Advent Meditation~By St. Alphonsus de Liguori (December 13)

[Dawn Marie]

THE MYSTERIES OF THE FAITH

THE INCARNATION

Discourse by Saint Alphonsus de Liguori

December 13, 2014

 

Discourse 14

 

He comes forth, then, from the prison of His Mother’s womb, but for what, is it perhaps to enjoy Himself? He comes forth to fresh suffering, for He chooseth to be born in the depth of winter, in a cavern, where beasts find stabling, and at the hour of midnight; and He is born in such poverty that He has no fire to warm Him, nor clothes enough to screen Him from the cold.  “A grand pulpit is that manger,” says St. Thomas Villanova. Oh, how well does Jesus teach us the love of suffering in the grotto of Bethlehem!  “In the stable,” adds Salmeron, “all is vile to the sight, unpleasant to the hearing, offensive to the smell, hard and revolting to the touch.”

 

Everything in the stable is painful; everything is painful to the sight, for one sees nothing but rugged and dark rocks; everything is painful to the hearing, for He hears only the cries of brute beasts; everything is painful to the smell, from the stench of the litter that is scattered around; and everything is painful to the touch, for His cradle is only a narrow manger, and His bed only a handful of straw.

 

Look on this Infant God, how He lies bound up in swaddling clothes, so that He cannot stir:  “God endures,” said St. Zeno, “to be bound in swaddling clothes, because He had come to pay the debts of the whole world.”  And hereupon St. Augustine remarks, “O blessed rags, with which we wipe away the filth of sins!”  Observe Him how He trembles with cold; how He weeps, to let us know that He suffers, and offers to the Eternal Father those first tears to release us from that endless wailing which we had deserved!

“Blessed tears,” says St. Thomas of Villanova, “which blot out our iniquities!”  O tears for us most blessed, since they obtain for us the pardon of our sins!

 

And thus did the life of Jesus Christ continue always in affliction and sorrow. But a short time after He was born He was obliged to fly as an exile, and wander into Egypt to escape out of the hands of Herod. Then, in that barbarous country He passed many years of His childhood poor and unknown. Nor was the life which He led on His return from Egypt, dwelling at Nazareth, very different up to the time when He received death from the hands of the executioner on the Cross in a sea of sorrows and infamy.

 

But, besides, we must also well understand here that the pains which Jesus Christ endured  in His Passion, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion, His agony, death and all the other torments, and ignominies which he suffered at the end of His life, He also suffered at the beginning; because from the beginning he had always before His eyes the sad scene of all the torments which He would have to suffer when about to leave this earth, as He predicted by the mouth of David:  “My sorrow is continually before me.”  We hide from the sick man the knife or the fire with which he is to be cut or cauterized in order to regain his health; but Jesus would not have the instruments of His Passion, by which He was to lose His life, that He might gain for us eternal life, hidden from His sight; He desired always to have before His eyes the scourge, the thorns, the nails, the Cross, which were to drain all the blood from His veins, till He died of pure grief, deprived of all consolation.

[Dawn Marie]

"Observe Him how He trembles with cold; how He weeps, to let us know that He suffers, and offers to the Eternal Father those first tears to release us from that endless wailing which we had deserved!"

[...]"He desired always to have before His eyes the scourge, the thorns, the nails, the Cross, which were to drain all the blood from His veins, till He died of pure grief, deprived of all consolation."