THE PARADOX OF CHRISTMAS – reflections by the Very Rev Fr Dimitri Cozby PhD, pastor of All Saints Orthodox Church, Victoria, Texas
Christmas, the feast of our Lord’s Nativity, is a joyful celebration. The images we commonly associate with the season appeal to our most cheerful and tender sentiments. At the center of the feast lies the sweet figure of the infant Jesus, cared for by His blessed Mother, watched over by His foster father, hymned by angels, honored and worshiped both by local shepherds from among His chosen people and by mysterious strangers from the East.
Certainly the Church encourages that joy and sharpens it by reminding us of its true significance, that the Child we honor is God become man for our salvation. Thus, in the hymns we echo the cry of the angels, “Glory to God in the highest,” and add our own refrain, “Christ is born! Glorify Him!”
However, precisely because the Church seeks to remind us of the true meaning of the feast, our celebration mixes in disquieting, uncomfortable elements. We are reminded of the anxiety that attended the birth: the puzzling circumstances surrounding the conception and Saint Joseph’s early doubts about the Virgin’s honor; the difficulties of the forced journey to satisfy the decree of an alien, pagan government; the humble, even primitive, setting of the birth. Most disturbing is the Gospel for the feast, which concludes with an allusion to King Herod’s paranoid suspicions. It thus prepares us for the next Sunday’s horrid sequel, when the vile prince’s distrust murderously explodes in the extermination of innocent children.
Our Lord’s birth, with all its tenderness and beauty, is not an isolated event. Christ came into the world because of our fall, the corruption of our nature by sin. Therefore, for all its joy, the Nativity is also a sad occasion. The Nativity is God’s loving response to the tragedy of our sin. The eternal God becomes a Child because we rebelliously deny that we are His children.
Christ enters a world where spotless women like His Mother must endure the reproaches of envy and ignorance; where power flows to the ruthless like Herod, not to the good and just; where righteous men like the magi must resort to subtlety and deceit to escape the intrigues of the wicked; where innocent children are slaughtered to satisfy hatred and greed.
Even our personal lives do not escape the universal corruption. We strive for the purity of the Theotokos, but we too often fall prey to envy and ignorance. Rather than searching out the secrets of our hearts and opening them to the cleansing light of Christ, we conspire with ourselves to hide old sins and to court new ones. We seek humility, yet we also turn on others with the brutality that might match Herod’s.
We must temper the joy of Christmas with somber reflection, because our life in this world merges both good and evil. “What earthly joy is unmixed with grief?” the Orthodox funeral service admonishes. Hope attends the birth of the Child – but poverty, both material and spiritual, characterizes the world He enters. We adore the quiet courage of His Mother, yet we give her Child no shelter, no dwelling place in our hearts and lives. We yearn to share the simple wonder of the shepherds and the sophisticated adoration of the magi, but our souls and minds are too often as murky and twisted as Herod’s, and we too break forth in vengeance and malice.
Above all, the Nativity wears a solemn aspect because it is a stage of our Lord’s incarnation, a process which culminates in His death on the Cross. The ultimate end of sinful man is death, and our Lord entered the world in order to share our common fate. The Child of Bethlehem, like every human child, enters the world in order to die. The death of those other innocent children of Bethlehem foreshadows the death of this Child, grown to perfect manhood. The manger of Bethlehem marks the beginning of the road which ends on Golgotha at the foot of the Cross.
Yet the death of the God-man is not an ordinary death, just as His birth was not an ordinary birth. Holiness Himself enters the world to change and transfigure. The birth and the death are part of God’s transcendent act of triumph through submission. God submits to the consequences of sin in order to eliminate those consequences from the lives of His children. He assumes the weakness of a child, and He endures the indignity of a unjust death. God saves by humility, He conquers in weakness, He reasserts His lordship over creation by taking to Himself the outrages perpetrated upon His creatures by sin. He restores us to spiritual health and wholeness by accepting the effects of our corruption. He enters our weakness to fill us with His strength, our sinfulness to cleanse us with forgiveness, our defilement to restore us to holiness. He dies in order that He may rise again, and thereby raise us up with Him.
What begins in the simple sweetness of the birth of a Child grows into the majesty of the Cross, the redeeming humiliation of the death of God. The obscurity of the Child’s birth prefigures His hiddenness in the tomb. But the obscurity is not complete: He is proclaimed by angels, adored by simple folk, worshipped by the cultured and educated, feared by kings. There is also a grandeur and a glory in the Nativity, and these too prefigure a splendor to come, that of His Resurrection and of the power and mystery of His Kingdom.
Saint Gregory of Nazianzus sums up the paradoxes of our Savior’s advent: “What He was He continued to be; what He was not He took to Himself …, His inferior nature, the humanity, became divine, because it was united to God …, because the higher nature prevailed in order that I too might be made God so far as He is made man. He was born but He had been begotten; He was born of a woman – but she was a virgin. The first is human; the second, divine. In His human nature He had no father, but also in His divine nature no mother…. He dwelt in the womb – but he was recognized by the prophet, himself still in the womb, leaping before the Word., for whose sake he came into being. He was wrapped in swaddling clothes – but He shed the swathing bands of the grave by His rising again. He was laid in a manger – but He was glorified by angels, and proclaimed by a star, and worshiped by the Magi …. He was baptized as man but He remitted sins as God…. He was tempted as man, but He conquered as God; yea, He bids us be of good cheer, for He has overcome the world…. He dies, but He gives life, and by His death destroys death.”
Christmas, our Lord’s Nativity, begins these paradoxes. Therefore, we should approach this feast with both gladness and awe, with gravity as well as rejoicing. We must first appreciate the depth of our sinfulness, which made the Lord’s birth and death necessary. Only then can we appreciate the true beauty of divine love which the Nativity manifests and the true glory opened to us by the Incarnation. As we celebrate this feast, may the simple tenderness of our Lord’s Nativity point us to the grandeur and humility of His crucifixion, to the glory of His Resurrection, and to His Kingdom of eternal love and light.
***
