The Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) — At the Mass during the Day

“And the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, and we saw His glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14.)

Saint Augustine of Hippo comments on this verse from the Gospel proclaimed during today’s Mass:

“His glory no one could see unless he was healed by the lowliness of his flesh. Why could we not see? Concentrate, my beloved people, and see what I am saying. Dust, so to speak, had forcibly entered humanity’s eye; earth had entered it, had injured the eye, and it could not see the light. That injured eye is anointed; it was injured by earth, and earth is put there that it may be healed. For all salves and medicines are nothing but [compounds] of the earth. You have been blinded by dust, you are healed by dust; thus the flesh has blinded you, flesh heals you. For the soul had become carnal by assenting to carnal passions; from that the eye of the heart had been blinded. “The Word was made flesh.” That physician made a salve for you. And because he came in such a way that by his flesh he might extinguish the faults of the flesh and by his death he might kill death, it was therefore effected in you that, because “the Word was made flesh,” you could say, “And we saw his glory.” (Tractates on the Gospel of John, 2.)

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

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