Christ is Born!

   Knowing that our Lord Jesus Christ is both God and man, we can say also, 'God is born!".

In no Faith other than Orthodoxy does this expression make sense in the manner that it does to us.  By definition, God is He Who is eternal.  Birth carries with it the understanding of a beginning in time for a presence in the flesh.  These two together are nonsensical when human understanding is applied.  Inside the Church, we effortlessly proclaim Jesus Christ as both God and Man equally and simultaneously.  It is a core belief of Orthodoxy!

Therefore the acceptance of this non-sequitur, this un-understandable conjunction of definitions, is at the very heart of what we as Orthodox Christians profess and proclaim.  Jesus Christ is both God and Man.  Christ is born!  God is born!  The God-man takes on our flesh in His plan to effect salvation for all of mankind.  God becomes man so that man might become god.  (St. Athanasius)  The blessed saint continues, He became what we are that He might make us what He is.

St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches this: Let us utter the words of the Psalm, joining in chorus with the loud-voiced David: “Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord.”  How does He come?  He crosses over into human life, not by boat or by chariot, but through the incorruption of a Virgin.  This is our God.  This is our Lord, Who appeared to us to ordain a Feast with thick branches, even unto the horns of the altar.

God puts on matter.  He who is immaterial and above His creation accepts to become as one whom He created, and in so doing, His matter touches the matter of His Creation.  Yes, this implies the matter of the earth.  The Holy Church expresses this in the hymnology of the upcoming Feast of Theophany, stating clearly the understanding of our Lord's changing the nature of the waters through His baptism.  But more importantly He left to us the matter of His precious Body and Blood.  Through the mysteries of the Church that is His Bride, He has touched us as well.  And He continues to do so every time we participate in the sacraments, the mysteries of His Church—each of them!

As we gather now to offer praise with the voices of the Angels, Glory to God in the Highest!, we marvel at His dispensation and His unbounded love for us.

St. Jerome says this:  They will not find Christ unless they keep watch.  This is the shepherd’s duty. Christ is not found except by the alert.  Psalm 121:4 says “Indeed the guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.”  The shepherds were keeping watch in the fields nearby.  Herod was there; the high priests and the Pharisees were there; while they were sleeping, Christ is found by watchful shepherds in a lonely grotto.

Let us together assume the vocation of shepherds.  Let us be watchful so that we, like those shepherds of old, may be accounted worthy to behold God as Born!

CHRIST IS BORN!

GLORIFY HIM!