Vigils Reading

An Excerpt from Sermon Eighty-Three on the Song of Songs6 by John of Ford

From the moment that ‘the Word was made flesh’, the Lord Jesus bore his cross, truly from then on ‘a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief’. In fact, we hold that the evangelist intended to reveal this by saying that ‘the Word was made flesh’, the word ‘flesh’ standing deliberately for his capacity to suffer and feel compassion. If you think of it, what in all creation is weaker than human flesh, or more tender? Weakness implies suffering and tenderness implies compassion, the two factors form which, as from two bars of wood, the cross of Christ was fashioned. We have the word of St Gregory that the real cross of Christ is to suffer and to feel compassion, by which he means pain of body and sympathy of soul. Of course, the necessary condition is that a cross like this is carried for Christ’s sake and in his dispositions.

It is clear enough that Christ bore a cross of this kind from his very entrance into his mother’s body, where he suffered the constriction of her virginal womb. Probably he suffered more than other babies, in that he who had come to learn suffering from experience, could not be without the sense of pain. From his very beginning, he was full of grace, but he was also pre-eminently full of knowledge and truth. So even when in the womb ‘he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows,’ and he did this all the more truly because he did it with full knowledge and consent. But other babies pass through this experience in what one might call the sleep of ignorance.

Here, within the narrowness of the womb, narrow indeed, he sought and found what long ago in paradise, Adam sought, and could not find its hiding place. Here he seized hold of the urge to sin, which the serpent had struck the first man, and drew it out with his hands. He saw his task through to the end, working now ‘ salvation in the midst of the earth’, and diligently and vigorously purging out all stain from human conception. Yes, it was there that the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world, it was there he did penance for our wickedness, enduring nine months of weariness and constantly interceding with the Father on our behalf.

For it was his choice not to anticipate the hour of his birth, but to go patiently through the normal stages of being formed. He awaited the ordinary period of being brought forth by his mother, for he had come to be all things for all men, and he wanted to be, also, a child for all children. In only one respect he evaded the laws that govern other infants when he entered his mother’s womb, he did not desecrate its sanctity; he caused no inconvenience while he lived within it; he did not tear it when he left. The Lord Jesus is the only infant who was truly innocent, for he made his mother’s virginity fruitful by his own conception, he sanctified it by his growth within her, and he gave her great joy by his actual birth