Christ is born! Glorify Him!
If you are anything like most Orthodox Christians, then you have been waiting to hear those ancient words signaling the beginning of the celebration of Christ’s nativity in Bethlehem since the fast started on November the 15th. We have gone through 40 difficult and tiring days of prayer and fasting, and now we have finally arrived at the celebration of Christ’s birth. Our preparation has paid off to make us ready for this celebration, and now we can keep festival with the joy of Christ in our hearts and with the communion of our friends and family.
But why do we Orthodox take the celebration of Christmas so seriously? Why do we insist on celebrating Christ’s birth for 12 whole days, and not just on one?* Why is God becoming man at all relevant to our lives?
The answer to those questions lies in the reason that God chooses to become a human. God becomes incarnate in order to save the entire human race, which is broken and fallen due to our sin and corruption. We are not able to ascend the heights of virtue to become like God, so God, in His great mercy and love for humanity, condescends from His throne and dwells among us men. God becomes a man in the person of Jesus Christ, who is both fully human and fully God. He is not born through intimate relations like all other humans are but is rather born of the Virgin Mary through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. A human womb contains Him Who cannot be contained. The Theotokos** accepts into herself God, Who is a consuming fire and is not herself consumed. Christ is a born in a cave***, His birth being announced and glorified by angels, shepherds, animals, and wise men from the east.
How can all of this be? It is a mystery beyond human comprehension. For with man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible. But we do know that this great mystery surely deserves our celebration and preparation for. Christ has come to redeem the world from death, but is first born in a cave, and comes and ministers to us men, preaching repentance for our salvation. The birth of Christ points us even further to His destruction of death by His own death and resurrection. Our icons of the Nativity demonstrate this: Christ is wrapped in grave clothes and lies down in a cave from birth (just like He did in the tomb on the Sabbath), thus foretelling the way in which He would die and be buried (see the cover picture for an example of such an icon).
The significance of Christmas can be summarized by the words of St. Nikolai Velimirovich, who said:
With the God-man Christ, all that is God’s has become man’s, human, ours, so that each of us individually and all of us assembled together in the Divine-human body of Christ, the Church, might become god-men, having attained ‘to the perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’ (Eph 4:12-13). Therefore Christmas, the day of the birth of the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the greatest and most important day in the history of all the worlds in which man moves and lives.
So thus let us celebrate the beginning of Christ’s earthly life and look with hope and joy towards Christ’s earthly ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven to save all of humanity. Let us glorify Christ, Whose birth we will celebrate for 12 entire days in honor of His divine condescension to save us. It is to this God we give glory, to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
*Christians have historically celebrated Christmas for 12 days, giving and receiving gifts on each of the days. This is where the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” gets its premise from.
** Greek for, “The Mother of God,” Theotokos is an ancient Christian word still used today to refer to the Virgin Mary.
***Although most western images of the Nativity do not depict this, most stables were in caves in those days. Thus, Christ, the God-Man, was born in a cave.
