Saturday, December 31 : Saint John Henry Newman

The Word was from the beginning, the Only Son of God. Before the creation of the universe, even before time was, in the bosom of the eternal Father, he already existed: God from God, Light from Light, supremely blessed in his knowledge of the Father and in the knowledge the Father had of him; receiving every divine perfection from Him yet always one with He who had begotten him. As it is written at the beginning of the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”… After man had fallen he could, in fact, have remained in the glory which he had with the Father. But that unfathomable love, which made itself known at the origin of our creation, not willing to see its work in ruins, caused him to come down from the bosom of his Father to carry out His will and to restore the evil caused by sin. With wonderful indulgence he came, not clothed with power but in weakness, beneath the form of a servant, in the likeness of that same fallen man it was his purpose to raise up. So he humbled himself, undergoing all the handicaps of our nature, in a sinful flesh like ours, like a sinner except without sin, innocent of all fault yet subject to every temptation and, at the end, “obedient to death, even death on a cross,” (Phil 2,8)… Thus the Son of God became the Son of Man – mortal, yet without sin; the inheritor of our infirmities but not of our guilt; rejected by the ancient race but the source of the new creation of God (cf. Rev 3,14). Mary, his mother,… bestowed a created nature on him who was her Creator. And so he came into this world, not on the clouds of heaven, but born here below, born of a woman. He was the son of Mary, and she, the Mother of God… He was truly God and man, but one only person…, one only Christ.

maronite readings – rosary,team