I hope that you enjoy my Christmas video message. If you are unable to watch it, please see a transcript of the video below:
Dominus dixit ad me : Filius meus es tu; ego hodie genui te.
"The Lord hath said to me, thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee."
First of all, may I wish all my subscribers on Substack a very Merry Christmas. I hope you enjoy it both spiritually and temporally.
The great thing about today is Christ coming into the world, God being with us. But that could not have happened without the Blessed Virgin, without Mary, the Mother of God.
And this is one of those things that I have always been amazed by, because Mary is completely and utterly human. She is no different from the rest of us.
Christ is both God and man. He is not a God who takes the form of man, nor is he a man who later becomes God. He is both. He has two natures, through eternity as God and through his life on earth as man.
Our Lady is just another of us. And yet she says yes, one of the most important 'yes's in the whole of history. For think what happens on the 25th March, when the Archangel Gabriel comes to Our Lady and she says, "Be it done according to thy word".
His opening remarks are "Fear not, be not afraid", because the appearance of an angel would to any of us be absolutely terrifying, but Our Lady immediately gets over this terror, immediately is able to understand the situation, that this is a visit from God, and she accepts it. And through her acceptance, Christ can be born as man, and we have the opportunity of salvation.
This is why, of course, Our Lady is so greatly revered in the Catholic Church, and why so many Catholics like me devote our prayers via Our Lady to God. Our Lady is the great, the best intercessor for us all because, as I sometimes remind my sons, the perfect son will always do what his mother asks him.
So Our Lady, who persuaded Christ to turn water into wine at the marriage feast of Cana, is the great intercessor for mankind, because she was completely one of us. She knew what life on earth was like. She was not also divine.
And this is important because Our Lady never becomes God. Though she is the Queen of Heaven, though she is received in heavenly glory, assumed in heaven by her Son, she is not God. She always was human.
And therefore we can relate to her, I think, through her warmth, through her motherhood. And this all comes down to the fact that she said yes when the archangel appeared to her.
She could have said no. And of all the people in all the world who God could have chosen, he went to the Blessed Virgin to ask her to be the vessel of honour, to carry that precious baby in her womb, to deliver that precious child to us on Christmas Day.
And she did it without fear, and therefore she is now able to intercede for us and bring us closer to God and, we all hope, to salvation at the end of our current lives.
As I said, I hope you have a very happy spiritual, and temporal, Christmas.
If you have enjoyed this video message, then please do share it with your friends.
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