I will put enmity between you and the woman.
The Lord, coming
into his own creation in visible form, was sustained by that creation of his
own which he himself sustains in being. His obedience on the tree of the cross
reversed the disobedience at the tree in Eden; the good news of the truth
announced by an angel to Mary, a virgin subject to a husband, undid the evil
lie that seduced Eve, a virgin espoused to a husband.
As
Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and so fled from God after disobeying
his word, Mary in her turn was given the good news by the word of an angel, and
bore God in obedience to his word. As Eve was seduced into disobedience to God,
so Mary was persuaded into obedience to God; thus the Virgin Mary became the
advocate of the virgin Eve.
Christ gathered all things into one, by
gathering them into himself. He declared war against our enemy, crushed him who
at the beginning had taken us captive in Adam, and trampled on his head, in
accordance with God’s words to the serpent in Genesis: I will put enmity
between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall lie in
wait for your head, and you shall lie in wait for his heel.
The one lying in wait for the serpent’s
head is the one who was born in the likeness of Adam from the woman, the
Virgin. This is the seed spoken of by Paul in the letter to the Galatians: The
law of works was in force until the seed should come to whom the promise was
made.
He shows this even more clearly in the same
letter when he says: When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born
of a woman. The enemy would not have been defeated fairly if his vanquisher had
not been born of a woman, because it was through a woman that he had gained
mastery over man in the beginning, and set himself up as man’s adversary.