One Minute Reflection – 12 October – “The Month of the Most Holy Rosary and of the Angels” – Ferial Day – Romans 15:4-13. Matthew 11:2-10 – Scripture search here: https://www.drbo.org/
“And again Isaias says, There shall be the root of Jesse and He Who shall arise to rule the Gentiles… in Him the Gentiles shall hope.” – Roman 15:12
REFLECTION – “Until the beginning of the vision, or the burden of Babylon, which Isaias the son of Amos saw, his entire prophecy was about Christ, a prophecy which we want to explain piecemeal, lest the ideas and discussions thereof together, confuse the reader’s memory.
The Jews interpreted the branch and the flower from the root of Jesse, to be the Lord Himself because, the power of His governance, is demonstrated in the branch and His beauty, in the flower. But ,we understand the branch, from the root of Jesse, to be the holy Virgin Mary, who had no shoot connatural to herself. About her we read …: “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son.” And the flower is the Lord our Saviour, Who said, in the Song of Songs, “I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys.” In place of “root,” which only the Septuagint translated, the Hebrew text has geza, which Aquila and Symmachus and Theodotus, interpret as kormon, that is, “stem.” And they translated “flower,” which the Hebrew text calls nēṣer, as “bud,” to show that after a long time in Babylonian captivity, no longer possessing any glory from the sprout of the old kingdom of David, Christ would rise from Mary, as though from her stem. The educated of the Hebrews believe that what all the ecclesiastics sought in the Gospel of Matthew but could not find, where it was written “Because He will be called a Nazarene,” was taken from this place. But it should be noted that nēṣer was written here with the [Hebrew] letter ṣade [צ], the peculiar sound of which—somewhere between z and s—the Latin language does not express.” – St Jerome (343-420) Father and Doctor of the Church (Commentary on Isaias 4.)
PRAYER – O God, Who, by the message of an Angel, willed to take flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, grant that we, Thy suppliants, who believe her to be truly the Mother of God, may, by her intercession, be assisted in attaining eternal life. Through the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son our Lord, Who lives and reigns with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen (Collect).
AnaStpaul 