Here, is the Son of Abraham, Issac and Jacob the Son of Jesse, David and Solomon a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” to use St. And, for the Hebrew people, we have here the final result, the summit, of the entire Hebrew race. One must understand, here: we have the Lord God Himself, the All-Father, the one most due our piety, Incarnate. A woman was conceived by barren parents, her nature prevented by grace from contracting the ancient contagion the Lord would take the entirety of His nature from her purity, having no human father. When the fullness of time arrived, the Lord began by purifying again the human race in its origins, laying the groundwork for a revived and truer piety.
The Old Testament is full of foreshadowings of this mission, which, sadly, are beyond the scope of this article. The first and long part of this process, was to consecrate a single people (i.e., separate them from the rest of the world), and prepare them gradually to produce the Messiah. The Lord, however, in pronouncing the curse upon them, was actually providing the means of remedy that would one day come: the decree of suffering, which God would take upon Himself.
The first parents of the human race, in degrading themselves, degraded the origin of all men, and ruptured the friendship they had with God their maker.
Augustine has well summarized this by contrasting two cities-the City of God, and the City of Man. The Lord knew that His Passion, the center of history and the greatest act of Piety, would necessarily provoke the great impiety, an exacerbation of the Mystery of Iniquity long working in the world. In the Passion of Christ, on the day whereof this article will likely post, we find that impiety and piety were in special conflict. The net effect is to impede people from putting down roots, or retaining any connection to the roots they had. It attacks whatever survives, by teaching the people to hate themselves, their parents and their ancestors, most effectively along lines of class and race tensions. In attacking sexual matters, it eats away at the very root of society. We also saw how modern society is based upon impiety, piety’s opposite-hence, its obsession chiefly with sex and gender, internal class struggles and racism. Last week, we mentioned that impiety is the virtue of showing respect for our roots and those joined closely to us in them. This week we continue on the theme of impiety, with a bit longer article in honor of the Sacred Triduum.