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The Christmas Cycle
The Son of God takes upon Himself the wretchedness of the human race and becomes a child
at Bethlehem. At His side stand Mary and Joseph, descendants of David, who had come to the
city to be enrolled in obedience to the ordinance of Caesar. While fulfilling this duty, Mary
gives birth to her Son, wraps Him in swaddling clothes, and cares for Him as any other mother
would have done. Faith shows us the fullness of the divinity behind this outward appearance of
weakness and helplessness. “The Lord hath said to Me: Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten
Thee” (Introit of the first Christmas Mass). We see a weak, newborn babe, but we acknowledge
Him to be the Son of God, one in nature and essence with the all-knowing, all-powerful God.
“O wondrous exchange!” The Son of God partakes of our human nature. He is fitted with
a body such as ours, and is subject to the hunger, thirst, and other annoyances and sufferings
which all human beings undergo. He has a soul like ours, with all its delicate sensibilities, its
love of beauty and truth, its sense of man’s degradation by Original Sin. “Wherefore it behooved
Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might become a merciful and
faithful priest before God, that He might be a propitiation for the sins of the people” (Heb
2:17). He partakes of our human nature in order to cleanse it and make it worthy to participate
in the divine nature. Child of the crib, how shall we thank You for this wondrous fellowship?
“O wondrous exchange!” We give the Son of God our misery and our nothingness, and He shares
with us His divine nature. In exchange for what we give Him, He adorns us with sanctifying
grace, calls us to the sonship of God and the resurrection to eternal life, and assures us of our
possession of bliss for eternity. For what we have given Him, He tells us “that eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for
them that love Him” (1 Cor 2:9).
“O wondrous exchange!” In the Offertory procession of the Mass we bring the elements of
bread and wine, and with them offer up our bodies and our souls, our hearts, our miseries, our
sins, and our needs. Suscipe, Domine: “Receive, O Lord, our gifts.” He accepts them and in the
Consecration transforms them and fills them with His divine nature, with His light and His life,
and He gives them back to us in Holy Communion, no longer bread and wine, no longer our own
unworthiness and nothingness, but His own flesh and blood, His own divine nature and human
nature, pure, holy, full of divine power and divine life. “He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My
blood abideth in Me, and I in him. . . . He that eateth this bread shall live forever” ( Jn 6:57, 59).
Prayer
May the oblation of this day’s festival be pleasing to Thee, we beseech Thee, O Lord; that of Thy
bountiful grace we may, through this sacred exchange, be found conformed to Him in whom
our substance is united to Thee. Who with Thee liveth and reigneth forever. Amen.
At the Manger (4)
“O wondrous exchange! The Creator of the human race, taking unto Himself a living body,
deigns to be born of a virgin; and becoming man from no human generation, He hath bestowed
upon us His divinity” (Antiphon for the octave of Christmas). In the Incarnation there takes
place a marvelous exchange; on the one hand, God assumes our human nature; on the other,
He permits us to share in His divine nature.
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