— Nativity of the Lord —Mass during the Day

“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings glad tidings, announcing peace, bearing good news, announcing salvation, and saying to Zion, “Your God is King!”” (Isaiah 11:1)

Saint Jerome offers the following insight on this verse from today’s First Reading:

“Christ brought peace to all things in heaven and earth through the blood of his cross. He said to the apostles, “My peace I give to you, my peace I leave to you,” and he announced good things to us, not that which is called “indifference” by philosophers, but things which are truly good, which the Father gives to those seeking him — that is all the graces of the Holy Spirit.

Paul, following the sense of the Hebrew truth in the epistle to the Romans puts it, “How beautiful are the feet of those proclaiming good news, proclaiming peace,” meaning the apostles whose feet the Lord washed, that they are clean and fair for preaching and to run through the world, quickly filling the globe with the doctrine of Christ. Following the Septuagint and the ambi guity of the Greek word, hōra means either “time” or “beauty.” If “beauty” is meant, then we might refer to what is said in the psalm, “Beautiful in appearance before the sons of men” — for what is more beautiful than for the form of a servant to become the form of God and to sit and reign with Christ in heaven?.” (Commentary on Isaiah, 14)

Collect

O God,
Who wonderfully created
the dignity of human nature
and still more wonderfully restored it,
grant, we pray,
that we may share in the divinity of Christ,
Who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.
Who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen