Christ is born!
Dear brothers and sisters, we have reached once again the celebration of the Nativity according to the Flesh of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. For us Orthodox Christians, it is of course one of the greatest feasts of the entire Church year. In our secular Western culture, it is one of the few Christian feasts which has survived at all (and for many Protestants, Christmas is often treated as far more important than Easter itself, which sadly has grown more and more neglected by them). This is all the more remarkable when one considers not only the utter obscurity in which this feast originated (“Thou wast born secretly in a cave,” as the Church sang yesterday), but also the many (and ofttimes violent) attempts to eradicate the celebration of Christ’s Nativity throughout history. Puritans in England, Pilgrims in America, Jacobins in France, Bolsheviks in Russia, and Maoists in China all made the celebration of Christmas illegal. Yet without exception, their efforts failed; even the all-consuming tides of modern secularism have thus far proved unable to sweep away our remembrance of this great and glorious day.
Why is that this particular feast has resisted such concerted efforts to destroy it? I think that mere cultural memory cannot entirely explain it; after all, Whitsun was once one of the three great festivals of the Christian year during medieval times, whereas today most Americans one meets on the street would likely be hard pressed to so much as identify the event it commemorates (even if one refers to it by the less British name of Pentecost). On the other hand, even the most spiritually apathetic atheist might have little trouble telling you that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Why?
The answer, it seems to me, is that despite all our carelessness, despite all our worldliness, despite all the demonic efforts throughout history to eradicate the remembrance of this day from among men, nevertheless there remains in all of us at least some small — but indelible — sense of the supreme and eternal significance of this day. Indeed, how could it possibly be otherwise? As St. Justin Popovic wrote:
God’s incarnation is the greatest upheaval and the most providential event, both on Earth and in Heaven, for the miracle of miracles has happened. If up until then the creation of the world from nothing was the greatest miracle, the incarnation of God in man has without a doubt surpassed it in its miraculousness. If at the creation of the world the words of God were clothed in matter, then at the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ God has clothed Himself in a body, in matter, in flesh. Therefore the incarnation of God became providential throughout the whole creation—for every individual, for every being, for every creature.
Listen carefully to what he said: “for every being, for every creature.” God not only clothed Himself in humanity; He also clothed Himself in matter. As St. John of Damascus would later write in his Dialectica: “since the divinity has been united to our nature, as a kind of life-giving and saving medicine, our nature has been glorified and its very elements changed into incorruption.” And we can see this great truth reflected in the fact that today’s feast has historically been so intimately connected with the Feast of Theophany, when the Incarnate Christ first revealed Himself to the people precisely by sanctifying the nature of water. Truly, as the Katavasion of the 9th Ode of the Great Canon says: “The birth of God makes all creation new.”
Thus, today the God-Man has become incarnate not for the sake of man alone, but also for the sake of the whole creation; the Second Adam has come to fulfill the holy obedience from which the First Adam fell, uniting in Himself all things in heaven and on earth, “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). St. Maximus the Confessor explains this great mystery in his 7th Ambiguum, stating that it is God’s good pleasure that
the creator of all things might be received as one, coming to reside through humanity in all beings proportionally, and that all things, separated from each other according to nature, might come to unity by converging around the one nature of man.
And this is why “the earnest expectation of [creation] waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God” (Rom. 8:19): because on that day, all creation will — according to its proper measure — participate through us in God.
My brothers and sisters, what a supremely lofty calling and what absolutely incomprehensible grace has been bestowed upon us this day by our all-compassionate God! Our salvation is so much more than merely an escape from punishment, or even from death itself. It is so much more, even, than to dwell in paradise for all eternity. Our salvation is nothing less than to participate in the divine life of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. Not only has He become incarnate on this day, but He also invited each of us sinners to share fully with Him in His incarnation, in this unparalleled theanthropic miracle which has transfigured all creation. How? Quite simply, by participation in the life of the Church. As St. Hilarion Troitsky writes: “The Church is a direct continuation of the Incarnation, as a building can be called the continuation of its foundation.”
And so we must here make our descent from the heights of heavenly mysteries to the simple practice of everyday Christian life — or rather, we must begin with the simple practice of everyday Christian life, in order to ascend thence to the heights of heaven. After all, these sublime truths and resplendent pearls of theology of which we have been speaking do not make a very satisfactory answer to my original question: why does the remembrance of Christmas still endure so strongly even in our unbelieving world?
To answer that question — and to make a beginning ourselves in the acquisition of the beautiful pearls of theology of which we have just spoken — we need simply call to mind the passage from the Gospel of Matthew which we have heard repeatedly read in church since yesterday morning:
Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. (Matt. 1:22-23)
“God with us.” This, my brothers and sisters, is the heart of Christmas, and of all Christianity. And this utterly profound yet exceedingly simple truth is something which every single one of us can understand — and which our world (despite its strongest efforts) cannot possibly forget: “God is with us, understand, O ye nations!”
On this day, God has entered into His creation and filled all things with Himself, so that wherever we might turn and whatever might befall us, God is with us. And so have the words of the Psalmist found their fulfillment on this day:
If I go up into heaven, Thou art there; if I go down into hades, Thou art present there.
If I take up my wings towards the dawn, and make mine abode in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall Thy hand guide me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.
And I said: Surely darkness will tread me down, and the night shall be turned into light in my delight.
For darkness will not be darkness with Thee, and night shall be bright as the day; as is the darkness thereof, even so shall the light thereof be.
For Thou has possessed my reins; O Lord, Thou hast holpen me from my mother’s womb.
I will confess Thee, for awesomely art Thou wondrous; marvellous are Thy works, and my soul knoweth it right well. (Psalm 138)
God is with us. God is with us, and — in the words of St. Basil the Great — “all things has He given unto us.” But of all the things He has given us, the most terrible without question is our freedom. God is with us — but we ourselves must decide whether we want to be with Him.
What kind of answer do the actions of our own lives make? All too often, it is an answer which we would be ashamed to hear spoken aloud by our lips. Yet on this day of all days, we can at least take heart that humankind has once given to God a fitting answer to His divine invitation:
What shall we offer Thee, O Christ,
Inasmuch as thou hast appeared on earth as a Man for our sake?
All creation, fashioned by Thee, doth offer Thee thanksgiving.
The angels offer hymnody, the heavens a star.
The magi offer gifts; the shepherds their wonder;
The earth a cave; the wilderness a manger;
And we - the Virgin Mother. (Sticheron for Vespers on the Eve of the Nativity of Christ)
Yet at the same time, as St. Philaret of Moscow writes:
Look at Her example, a soul striving for union with God, and see in the mirror of Her perfection your duty. The Lord is a jealous God. When He says to man with a voice of fatherly kindness: Son, give Me thy heart, His righteous jealousy is commanding, in a spiritual as well as a moral sense: Do not commit adultery. He Who gave us a heart is not satisfied with a larger or smaller portion of it: it must all belong to the Master of everything. He does not consider any kind of love to be worthy of Himself which is not based on love of Him. Every enjoyment which we passionately seek for ourselves, every thought directed toward creation, every distraction, is a departure from Him.
The Holy Fathers tell us that there is only one thing in the entire world which truly belongs to man, and therefore only this one thing which we are truly able to offer God: our freedom. Let us therefore resolve, on this holy day of the Nativity of Christ, to strive with all our might to offer Him this one gift in return for all that He Himself has given to us. God is with us; let us therefore never depart from Him to run after the vain and fleeting things of this life, but rather let us remain with Him at all times and in all things.
And to remain with Christ on Christmas Day means to remain with Him in lowliness, in silence, in humility, and in poverty. He was born in a cave and lay in a manger, far from the praise of men and completely bereft of all the good things of this life. Let us remember that it was only to poor and humble shepherds that the angels appeared, summoning them to come behold the face of Christ. Let us, therefore, strive to be like them, and to become obedient to the words of the Divine Liturgy which we will hear once again only a few short minutes from now: “Let us now lay aside all earthly cares, that we may receive the King of All, Who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic host. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”
Let us be with God in silence. Let us be with Him in prayer. Let us be with Him in humility, and in mercy, and — above all — in self-emptying and self-sacrificial love. Let us seize — with gratitude and with longing — upon every opportunity for each of things which the all-wise providence of God offers us in our lives. Because in all of these things, He is offering us nothing less than Himself.
God is with us; let us, from this day forth, choose always to be with Him. Amen.
Christ is Born!