“Today the Word of God appeared
clothed in flesh, and That which had never been visible to human eyes began to be
tangible to our hands as well. Today the shepherds learned from angels’ voices
that the Saviour was born in the substance of our flesh and soul; and today the form
of the Gospel
message was pre-arranged by the leaders of the Lord’s flocks , so that we too
may say with the army of the heavenly host: ‘Glory in the highest to God, and on earth peace to
men of good will.’”
“Our Saviour, dearly-beloved, was born today: let
us be glad. For there is no proper place for sadness, when we keep the birthday
of the Life, which destroys the fear of mortality and
brings to us the joy
of promised eternity. No one is kept from sharing in this happiness. There is
for all one common measure of joy, because as our Lord
the destroyer of sin
and death finds none free from charge, so is He come to free us all.
Let the saint exult in that he draws near to
victory. Let the sinner be glad in that he is invited to pardon. Let the
gentile take courage
in that he is called to life. For the Son of God in the fullness of time which
the inscrutable depth of the Divine counsel has determined, has taken on Him
the nature
of man, thereby to
reconcile it to its Author: in order that the inventor of death, the devil, might be conquered
through that (nature) which he had conquered.
And in this conflict undertaken for us, the fight
was fought on great and wondrous principles of fairness; for the Almighty Lord
enters the lists with His savage foe not in His own majesty but in our
humility, opposing him with the same form and the same nature, which shares
indeed our mortality, though it is free from all sin.
Truly foreign to this Nativity is that which we
read of all others, ‘no one is clean from stain, not even the infant who has
lived but one day upon earth’ (Job 19:4).
Nothing therefore of the lust
of the flesh has passed into that peerless Nativity, nothing of the law of sin has entered.”
~St. Leo the Great
