Vigils Reading

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.