Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Heartfelt congratulations with the great feast of the Nativity of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ!

The all-praised and glorious Apostle Luke proclaims in his Gospel that the Most-Pure Virgin Theotokos “wrapped [the new-born Infant] in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”. In these simple and seemingly not too meaningful words many deep and wonderful things are truly hidden. Today we celebrate not simply the birth of a famous person, a prophet, a gifted preacher, but the incarnation of God. What does it mean for God to humble Himself and become a man? A mortal man, of course, is in no position to answer such a question. He cannot understand the nature of God, nor can he understand that freedom and life which only God has; therefore he has no comprehension as to how God could empty Himself and become one of us – a mortal human.

Although we will never truly know how the Lord God became a man and what type of humility and love towards us He must possess to accomplish this, the swaddling clothes of Bethlehem, at least in an earthly way, give us an opportunity to comprehend what took place so many years ago in a bleak Judean cave. The swaddling clothes in which our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was wrapped in the first days of His earthly sojourn prefigure His entire future life.

The newly-born Saviour, like any swaddled infant, was helpless and could do nothing independently. He could not get up, nor go anywhere, nor take up anything at all in His hands.

Such a state of helplessness or constraint, which would chafe any freedom-loving person, continued throughout the entirety of our Saviour’s earthly life. He could not stay in Bethlehem amongst His people, but was compelled to hide in Egypt from the blood-thirsty Herod. After the death of that cruel king, once again the earthly rulers did not allow Him to live in the Judean land, in His capital, but forced Him to grow up in provincial Galilee. The Creator of the whole world, the Eternal God, lived in obedience to mortal parents. He stripped bare, bowed down His head and was baptized by His servant and prophet John. The priests, chief priests, and scribes of the Law of the True God not only rejected the teachings of the Son of God, but continually tempted Him, conspired against Him, and finally, arrested Him, bound Him, nailed Him to the Cross, and killed Him. After such a life, He was again wrapped, though this time not in the swaddling clothes of an infant, but in a burial shroud, and not by the Virgin Mary alone, but by noble men and holy women. He was placed, once again, under the earth, but this time not in a manger, but in a tomb. In such a way, the entire duration of our Lord Jesus Christ’s earthly life, from the first moment to the last, is defined by constraint. This is what the incarnation means! This is what it means for God to become a man!

The Lord God sent His Only-Begotten Son to earth not simple by chance, but to join to Himself His creation – mankind. For this reason He was born today and took upon Himself human flesh, and, one could say, constrained His Divinity. Since God has taken such a radical step towards us, it behooves us to also make a step towards Him. This means to swaddle our sinful habits, our passions, and to deny them the possibility to act on us, and to continue constraining them throughout our earthly life.

priest Alexis