Nothing to Everything

Wednesday in Christmas 1
30 December 2009

During the Christmas season, many outwardly successful people find themselves overwhelmed by the gracious gifts of God. Such people, who recognize the proper source of their success, know just how amazingly gifted they are. Often, God's created gifts seem even more amazing in comparison to their childhood or young adulthood when they worked hard, but did not have the prospects for success they are now experiencing. God's gifts are more spectacular when set upon the background of our previous poverty.

The same amazement at the spiritual gifts that God gives should arise when we contemplate from where we came and to what the Lord is raising us. What high gifts are given to us through the incarnation of our Lord! When we recognize where we have come from, only then can we properly estimate the value of the incarnation for us. We who were outcasts have become sons. We who were slaves looking in from the outside, have been made members of the household reclining at the bosom of the Father. We who were starving while begging for scraps at the servant's entrance have been brought into the dining room, seated at the place of honor and fed at the banquet of immortality upon rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. We, whose nakedness was an object of ridicule through our obscenely ragged cloak of self-righteousness, have been enwrapped by the blood-dyed and finely spun robe of adoption to sonship. We have been taken from nothing to everything by the grace of God.

Leo the Great

"Whoever devoutly and faithfully claims the name of Christian, should estimate this atonement at its right worth. For to you who were a castaway, banished from the realms of paradise, dying of thy weary exile, reduced to dust and ashes, without further hope of living, by the incarnation of the Word were given the power to return from afar to your Maker, to recognize your parentage, to become free after slavery, to be promoted from being an outcast to sonship. All this happened that you, who were born of corruptible flesh, might be reborn by the Spirit of God, and obtain through grace what you did not have by nature, and, if you acknowledge yourself the son of God by the spirit of adoption, dare to call God Father. Freed from the accusations of a bad conscience, you can aspire to the kingdom of heaven, do God's will supported by divine help, imitate the angels upon earth, feed on the strength of immortal nourishment, fight fearlessly on the side of piety against hostile temptations. And if you keep your allegiance in the heavenly warfare, you cannot doubt that you will be crowned for your victory in the triumphant camp of the eternal King, when the resurrection that is prepared for the faithful has raised you to participate in the heavenly kingdom."

Leo the Great, Sermon XXII, on the Nativity, V