Ave Maria Meditations
The Son of God who was in the beginning with God, through whom all things were made, without Him nothing was made, became man to free man from eternal death.
He stooped down to take up our lowliness without loss to His own glory. He remained what He was; He took up what he was not. He wanted to join the very nature of a servant to that nature in which He is equal to God the Father. He wanted to unite both natures in an alliance so wonderful that the glory of the greater would not annihilate the lesser, nor the taking up of a lower diminish the greatness of the higher.
What belongs to each nature is preserved intact and meets the other in one person: lowliness is taken up by greatness, weakness by power, mortality by eternity. To pay the debt of our human condition, a nature incapable of suffering is united to a nature capable of suffering, and true God and true Man are forged into the unity that is the Lord. This was done to make possible the kind of remedy that fitted our human need: one and the same Mediator between God and man able to die because of one nature, able to rise again because of the other.
Pope St. Leo the Great
