Vigils Reading
July 1
OUR FIRST PARENTS
From a sermon by Isaac of Stella
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The common wounds of Adam and his posterity, are disorders that come
to our nature from its origins, born at our beginning and burgeoning as we grow.
Such is our condition thanks to “the Amorite that begot” us and “the Hittite that
bore us” and forsook us. Truly we are “the seed of Canaan, and not of Judah.”
Born of such stock there was “no water to wash us, no salt to harden us, none
would wrap us in swaddling-clothes, our navel-string was left uncut.”
None showed us the pity such cases are in need of. No, not even those
First Parents of ours, so truly “of the earth”, “earthly” did they prove. Parents at
once of our nature and our guilt, they gave us death at the very time that they
gave us life. They sowed what was indeed theirs to bestow; they freely donated
what they had themselves sadly discovered. They begot us into their own
confused condition, children in every way like their fathers. Just as our First
Parents reaped variously from different sources, so did they sow in different
ways, implanting in us nature from God and guilt from the devil. No wonder our
origins condition us so that we are children of God and children of the devil. We
are good, well-endowed creatures of God, and also wickedly and woefully ruined
by the devil. On the one hand, we have a nature that makes us something; on the
other, we bear the guilt that brings us to nothing.
This last, this nothingness of ours, is all the devil’s doing and is precisely
that from which the Son of God at his coming, would loose and free us, and so
rescue that something that we really are. He came to restore what is his in us to
destroy what another has done to us… He would separate the good from the evil
in us, the evil from the good, the precious from the vile…
We have but to listen to Isaiah would we learn how resolutely and how
ready Christ came to the task of our redemption. “From the root of Jesse,” he
says, “a rod shall burgeon”—it could not do so from the branches— “and out of
its root a flower shall spring.” This should kindle hope in me: flowers are sure
harbingers of fruit. “On him the spirit of the Lord will rest.” No wonder the Fruit
is so Good. Where else could Christ be conceived if not in Nazareth, where born
save in Bethlehem? On him had rested “a spirit wise and discerning.” His soul
was indeed rich in virtue, abounding in divine gifts; and not for nothing. Having
to measure up to and vanquish seven forms of concupiscence, the Gifts of the
Spirit are seven; Adam’s cravings are countered by seven Gifts in Christ. Seven
wounds call for seven medicines, one against the other. Though nature in Adam
is one thing and guilt is another, yet both are in him together.
Were a single fountain to supply, even if by different pipes, wine and
water together, the result would mean drawing watered wine or wine-filled
water. This is our case, “sons of Adam!” Our “wine has grown watery;” our
native guilt and our guilty nature, both, come [into existence] simultaneously.
Your nature is no sooner a good gift of the Good God than it is guilt infected by
the Wicked One. Child begotten to man is by that very fact sinner begotten to
sinner. Our nature, for all its goodness, is never without evil or guilt; this very
evil guilt has no foothold except in a nature that is good.