In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.  Christ is Born!  Glorify Him!

Today at Vespers (I say today because it is during Vespers that the Church begins its new day), we heard some astounding hymnography.  Because we sang it and the words went by quickly, perhaps they did not sink in as much as they would if we’d read them from the page, so I’ll read some of it again.  As the Orthodox Church knows anything worth saying is worth repeating.  From one of the troparia of “Lord I have Cried” we hear:

Come, let us greatly rejoice in the Lord,

as we sing of this present mystery:

the wall which divided God from man has been destroyed;

the flaming sword withdraws from Eden’s gate;

the Cherubim withdraw from the Tree of Life;

and I, who had been cast out through my disobedience,

now feast on the delights of Paradise:

for today the Father’s perfect Image,

marked with the stamp of His eternity,

has taken the form of a servant.

Without undergoing change He is born from an unwedded mother;

He was true God, and He remains the same,

but through His love for mankind,

He has become what He never was: true man.

Come, O faithful, let us cry to Him://

“O God, born of the Virgin, have mercy on us!”

I will suppose that it is not necessary to remind anyone that we are still celebrating the Nativity of our Lord.  We’ve all heard of the 12 days of Christmas, well, we still celebrate all 12 days, and so our hymnography today reflects this great miracle of God becoming flesh.

Come, let us greatly rejoice in the Lord,

as we sing of this present mystery:

the wall which divided God from man has been destroyed;

the flaming sword withdraws from Eden’s gate;

the Cherubim withdraw from the Tree of Life;

and I, who had been cast out through my disobedience,

now feast on the delights of Paradise:

With the Lord’s incarnation the separation that man created between himself and God has disappeared.  We who had been banished from Paradise can now hear with the Thief on the Cross, “this day you will be with Me in Paradise.” Where before men trembled at the thought of death and the afterlife was seen as a place of dread, hades. 

When we contemplate that the Cherubim have been withdrawn from the Tree of Life, we must remember what Our Lord said when He first placed them there in the first place: “‘Behold the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil.  Now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever….’ Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of pleasure to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.”  Now, this man becoming like one of Us, does not mean he has attained to the Likeness of God which is the Son and Word of God.  No, it simply means that man has attained some knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil.  It was, however, knowledge that man was not ready for and it was bought at the cost of disobedience to the Lord.  By this disobedience, man’s eyes were opened and he gained some knowledge but he also drew in corruption to himself…just as the Lord had said; if Adam and Eve ate from the tree they would die by death. 

The man and woman knew that they were naked because they had lost the light of God which had shone around them.  They would die by death because they had lost the direct connection to those energies of God that sustained them and surrounded them.  They had fallen, and the first thing they felt was shame.  God, in His mercy, did not wish them to live in this fallen state forever.  Can you imagine what it would be like to live forever in a state of corruption and shame; separate from the energies of God?  There is an old folkloric image of what this would look like:  a vampire, a creature that is neither alive nor dead, but living on in hunger and torment.  The current popular image of vampires as a romantic image shows how far we have moved from true morality in our culture.  This is not to say that vampires are real, but the classic image of them serves as a good image of what an eternity without God would look like.  But we have just heard:

the Cherubim withdraw from the Tree of Life;

and I, who had been cast out through my disobedience,

now feast on the delights of Paradise

We are now permitted access to the Tree of Life!  What is this tree of life?  What is the fruit that we may eat now?  The tree is the Cross of our Lord and the food of this tree is the body of Christ Himself.

          What does it mean, then, that we are allowed now to eat of this tree?  It means that something fundamental in our nature has changed again.  Just as by Adam’s transgression, all humanity inherited a corruptible nature with death as its reward, so we have now, through Christ, inherited a nature which has put on incorruption.  St. Athanasius the Great describes the process quite well using the words of St. Paul to help and guide him:

“Since, then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, He also Himself assumed the same in order that through death He might bring to naught Him that hath the power of death, that is to say, the Devil, and might rescue those who all their lives were enslaved by the fear of death.” (Heb. 2.14)  For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things:  He put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.

St. Athanasius then quotes St. Paul who says that since death came by one man to all men, so in another man, Christ, all men can come to the resurrection.  By one man, Adam, death is victorious, in Christ; man gains the fruits of victory. “Now, therefore, when we die we no longer do so as men condemned to death, but as those who are even now in  process of rising we await the general resurrection of all, ‘which in its own times He shall show,’(1Tim.6.15) even God Who wrought it and bestowed it upon us,” writes St. Athanasius.  The Logos, the Word of God, the agent of Creation has become the agent of our re-creation, our renewal.  Who else, but the Creator could become our re-creator?  Man could not do this on his own for, as St. Athanasius also pointed out, “You cannot straighten in others what is warped in yourself.”  The Troparion continues:

for today the Father’s perfect Image,

marked with the stamp of His eternity,

has taken the form of a servant.

Without undergoing change He is born from an unwedded mother;

He was true God, and He remains the same,

but through His love for mankind,

He has become what He never was: true man.

Come, O faithful, let us cry to Him://

“O God, born of the Virgin, have mercy on us!”

Here is perhaps one of the greatest aspects of the mystery of the Incarnation.  While a man on earth, He was and is in heaven with the Father and the Spirit.  He as the eternal Logos was ordering and holding all things together.  He was and is filling all things and everywhere present and at the same time He was completely present as a child.  His divinity was not diminished or changed in any way.  He remained completely God and at the same time He was (and still is ) completely man.  He is, as the Troparion says, the Father’s perfect image.  He is the image and we were made after the image, that is, we were made in the image of the Image.  It is thus only through Christ that we can even approach the Father. 

It is with this in mind that we are put in awe of what actually occurred at the Incarnation.  The Uncreated God, the Logos of the Father, became created, a tiny baby in a manger.  He became a man who needed to eat to sustain Him, who could weep for his friends, Who could feel the natural fear of death in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Even today’s reading in the Gospel brings this home to us when we see that the infant Christ’s life was in peril and needed to be preserved by the efforts of Joseph the Betrothed and the Theotokos.  While it was also to fulfill prophecy, the flight to Egypt also emphasizes that vulnerability that Christ took on for us.

          It is this humanity, this vulnerability that God the Logos experiences from the inside, as it were, that is perhaps the greatest comfort we can have.  Are we tempted?  Do we thirst?  Do we have a natural fear of death, of the separation of our soul from its body?  Have we been scorned or mocked?  Have we been put in financial peril or have we been hungry?  Our God who overcame the world knows all of this from our perspective.  He has shared our difficulties in this life.  He knows our sorrows, but He also is the cause of our joys.  He has overcome all of these and He is the means for us to overcome as well.  We do not have a distant and abstract God, but a God who is closer to us than our own breath....He is everywhere and fills all things and holds all things together…and He is also at the same time one of us, taking us up to where He is with the Father.  The Nativity was the first salvo in a war that was won in an empty tomb…a war whose opening cry was Christ is Born, Glorify Him, and whose victory cry is Christ is Risen!