Verse to Meditate on Throughout the Day
“Behold, the Lord will come descending with splendor to visit his people with peace and he will bestow on them eternal life”
Morning Prayer
Grant that your people, we pray, almighty God, may be ever watchful for the coming of your Only Begotten Son, that, as the author of our salvation himself has taught us, we may hasten, alert and with lighted lamps, to meet him when he comes.
[Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever]
Prayer of Offering Throughout dayBe pleased, O Lord, with our humble prayers and offerings, and since we have no merits to plead our cause, come, we pray, to our rescue with the protection of your mercy. Through Christ our Lord
Verse at end of day
“We await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our mortal bodies, to conform with his glorified body.” (Cf. Philippians 3:20-21)
Longer Scripture Reading: Isaiah 27:1-13
Advent Reflection: From a treatise Against Heresies, by St Irenaeus, bishop
(Lib. 5, 19, 1; 20, 2; 21,1: SC 153, 248-250. 260-264)
Eve and Mary
The Lord, coming into his own creation in visible form, was sustained by his own creation which he himself sustains in being. His obedience on the tree of the cross reversed the disobedience at the tree in Eden; the good news of the truth announced by an angel to Mary, a virgin subject to a husband, undid the evil lie that seduced Eve, a virgin espoused to a husband.
As Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and so fled from God after disobeying his word, Mary in her turn was given the good news by the word of an angel and bore God in obedience to his word. As Eve was seduced into disobedience to God, so Mary was persuaded into obedience to God; thus the Virgin Mary became the advocate of the virgin Eve.
Christ gathered all things into one, by gathering them into himself. He declared war against our enemy, crushed him who at the beginning had taken us captive in Adam, and trampled on his head, in accordance with God’s words to the serpent in Genesis: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall lie in wait for your head, and you shall lie in wait for his heel.”
The one lying in wait for the serpent’s head is the one who was born in the likeness of Adam from the woman, the Virgin. This is the seed spoken of by Paul in the letter to the Galatians: “The law of works was in force until the seed should come to whom the promise was made.”
He shows this even more clearly in the same letter when he says: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman.” The enemy would not have been defeated fairly if his vanquisher had not been born of a woman, because it was through a woman that he had gained mastery over man in the beginning, and set himself up as man’s adversary.
That is why the Lord proclaims himself the Son of Man, the one who renews in himself that first man from whom the race born of woman was formed; as by a man’s defeat our race fell into the bondage of death, so by a man’s victory we were to rise again to life.
