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Dear Parish Faithful,
Today is Christmas Eve and we are in our final preparation for the Feast of the Lord's Nativity. There are a multitude of themes that come readily to mind during this feast of inexhaustible spiritual riches - for the Incarnation opens up our minds and hearts to the inexhaustible mercy and love of God - "Since for our sake the eternal God was born a little child!"
So, I have a few somewhat random passages, each of which touches on a particular theme; and each of which contributes something meaningful to our own understanding and experience of the birth of Christ.
St. Ephraim the Syrian
To begin, here is a portion of St. Ephraim's Hymn I On the Nativity. St. Ephraim was the precursor of St. Romanos the Melode from the Syrian tradition, who wrote a type of poetic theology in a series of beautiful hymns based on his knowledge of the Scriptures. These hymns were usually sung in church but today we at least have the texts which have come down to us. Toward the end of this hymn, St. Ephraim draws out the moral and ethical imperatives that flow from the doctrine of the Incarnation:
Serene is the night in which shines forth the Serene One Who
came to give us serenity.
Do not allow anything that might disturb it to enter upon our
watch.
Let the path of the ear be cleared; let the sight of the eye be
chastened;
let the contemplation of the heart be sanctified; let the speech of the
mouth be purified.
This is the night of reconciliation; let us be neither wrathful nor
gloomy on it.
On this all-peaceful night let us be neither menacing nor boisterous.
This is the night of the Sweet One; let us be on it neither bitter nor
harsh.
On this night of the Humble One, let us be neither proud nor
haughty.
On this day of forgiveness let us not avenge offenses.
On this day of rejoicings let us not share sorrows.
On this sweet day let us not be vehement.
On this calm day let us not be quick-tempered
On this day on which God came into the presence of sinners,
let not the just man exalt himself in his mind over the sinner.
On this day when the Rich One was made poor for our sake,
let the rich man also make the poor man a sharer at his table.
On this day a gift came out to us without our asking for it;
let us then give alms to those who cry out and beg from us.
This Lord of natures today was transformed contrary to His
nature;
it is not too difficult for us also to overthrow our evil will.
Bound is the body by its nature for it cannot grow larger or smaller;
but powerful is the will for it may grow to all sizes.
Today the Deity imprinted itself on humanity,
so that humanity might also be cut into the seal of Deity.
Ephraim the Syrian Hymns, p. 73-74.
St. John Chrysostom
St. John Chrysostom implores us not to "pry" into the mystery of the virginal conception of the Son of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary. To do so is to try and analyze or rationalize a mystery both unanalyzable and trans-rational:
Do not speculate beyond the text. Do not require of it something more than which it simply says. Do not ask, "But precisely how was it that the Spirit accomplished this in a virgin?" For even when nature is at work, it is impossible fully to explain the manner of the formation of the person. How then, when the Spirit is accomplishing miracles, shall we be able to express their causes? ...Shame on those who attempt to pry into the miracle of generation from on high! For this birth can by no means be explained, yet it has witnesses beyond number and has been proclaimed from ancient times as a real birth handled by human hands. ... For neither Gabriel not Matthew was able to say anything more, but only that the generation was from the Spirit But how from the Spirit? In what manner? Neither Gabriel nor Matthew has explained, nor is it possible.... So how could the infinite One reside in a womb? How could he that contains all be carried as yet unborn by a woman? How could the Virgin bear and continue to be a Virgin? Explain to me how the Spirit designed the temple of his body.
The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 4.3.
Archbishop Kallistos Ware
When Jesus Christ was born, a new person did not come into existence. But a divine Person was born in the flesh. Archbishop Kallistos Ware explains this great mystery with theological clarity:
When a child is born from two human parents in the usual fashion, a new person begins to exist. But the person of the incarnate Christ is none other than the second person of the Holy Trinity. At Christ's birth, therefore, no new person came into existence, but the pre-existent person of the Son of God now began to live according to a human as well as a divine mode of being. So the Virgin Birth reflects Christ's eternal pre-existence.
Because the person of the incarnate Christ is the same as the person of the Logos, the Virgin Mary may rightly be given the title Theotokos, "God-bearer." She is mother, not of a human son joined to the divine Son, but of a human son who is the only-begotten Son of God. The son of Mary is the same person as the divine Son of God; and so, by virtue of the Incarnation, Mary is in truth "Mother of God".
The Orthodox Way, p. 76-77.
Brendan Byrne
And, to close, I would like to turn to a very insightful passage from a contemporary biblical scholar, Brendan Byrne, who reflects deeply on the implications of the genealogy of Christ that introduces the Gospel According to St. Matthew, and which we heard yesterday on the Sunday Before the Nativity.
That genealogy is decidedly not a list of saintly figures from the Old Testament, but at times something of a "motley crew" of some real great sinners, mixed in with some righteous figures. The point that Brendan Byrne makes is that this mixture of the "good" and the "bad" may also describe our own personal genealogy! But that does not mean that God can not providentially work us through this on a personal level:
The One believers own as Son of God and Savior did not just drop out of the sky, so to speak, without a mixed history - good and bad - that lies behind every human life. There are skeletons in his family closet just as there are in ours. Nor was this line "pure" in an ethnic sense or exempt from sexual scandal and exploitation. But it is through just such a human history that the thread of salvation runs. The invitation is there to trace in our own "ancestry," whether it be our family story or our individual life story, a similar working of grace and redemption, all to be woven into the wider pattern of salvation brought by Jesus.
Lifting the Burden, p. 22.
Closing Thoughts
Just a "taste" of the profound mystery surrounding the Nativity of Christ. In addition to reading this series of wonderful passages, it still remains that the actual worship of Christ through our liturgical tradition offers us the very experience of being united to Christ.
We will celebrate the great Feast of the Nativity in the following manner:
Festal Matins this evening at 7:00 p.m.
Divine Liturgy Tuesday morning at 9:30 a.m.
In our hyper-hectic world, I hope that everyone has something of a vigilant day in which being a Christian is somehow manifested.
