Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
Sharing a meditation from Fr. Seraphim Holland as found on the Pravoslavie RU website (http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/67424.htm)
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen! Christ is Born!
The place of the manger, Bethlehem.
On
a day like today, there are many episcopal letters—very good ones, that
I would like to read to you’ but not right now. And the reason is
because on a day like today, a pastor wants to share something of his
heart with his flock. That is why those letters are written: because the
arch-pastor wants to share something of his heart. Well, in every
church celebrating the Nativity today, pastors want to share from their
hearts, and this is what I want to do with you right now. This Gospel is
not expressly about the Nativity of Christ, is it? It not a narrative;
it isn’t about a baby in a manger. It is about what happened after
the Nativity of Christ. We are not quite sure exactly how long after,
but not on the day of the Nativity; probably not even during the week of
the Nativity. It is about the wise men, the astrologers from Persia,
who came to worship Christ. They inquired of Herod where the Christ
Child would be born. They did this is because by God’s dispensation the
star, which was actually an angel guiding them, moving in a way that a
star does not move—from north to south, and not according to the way a
star would move in that area—disappeared when the wise men came to
Jerusalem. They didn’t know where to go, so they inquired, and then
Herod knew of their intentions. He said, “When you worship the Child,
then tell me, so that I can also worship Him” (cf. Mt. 2:1–8). But of
course, we know that he wanted not to worship, but to kill. And shortly
after the wise men had left, he did kill ten thousand holy innocents,
trying to make sure that he killed the Christ Child. But by then our
Lord was either on His way to Egypt or there already.
Here is what I want to share with you from my heart. When the wise men had finished worshiping the Lord Jesus, Being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way (Mt. 2:12).
This is very significant. Every time I read this, I am filled with
great joy. There is another way, brothers and sisters. Not the way of
the world, not the way of death, not the way of mundane life; there is another
way. And we are celebrating, that the God-man came down, became
incarnate—He actually became the God-man, so that we could have this
other way. These wise men went another way to avoid Herod; but
mystically this means there is now another way to live: because Christ
is born. There is another way to be. There is another way to become.
Human life is filled with sorrow, it is filled with sin, uncertainty,
incompleteness, sickness, death. But there is another way. That way is
life, that way is perfection, that way is completeness, peace, and
righteousness. And that way is obtainable because of Jesus Christ. So we
must apply the Nativity to our souls. We must learn to live in another
way.
Now, sometimes when I look at my
own life, and I happen to know the lives of many other people (they are
very similar to mine), I see how mundanely we live, how easily we become
angry or confused, how easy it is for us to be lazy about holy things
and diligent about things that don’t matter. It seems that we are always
living in the way of the world. But that wasn’t what we were born for.
We were born for perfection. We were born for eternal life. And that
eternal life is to be in God, and with God; to be united with Him, to
not have anything in us that is corruptible. We see corruption every day
in our lives, but we weren’t born for that. We were born for another
way. We were born to know Jesus Christ personally, intimately, by
becoming like Him. And that is what the incarnation of the God-man
provides—for us to become like Him. Now, there is much that must
transpire for us to become like Him. He gives us the ability, but He
does not give us the will. He strengthens our will, but He does not give
it to us. We must desire to follow this other way. And if we do, then
we will indeed become perfect. We will become what we were born for.
Just
recently I was having a conversation, and as often happens in
conversations, the significance didn’t hit until later. This person said
that it really hit her that Christ was born to die… When we look at Him
in the manger, we see someone Whose whole purpose in life as a human
being was to die. From the beginning, His purpose was to die—so that we
could live. But we are not born to die. Now, we do die, and we live with
that stench of death around us when we sin. Because anything that is
sin is death: when our thoughts, emotions, or priorities are not holy
and righteous—that is death. But we weren’t born to die. We were born to
live. We were born to be fully alive. Do you know that in our ascetical
theology, we do not consider human beings without Christ to be truly
human? You are not truly human until you are a Christ-man, and Christ is
totally filling you—because man was created to have Christ within him.
If Christ is not within the man, then he is not fully a man. We are
becoming fully men, fully humans because of Christ. That is the other
way, not the way of the world.
I
also want to say something about why this particular passage was
selected—not about the Nativity narrative, not about the babe in the
manger, but what happened afterwards; just as on Pascha we do not read
about the Resurrection. We read from the first chapter of St. John about
the nature of God, Jesus Christ Who is eternally the Son, becoming man
so that we could be one with Him. Why do we do this? Why do we look
ahead? Well, first of all, in our services we have already read the
Nativity narrative many times previous to today. In the same way,
throughout the year, every Sunday we read the Resurrection narratives.
But knowing the history is not what you need. What you need is to become
what the purpose is of our Lord’s incarnation, death, and Resurrection.
So, we read on the Nativity about the wise men, and how they went back
another way—because the Nativity is so that you can live another way, a
different way, not the way of human flesh without Christ, but the way of
being a Christ-man, a deified creature. That is why we read it. It’s
the same on Pascha, and the same thing also after Theophany. On the
Sunday after the Theophany we read of Christ going into the wilderness,
being tempted by the devil, because after baptism comes temptation.
After baptism comes life, the living of your life with the power that
God has given you, so that you can live differently from the rest of the
world, differently from your own motivations; so that you can be
changed, become a deified Christ-human creature.
That
is the purpose of the incarnation. St. Paul says it in clear
language—for those who have ears to hear—in one of my favorites of all
the epistles, where he speaks of the fullness of time, when God sent His
Son, the Incarnation, and then he says to
redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption
of sons. And because ye are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of His
son into your hearts crying Abba, Father; wherefore ye are no more a
slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir of God through Christ (Gal.4:5-7).
Do you know what this means? This is possible because through the
Incarnation, and then Baptism, and being filled with the Holy Spirit, we
can become something that we are not. We can become, as the Scripture
says, gods. It is not blasphemous to say that. The Psalm says ye are gods,
and the Church understands that to mean that we will become God-like,
full of righteousness, truth, mercy, and the knowledge of God—something
that we do not have by nature. Jesus Christ is the Son of God by nature,
eternally. But we are not sons of God by nature—we are adopted into
son-ship; and with this adoption we are treated entirely as sons. But
this necessitates a change in the way we think, the way we live, the
priorities we have, and how we spend our time. It means we must live a
different way, another way.
This
is what my heart wants to tell you today, on this day of the Nativity,
when the Lord has made it possible for us to be adopted, to be of His
family, to become united with Him, and perfected in Him. We must
remember this in everything we do, and not live the way of the world,
but rather live the other way, the holy way—the way that makes no sense
to the world, the way that is foolishness to the world. We must remember
this in everything we do. We were born to be alive, even though there
is evidence of death in us every day—from our sins, from aging, from the
mistakes we make, from our uncertainties. If a Christian has the
God-given ability in his heart, he can feel that death. But that death
is not natural, that death is not the purpose of our life. The purpose
of our life is to be alive in Christ. And with God becoming man, it is
now possible. Remember this. Live a different way from the rest of the
world. And if there are things in you that are living like the world,
beg God to help you with them. Do something about it. You were born for
perfection. Don’t wallow in mediocrity. None of us should be mediocre.
All of us should know God, and feel God in everything we do; with every
breath we take, we should feel the Holy Spirit. If we do not feel this,
then we must change the way we live. This is the purpose of life—to live
a different way from just being a human—to live as a Christ-human. The
Greeks have a word, Theanthropos,
or God-man. We are also to become God-men. We call Jesus Christ the
God-man, but we are to become God-men. We are to become like God and to
be united with God, and to do godly things, to have the knowledge of
God, to be united to Him in holiness, wisdom, and purpose. This is that
other way that is possible today.
Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
Transcription of the original audio recording
09 / 01 / 2014
