies by Irenaeus
The Lord came into his own creation in a visible way: his own creation sustained him who sustains everything in being. His obedience on the tree of the cross reversed the disobedience at the tree in Eden; the good news of the truth announced by an angel to Mary, a virgin who was shortly to be married, undid the evil lie that had seduced Eve, a virgin also espoused to a husband.
Just as Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and fled from God after disobeying his word, so Mary in her turn welcomed the good news by the word of an angel that she should sustain God in obedience to his word. As Eve was seduced into disobeying God, so Mary was persuaded into obeying God; thus the Virgin Mary became the advocate of the virgin Eve. Just as the human race fell into bondage to death by means of a virgin, so now it is rescued by a virgin. The disobedience of one has been counter-balanced by the obedience of the other.
Christ gathered all things into one by gathering them into himself. He declared war against our enemy, crushed and trampled on the head of the one who at the beginning had taken us captive in Adam, in accordance with God’s words to the serpent in Genesis: ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall watch for your head, and you shall watch for his heel.’
The one who is described as watching for the serpent’s head is the one who was born in the likeness of Adam from the Virgin. This is the seed spoken of by Paul in the Letter to the Galatians: ‘The Law of works was in force until the seed should come to whom the promise was made.’ This fact is stated even more clearly in the same letter when he says: ‘When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman.’ Indeed, the enemy would not have been defeated fairly if the vanquisher had not been born of a woman, because it was through a woman that the enemy had gained mastery over humanity in the beginning, setting himself up as our adversary.
That is why the Lord proclaims himself to be the Son of Man, the one who renews in himself that first man from whom the race born of woman has derived. As by one man’s defeat our race fell into the bondage of death, so by another’s victory we were to rise again to life.
The Eight Days of Prayer before Christmas
A Reading from The Experience of Prayer by Sebastian Moore and Kevin Maguire
In the time of the year’s darkness,
At the Winter Solstice,
We embraced the darkness
And we chose the madness
Of chaos and oblivion;
Because we chose to shut our eyes
To the darkness that was there,
And saw in the fantastic lights
That swam in our fevered eyes
A glimmer of daylight in the distance;
And this we chose, and called it Light;
Called it Light and the Will of God,
Because we had learned, living in the dark,
To identify God with the unseen light;
And in extremity we comforted ourselves
With the hope of a light we did not see.
We hoped for a light and called it God;
And so, with screwed-up eyes and heated mind,
We said we saw a glimmer and we called it God.
Yet we were in the darkness all the time,
And our fevered crazy choosing
Chose the one thing that it would not see:
That which strikes terror to the marrow of the heart;
The dark, the dark, the awful total night.
And so, for all our crazy games and blundering,
Wrapped in the darkness, we have stumbled on
The one thing that we feared and fled so long.
In the darkness we have found the centre of darkness,
And we are overwhelmed by a strange, dark, power.
This is a knowledge we have lived in constantly,
And yet had kept it hidden from our minds.
But this is now the ending of our day.
That regal splendour of our lighted world.
Now can our eyes spring free to see the night,
And the darkness that is vibrant with our God.
17 December
O Sapientia
O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
and reaching mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
ordering all things well:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.
A Reading from a letter of Leo the Great
There is no point in asserting that our Lord, the son of the Virgin Mary, was truly and completely human if he is not believed to be of that stock from which the gospel informs us that he came.
Matthew says: ‘An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ He then charts Christ’s human origin, tracing his lineage down to Joseph to whom the Lord’s mother was betrothed. Luke, on the other hand, works backwards step by step, tracing his succession from the origins of the human race, in order to show that the first Adam and the last Adam were of the same nature.
The almighty Son of God could have come to teach and justify humankind with only the outward appearance of our humanity, just as he appeared to the patriarchs and prophets. As, for example, when he wrestled with Jacob, or when he conversed with the patriarchs, or when he did not refuse their hospitality to the point of even sharing the food they set before him. Such outward appearances pointed to this man Jesus. They had a hidden meaning which proclaimed that his reality would be taken from the stock of his forebears.
Thus God’s plan for our reconciliation, formed before all eternity, was not realised by any of these prefigurations. As yet, the Holy Spirit had not come upon the Virgin nor had the power of the Most High overshadowed her. Only then, would the Word become flesh within her inviolate womb, in which Wisdom would build for herself a house. Then, too, the Creator of ages would be born in time and the nature of God would join with the nature of the slave in the unity of one person. He through whom the world was created would himself be brought forth in the midst of all creation.
If this new humanity, made in the likeness of sinful flesh, had not assumed our old nature; if he, who is one in being with the Father, had not accepted to be one in being with the mother; if he who is alone free from sin had not united our nature to himself, then we would still be held captive under the power of the devil. We would have gained nothing from the victor’s triumph if the battle had been fought outside the arena of our nature.
But, by means of this marvellous sharing, the mystery of our rebirth has shone upon us. We are reborn in newness of spirit through the same Spirit through whom Christ was conceived and born. This is why John the evangelist speaks of those who believe as those ‘who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’.
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