Meditation: Why Did He Come?
Christmas means that there are two births of Christ: one into the world at Bethlehem; the other into the soul when it is spiritually reborn. Through the Holy Mysteries of Baptism and the Eucharist, Christ is born in the second Bethlehem. i.e., our hearts and minds, our souls and bodies. He that is the pre-eternal God becomes a newborn babe that we might be converted and become babes in Christ. The Only-begotten Word of God, One of the Trinity, becomes man, that man might become “a communicant of the Divine Nature” through theosis. The dark cave of dumb beasts in Bethlehem becomes heaven and is filled with the unwaning, uncreated light of Divinity. Christ is born that our dark souls may be filled with light; for do we not invite the Divine Son of God to come and dwell in us when we pray in the Pre-Communion prayers: “And even as Thou didst deign to lie in a cave and in a manager of irrational beasts, so also deign to lie in the manger of my irrational soul and to enter my defiled body.” If He was born in the first Bethlehem, it was only that He might come and be born in the second Bethlehem-your soul and mine!
Meditation: Why Did He Come?
There are some people who find it hard to believe in the miracles of Jesus. They say. “How can one believe that Jesus walked on water, or fed the five thousand, or was born of a virgin, or raised the dead and was Himself raised from the dead? How can one believe all this?
Yet, the real difficulty does not all lie with the miracles. It lies in the Christmas message of the Incarnation. The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was and is God made man, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, fully human and fully divine. If Jesus was the same Person as the Eternal Word, through Whom the world was created, then it is not strange-not strange at all-that He walked on water, and was born of a virgin, and raised the dead. If He was truly the Son of God, it would be more strange and startling if He should die and not rise again! God’s coming to us at Christmas is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it is a mystery that makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains. For He who was born was not another Socrates or Plato or Einstein, but the Eternal Son of God. If you begin by denying that Jesus is the Son of God, then you will have a problem with all of the miracles.
Meditation: Why Did He Come?
One thoughtful Christian wrote about what God’s coming at Christmas meant to him:
The advantage of the manger scene is that it tells me that Jesus was willing to come in and walk this world with me. He knew pain and rejection and suffering in his time. He suffered from violence. As he looks up from that crib he has a right to ask me why I expect to live in a perfect world when he didn’t.
If I dig that deeply enough into all of that, I begin to understand that the glory of Jesus Christ in my life is that he shared my darkness, but he allows me to share his light.
For Pondering:
The devotional writer, Meister Eckhart, wrote:
What good is it to me
if this eternal birth of the divine Son
takes place unceasingly
but does not take place within myself?
And, what good is it to me if
Mary is full of grace and
if I am not also full of grace?
What good is it to me for the
Creator to give birth to his
Son if I do not also give birth
to him in my time and my culture?
This, then, is the fullness of time:
When the Son of God is begotten in us.
~ Presbytera Emily Harakas & Fr. Anthony Coniaris, DAILY MEDITATIONS and Prayers for the CHRISTMAS ADVENT Fast and Epiphany: Living the Days of Advent and Epiphany according to the Orthodox Church Calendar
