THE INCARNATION OF THE LIGHT

NATIVITY EPISTLE, 2004

  Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

                In Him was Life and that Life was the light of the world. That light shines on in the darkness; for the darkness has neither overcome it nor comprehended it, neither does it receive it (Jn.1:4-5).
 
 

The Feast of the Nativity of Christ is so often seen as an occasion of worldly happiness and perceived as being lesser that Holy Pascha. Indeed, both feasts are an occasion for joy and good will, but both are also seasons for repentance and spiritual renewal.

 

This year as we prepare to celebrate the Nativity Feast, I wish to invite you to take a new look at its meaning C at the meaning of Christ's birth and the meaning of the feastday on which we celebrate it. Let us for a moment put away such euphemisms as "Christmas" and even the term "the Nativity Feast." Let us instead focus our minds on the reality of this great cosmic event, and address it with understanding as The Incarnation of God.

In order to understand what took place that night in Bethlehem, we must first return to the beginning of history, to the creation of the universe.

 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth....And He separated the light from the darkness (Gn.1:1,4).

 

If we understand this narrative only materially and do not see its spiritual dimension, we will miss the essential meaning of the Nativity of Christ. The whole of the creation narrative has a prophetic meaning. It both offers us the meaning of life, and foretells the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. This is why John, in his Gospel precedes the above words by telling us that Jesus Christ, God the Word, was the actual creator of all that exists, and that "nothing that exists was made without Him."

 

Christ came into the world to profoundly separate light and darkness, and to expose the darkness to the light of his presence. It is our own struggle to recognise that the darkness is not "out there," or in others. The possibilities of evil, even great evil, is an option for all of us. Hitler, Stalin, and a host of other villains of our own era were not uniquely evil. They had many followers willing to do their bidding. During His ministry Jesus Christ did not give us a critique of the world itself, or of the Roman Empire. He exposed the wickedness and cold indifference in the hearts of actual individuals. He shone the light on the darkness that lurks in the hearts of each human being and becomes shared by others around them. The evil that a man like Hitler carried out is a possibility for each of us. Hitler was a human being; we are human beings, so whatever was possible for him is a possibility for any person. We are governed by a conscience, but we can learn to ignore our conscience, or even to so rebel against it that in our bitterness, we act radically in opposition to it. We might then respond to the torments of our conscience with even greater wickedness.

 

We may not intentionally nourish the darkness that lies within each of us, and most human beings would never carry out any great evil. Nevertheless, in our daily lives, we are burdened with inclinations based in prejudices, envy, self-righteousness, self-pity and moments of bitterness, which make it possible for us to commit lesser acts of evil against others. This is the darkness which Christ exposed to the light in each human being. This is the darkness that we must constantly struggle with in ourselves. Wars begin in the hearts of men, murder is an affair of the human heart and Auschwitz existed in prototype in the hearts of its creators before it was put into practice. All this was exposed in the hearts of the most religious men of the day during Christ's earthly ministry.

 

And yet, humanity is essentially good. There is a light of grace in all and the conscience is a holy prophet implanted in every human being to reflect the image and likeness of God in each. It is this inner conflict that Christ came to illumine. He came to separate once more light from darkness in each human being, and to give us the real possibility of overcoming this darkness. He rekindled within us the lamp of grace, reopened the doors of the conscience and called upon all to embark in a real struggle for the triumph of light over darkness in each of our hearts, to empower our own consciences anew.

 

 This is the reason for the long fasting period before the Feast of Christ's Nativity. For most of society, the celebrating begins long before Christmas, and seems to come to an abrupt end the day after. This is because the worldly frame of mind celebrates the world as it was before the advent of Christ, while for Orthodox Christians, the season of celebration begins with the advent of Christ, and continues until Theophany. We do not celebrate the world as it was before the Incarnation, rather we keep the Nativity Fast as a proclamation that the world was deficient and poorer before the Incarnation, before the coming of Jesus Christ, and we celebrate only on the Feast of the Incarnation and the days that follow; we celebrate a world renewed in Jesus Christ, not the enfeebled and broken world that existed before His coming.

 

It is during this fasting period that we are called upon to examine ourselves deeply. With prayer and fasting to help guide us and liberate us from the secular way of thinking, we are able to discern more clearly where the boundary between light and darkness is in our own hearts. In such fasting and prayer, we seek to acquire the self-discipline and self-control that makes it possible for us to cooperate with Divine grace and the presence of the Holy Spirit, to increase the light and diminish the darkness. It is by means of this preparation, worked out through fasting and prayer, that we are the more able to comprehend that Light which "the world could neither overcome nor comprehend." It is by means of this preparation that we can receive the Feast of the Nativity, not in terms of the saccharine slogans and mantras of the world, but as a real presence that truly does separate the light from the darkness within us.

 

It is a wondrous mystery of God's grace that we can become co-workers with Christ in the salvation of mankind. If we have prepared ourselves and truly received the presence of Christ, the real Incarnation of God, then His grace can become incarnate in us. The less darkness there is in each one of us, the less there is in the world. The more light there is in each one of us, the more light there is in the world. To the degree that Christ becomes incarnate in us, in our consciences, to that same degree, we also become the light of the world, as a "candle set upon a lampstand" (Mt.5:15).

 

Brothers and sisters, on this Feast of the Nativity, of the Incarnation of God, let us resolve to understand that we are called upon not only to receive the mystery, but to live it. We are called upon not only to receive our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and be transformed by Him, but we are called upon to become co-workers with Him in the redemption of mankind and of the whole world. We can fulfil this first of all be letting His light so shine in us that the darkness within is driven out by that light, and the light can then so shine in us as to help dispel the darkness in the world around us. We can accomplish this if, with the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit, the light of Christ becomes truly incarnate in us. This is the true meaning of the Feast of the Nativity of Christ.

  

  CHRIST IS BORN! GLORIFY HIM!