Our Lady of Consolation
Why do we celebrate Christmas anyway? Here is one answer, taken from "On the Incarnation of the Word" by St. Athanasius (296 AD - 373 AD)
For in speaking of the appearance of the Saviour among us,
we must needs speak also of the origin of men, that you may know that the
reason of His coming down was because of us, and that our transgression called
forth the loving-kindness of the Word, that the Lord should both make haste to
help us and appear among men. For of His
becoming Incarnate we were the object, and for our salvation He dealt so
lovingly as to appear and be born even in a human body.
…. He took pity on our race, and had mercy on our infirmity . . . and, unable to bear that death should have
the mastery. . . He takes unto Himself a body, and that of no different
sort from ours. . . . He takes a body of our kind, and not merely so, but from a
spotless and stainless virgin, knowing not a man, a body clean and in very
truth pure from intercourse of men. For being Himself mighty, and Artificer of
everything, He prepares the body in the Virgin as a temple unto Himself, and
makes it His very own as an instrument, in it manifested, and in it dwelling. And thus taking from our bodies one of like
nature, because all were under penalty of the corruption of death He gave it
over to death in the stead of all, and offered it to the Father— doing this,
moreover, of His loving-kindness, to the end that, firstly, all being held to
have died in Him, the law involving the ruin of men might be undone (inasmuch
as its power was fully spent in the Lord's body, and had no longer
holding-ground against men, his peers), and that, secondly, whereas men had
turned toward corruption, He might turn them again toward incorruption, and
quicken them from death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of
the Resurrection, banishing death from them like straw from the fire.
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