According to Tradition, from the 15th November the season of the Nativity begins. From ancient times, the Church appointed this period as a time for fasting, prayer, charity and study of the scriptures, for contemplation and preparation for the unique event in human history of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, of His coming into the world as a man. The Evangelist proclaims that “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the Only-begotten, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

According to Orthodox liturgical Tradition and practice, we begin from the Feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple of Solomon (21st November) to chant the Katavasies of Christmas. We sing, “‘Christ is born, give glory! Christ comes from heaven, go to meet him! Christ is upon earth, be exalted! Sing to the Lord all the earth; and all you peoples raise the hymn with joy, for he has been glorified”. These superb hymns ontologically prepare us and spiritually carry us to the Feast of Christmas, and they remind us of the divine love and condescension of God to the human race.

As you all know, brethren in the Lord, throughout the course of twenty centuries of Christian life and experience, a new world was created – a spiritual, creative, poetic, theological and musical world – a world which existentially, festally and in a very human way, celebrates and is centred around the Feast of Christmas. People often misunderstand this creativity which people entertain with such imagination, joy and power during this period, as a reminder of the coming of Christ the God-man and Redeemer as a child to live among us. Many take advantage of this Feast in a secular and sometimes unacceptable way – a way which is foreign to the spirit and the letter of Christmas, and they insert into Christmas their own schemes and ideas which are anything but Christian. It falls to us to surpass, break through and overcome these ideas and to continue to live life with Christ at its centre, striving always to become holy and to keep our lives at the centre of the Church’s life and Tradition.

In his epistles to the Christians of his day, the Apostle Paul mentions and exalts the Incarnation of Christ and places the event at the centre of history. He reminds us that “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways” (Hebrews 1:1). And he continues to expound the mystery of Divine Economy is his epistle to the Galatians: “But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law” (4:4). That great Apostle to the Nations also reminds us that the Trinity has guided history, that the Birth of Christ touches and embraces all humanity, because God desires that all should be saved and become sharers and partakers of His Kingdom.

This year, the Oecumenical Patriarchate decided to dedicate the year to St Paul the Apostle, to honour that holy man who has offered so much to the Church, to Christendom, to civilization and to the liberation of the human race and to man’s turning away from idol worship and the moral and spiritual decadence of the ancient world. By the grace of God, as he used to say himself, and by his superhuman efforts and his unshakeable faith in the incarnate Christ, he turned the gaze of humanity to Heaven and helped man to worship the Creator rather than creation and to believe in the “One True God Who sent Christ Jesus”. Throughout this Year of St Paul, we are called not only to imitate his sacrificial life and inspired example, but also to absorb his profound teachings which are always relevant and which offer solutions to the problems and difficulties of modern society. And so, during this festive and spiritually emotional period, we will be organising a series of lectures regarding the immortal teachings and instructions of that great Apostle, that builder and former of the Church.

With these words I greet you all. I wish you health and strength and the renewal of faith in our great Christian values. Such values are always relevant to the times, and people need them even more in difficult times such as ours, when we witness amongst other things, the bankruptcy of global organisations and great financial institutions in Europe and America, which men arrogantly founded with the delusion that such works are everlasting and unmoveable.

These events of which people everywhere have been feeling the repercussions in the past few months, and particularly the global financial crisis, teach us that only the Gospel, the Church, the Message of Christ our God is eternal. Christmas will always rekindle our hearts and minds. It will always remain alive as the light of salvation to renew, uphold, comfort, teach and guide humanity to his true and eternal destination. This message of hope and faith - the inspired word of the Gospel - was proclaimed even by the President Elect of the United States, Barack Obama. The message of Christian optimism and love and reconciliation has inspired the citizens of that great, multi-cultural and powerful country, and so they entrusted to him the noble duty of governing their country. This message rekindled the hopes not only of the American people, but also people throughout the world, because Mr Obama drew inspiration from the great, unfailing springs of Christianity, of Democracy, of the love for neighbour and the enduring virtue of humility and meekness which is proclaimed in the Feast of Christmas, which we Christians and others throughout the globe will be celebrating in a few weeks’ time.

I pray for you and your families, and I remain with fervent prayers and love and respect in Christ our Lord.

London, November 2008

Gregorios, Archbishop of Thyateira & Great Britain

The mysteries of the Christian life are many: the mystery of the crucified God, the risen dead, the sight-filled blind, the joyful broken. And present within the Church’s chief mystery—the holy gifts of the holy offering, become none other than the holy body and blood—lies another mystery still: the mystery of love. This sacrament of God’s creative self-communication, of dynamic love which transcends and transforms the cosmos of love’s fashioning, actualises in each human life—whether realised or not—the eternal love, the very life, of the most holy Trinity. Love has come to us, love comes to us, love each day may re-create us wholly to the active life of its own image.

The Mystery of Love, that creative, energetic life of the eternal God, stands at the centre of our Christian existence. All the sacraments, all the mysteries of this life, are bound up in this; for Love has come to us, has bowed down the heavens and descended to the throne of our human heart. The self-communication of love, which ever expresses itself in the mutual love of the Trinitarian life, has communicated itself into the cosmos as light into the darkness.

Love has come to us. The holy incarnation, which the Church celebrates today in the Nativity of the Saviour, is meaningless and distorted if not seen as this mystery of the advent of Love. Though such realities be true, the full meaning and purpose of this fearful birth are not summed up in the sin of human life, in the weight of sin demanding sacrifice, of the wandering, lost sheep in need of guidance. The reverent dread, the full wonder of the Nativity of God, lies in the pure and greatest mystery of Christian reality: the love that orders the cosmos, the love that creates and fashions, the love the Theologian calls God himself, comes directly, fully, gently yet forcefully into the world.

The world into which love has become incarnate has, since that advent (and never more than today), misunderstood that love and its coming. The ways and life of God are a folly to the world—a folly that would defy all knowledge outside of prayer. And so love becomes but an emotion, a feeling; and the emotion is assigned by preference, choice, perspective and position. ‘Love is gentle’, but gentle no longer in emulation of the Gentle Light that burns away the darkness of sin; rather, gentle in mere and sheer acceptance—of every cancer, of any wrong. ‘Love is kind’, but its kindness is not as that of the one who rebuked the healed sinner, ‘Go, and sin no more’; rather, a kindness which says simply, dreadfully, ‘Go’, and lets the sin abound.

As the Church celebrates the great mystery of the incarnation, of the holy Nativity of God according to the flesh, we are compelled by the child’s visage of the pre-eternal God to take into our hearts the gentle rebuke of our worldly misconceptions.

This one is Love, who has fashioned the cosmos from the void, yet who lays enshrined in a stable.
This one is Love, who fashions man, and bears upon His shoulders his sins.
This one is Love, who offers peace, yet overturns the squalor of the Temple stalls.
This one is Love, who forgives absolutely yet makes the highest of all demands: ‘Come, take up your cross, and follow me’.
This one is Love, who does not merely dismiss sin and all its tragic reality, but comes into its midst to condemn, conquer and destroy is captivating false-power.
This one is Love, and Love is no other.

Such sin do we commit when we call or treat as love anything other than the life of the one born in Bethlehem of Mary, love’s Mother. In the life in Christ, love is defined for us always by that eternal reality of the Father’s great paternal love for the Son, his love worked in the sacred person of the Holy Spirit—in the mutual co-inhering love of their united Trinitarian life. It is this love which has come to us in the incarnation of the Son, for love is God and God is love, and we are proved fools in every division of such a reality.

Yet divide it we are wont to do—and perhaps amongst the chief challenges posed to us in keeping this holy feast is to see anew the singular reality that is God’s life, his will, and the substance of our love—even as he is one reality who comes among us as man and God. As God has taken to himself the whole of human life and united it inseparably to his divine being, becoming for us the one known ever in two, so ought we see in our Christian life the perfect synonymity, the full and absolute union, of ‘love’ and ‘God’. Our lives and our loving are defined by the Love who has taken our life, to make ours his and his our own.

Christ is born, and love is held out to all the world.
Christ is born, and the Trinity makes manifest the extent of his compassion.
Christ is born, and life is joined to Life, will to Will, man to God.
Christ is born — let us glorify him!

M.C. Steenberg

25th December 2004 / 7th January 2005

The feast of the Nativity according to the flesh of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.