Sermon 184

The mystery of the Incarnation hidden from the wise of the world.

The birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, wherein Truth has arisen from the earth, and day from day has dawned anew upon us today, shines forth with its annual return: let us rejoice and be glad in it. For what benefit such great humility has bestowed upon us is known to the Christian faithful, but is removed from the hearts of the impious; for God has hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to little ones. Therefore, let the humble hold to the humility of God: so that by this great help, as if by the carriage of their weakness, they may reach the height of God. But those wise and prudent ones, while seeking the heights of God and not believing in the lowly things, neglecting these and thus not reaching those, remain airy and light, inflated and elevated, and as if suspended in the wind between heaven and earth. For they are wise and prudent, but of this world and not of the one by whom the world was made. For if they had true wisdom, which is of God and is God, they would understand that God could take on flesh without being changed into flesh; they would understand that He assumed what He was not, and remained what He was; and that He came to us in man, and did not depart from the Father; and that He persisted in what He is, and appeared to us as what we are; and that to the infant body was given power, and it was not withdrawn from the worldly mass. The entire world, which remains with the Father, is His work; the birth from the Virgin, His work in coming to us. The Virgin Mother gave proof of His majesty, a virgin both before conception and after birth; found pregnant by a man, yet not made so by one; pregnant by a male without a male; happier and more wonderful in added fertility, not losing integrity. This great miracle, they prefer to think a fiction rather than a fact. Thus, in Christ, both human and God, since they cannot believe, they despise the human; since they cannot despise, they do not believe the divine. For us, however, the body's lowliness in the humility of God should be all the more dear as it is more despised by them; and as the birth from the Virgin seems to them impossible, let it be all the more divine to us in the nativity of the man.

Let all Christians rejoice.

Therefore, let us celebrate the Lord's Nativity with proper reverence and festivity. Let men rejoice, let women rejoice: Christ, the man, is born, who is born of a woman; and thus both sexes are honored. Now let him move on to the second man, who had been condemned in the first. A woman had persuaded us into death: a woman has given birth to life for us. The likeness of sinful flesh was born, by which the flesh of sin might be cleansed. Therefore, let not the flesh be blamed, but let guilt die, so that nature may live; because He was born without guilt, through whom he who was in guilt might be reborn. Rejoice, you holy children, who have especially chosen to follow Christ, who have not sought marriages. He did not come to you through marriage, whom you have found to be followed, so that He might grant you to despise by what you have come. For you have come through carnal marriages, without which He came to spiritual marriages: and He gave you to spurn marriages, whom He has specially called to marriage. Therefore, from what you were born, you did not seek; because you have loved Him more than others who was not born in this way. Rejoice, holy virgins: a Virgin bore you, to whom you may unite without corruption; who neither by conceiving nor by giving birth can lose what you love. Rejoice, righteous ones: it is the birth of the Justifier. Rejoice, weak and sick ones: it is the birth of the Savior. Rejoice, captives: it is the birth of the Redeemer. Rejoice, servants: it is the birth of the Lord. Rejoice, free people: it is the birth of the Liberator. Rejoice, all Christians: it is the birth of Christ.

Here, born of a mother, he commended this day to the ages, he who, born of the Father, created all ages. Nor could that birth have had any mother, nor did this one require a human father. Finally, Christ was born both of the Father and of the mother; both without a father and without a mother: of the Father, God; of the mother, man; without a mother, God; without a father, man. Therefore, who will recount his generation? Whether that one without time, or this one without seed; that one without a beginning, this one without precedent; that one which never was not, this one which neither before nor afterward was; that one which does not have an end, this one which has its beginning there, where it ends.

The birth of Christ is twofold.

Rightly therefore did the Prophets announce that He would be born, and the heavens and angels that He was born. He lay in a manger containing the world: and He was an infant and the Word. Whom the heavens do not contain, the womb of one woman carried. She directed our King; she carried Him in whom we exist; she nursed Him who is our bread. O evident weakness, and marvelous humility, in which the whole divinity was hidden so! The mother to whom His infancy was subject, He governed by His power; and she whose breasts He sucked, He fed with truth. May He perfect His gifts in us, who did not disdain to take up even our beginnings; and may He make us sons of God, who was willing to become the Son of Man for our sake.