Her Water Breaks

David
29 December 2009

What has creation to do with salvation? What does the first article of the creed have to do with the second article? Much. Through the incarnation, creation becomes the stuff of salvation. That which seems to be incidental to human life now becomes pivotal to spiritual life. Bread and wine in the holy sacrament bear the antidote to death and prescription of immortality. In preaching, the voice of man bears the Word of God, calling forth life from death in the pronouncement of holy absolution.

In holy baptism, mere water in connection with the Word of God becomes a washing away of sin and a participation in the life of Christ. Christ has sanctified all these means of grace by partaking of flesh from one of his creatures, the Virgin Mary. In her womb, He sanctified all waters to become the water of life, in which life is suspended. The Spirit of life is poured out on us lavishly from the womb of baptism. The water of life is broken upon us from that font.

Leo the Great

"To undo the chain of sin and death, the Almighty Son of God, who fills all things and contains all things, altogether equal to the Father and co-eternal in one essence from Him and with Him, took on Him man's nature, and the Creator and Lord of all things deigned to be a mortal. He chose for His mother one whom He had made, one who, without loss of her maiden honor, supplied so much of bodily substance, that without the pollution of human seed the new Man might be possessed of purity and truth.

"In Christ, therefore, born of the Virgin's womb, His nature does not differ from ours, because His nativity is wonderful. For He who is true God, is also true man: and there is no lie in either nature. 'The Word became flesh' by exaltation of the flesh, not by failure of the Godhead, which so tempered its power and goodness as to exalt our nature by taking it, and not to lose His own by imparting it. In this nativity of Christ, according to the prophecy of David, 'truth sprang out of the earth, and righteousness looked down from heaven' (Ps 85:11). In this nativity also, Isaiah's saying is fulfilled, 'let the earth produce and bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together' (Is 45:8). For the earth of human flesh, which in the first transgressor was cursed, in this Offspring of the Blessed Virgin only produced a seed that was blessed and free from the fault of its stock.

"Each one is a partaker of this spiritual origin in regeneration; and to every one when he is re-born, the water of baptism is like the Virgin's womb; for the same Holy Spirit fills the font, who filled the Virgin, that the sin, which that sacred conception overthrew, may be taken away by this mystical washing."

Leo the Great, Sermon on the Nativity, III