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Σάββατο 17 Δεκεμβρίου 2016
THE NATIVITY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST By Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (+2003).
THE NATIVITY OF
OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST
By Metropolitan
Anthony of Sourozh (+2003).
Τhere
is anguish when a woman is in labour, but all this is forgotten when the child
is born, because a man has come into the world. Someone has come into the world
to live, someone has entered into the realm of transitory life in order to grow
into life eternal, and the birth of a child is always perceived as the
beginning of life and as the beginning of eternity, once more incarnate, once
moremade real, visible, tangible, become part of human joy and human
simplicity.
And yet, when
we think of the nativity of Christ, the birth on earth of the Son of God, we see
it in a quite different way. One of the ancient miniatures representing the
birth of the Lord, shows us, apart from the habitual features of a cave, ofthe
Mother Virgin, of Joseph, of the familiar animals, the manger standing by,
deposited on an altar of sacrifice. And the child is lying on it as probably Isaac
laid on the altar which Abraham had built in order to bring him as a blood
offering to the Lord. Every one of us is born through temporary life into
eternal life; the Eternal One, He who is life itself, is born into the world in
order to enter into the realm of death. Eternal, Immortal God enters into the
realm of man, not only the created world, but to enter the fallen world where death
is the end of our earthly pilgrimage.
When we look at
this image of the new-born child, lying on an altar of stones, ready for a
sacrifice, brought as an of-fering, we can well ask ourselves, “Who is he who
sacrifices this child?” And we have an answer: it is the Father who gives us
His Son that through His death we may live. We see here incarnate, clearly
expressed, divine Love, and the measure of this love divine. The Only-Begotten
Son is given unto death, delivered unto death for our sakes. Saint Paul ponders
on the event, and he exclaims: Hardly would anyone die for a Rriend, and Christ
died for us while we still were enemies of : : d. But God commendeth his love
toward us, in that, while _r ere yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom 5:8).]
God called us
into existence, it was a one-sided act, not of fils own powerful will, but of
His immeasurable love. He called us into existence, that we may share with Him
not only existence, but life, become partakers of all that He is; we are
called, in the words of Saint Peter, to become partakers of divine nature; we
are called to be brethren and sisters of Christ, sons and daughters of the
Living God. He created us in an act of love and in this act of love, from the
first, He gave Himself as an offering to us. And this offering is always a
sacrifice. In order to make this offering meaningful, He gave us freedom, the
freedom to accept love and to reject love, to love Him in response to His love,
or discard His love and, through our deeds, through all our attitude to Him and
to life, to proclaim to Him that His love is of no avail to us, that we do not
want it, that it is in vain that he has loved us first, it is in vain that He
had loved us so much as to give His
Only Begotten
Son for us. God gives us the freedom, and we ask very often, “Why?!” Why have
we not been made in such a way that, compelled by a blessed necessity, we would
be unable to go wrong, that we should be made in such a way that we always and in
all things would respondto the best. But is it not simply because where there
is no freedom of love and rejection of love, there is no love? If we gravitated
towards one another without any choice, it would be a law of nature, it would
not be an act of free gift of oneself and of acceptance of the other. This
freedom means love, at least the possibility of love, as it means also the
possibility for us to reject God. But God in His freedom does not reject us.
He
remains faithful to the last, perfectly generous, heroically faithful.
And when the
freedom of man is misused, He uses His freedom to come to us, and to reach out
towards us at the very depth of ourselves, at the extreme distance which we
reach when we die to love. He enters this very realm which is the realm where
there is no love, where there is only dividedness, brokenness and separation,
both from God and from one another and within ourselves, the inner brokenness
and conflict between mind and heart, between conscience and action: Christ is
born into the realm of death we have made through the misuse of freedom,
because we have forgotten that freedom culminates, is fulfilled in that love
which gives itself perfectly, which is forgetfulness of self, which is the
laying down of one’s life for the other.
Let us then
look at this crib not as we do when we are small children, seeing only an image
of a child’s birth, miraculous, wonderful; let us look at it with an earnest
and adult gaze, and see that this crib is an altar of sacrifice, that this cave
where He was born is an image of that cave in which He will be deposited, a young
man, killed for God’s sake after the agony of the Garden and the agony of the
Cross, and let us ask ourselves, “Are we, each of us, a response to love
revealed in such a way, revealed to such degree?” Will we find in ourselves a
response, or shall we only say, “It was His choice, I have chosen against Him.
He has chosen life for me, I have chosen death for Him.”
Is that the
answer which we will give? Oh, not in words, but in deeds, through our life,
through our attitude to our own self, in which our own dividedness is not
overcome, through our attitude to one another in which those people for whom
Christ lived and died remain to us strangers, irrelevant and can be brushed out
of our way, or through our attitude to Him Whom we do not treat as our everpresent
invisible neighbor, for Whom we have no thought, no compassion, no charity, no
love.
Or are we going
to respond to this revelation of love in which the frailty of love is made
visible, perceptible to us in the frailty of this little human body deposited
on the straw of a crib, respond to the frailty of God by a mature love?
This is the
question which now the day of Christmas sets before us, and we have days and
months of liturgical unfolding of the year, to grow through it towards a definitive
and final answer when we will see love sacrificed on Calvary. We have got this
liturgical year to follow step by step, in this year we will discover how the
saints of God have responded, and at every step the question will stand before
us: “And what about you, what about thee personally, what about us in our
togetherness, what is our answer to love?” Amen.
Orthodox
Heritage Page 8 Z Vol. 14, Issue 11-18
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