“This feast is a celebration of God’s humble and merciful love shown in His eternal Son, who out of love for humankind and its salvation became exactly what He loved – a Man,” His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel said during the Divine Liturgy celebrated at the patriarchal cathedral on the feast of the Nativity of the Lord.
His Beatitude explained that the descent of the eternal Son of God from eternity into time and from heaven to earth “unites heaven with earth and God with men.”
“The Messiah was prophesied centuries before to prepare the people; this was an active expectation, with prayer, fasting and hope.”
“Those who wanted to see the Messiah with their own eyes often had to suffer in history; they were received with hostility, they wandered in the mountains, in deserts, in the holes of the earth (Hebrews 11:38). They waited in suffering and hope; in suffering because they often suffered when they tried to correct people’s lives, but also in hope because of what God promised,” the Patriarch of Romania explained on December 25.
The Orthodox faith is the gold that we bring to the Child Jesus
“These three gifts have, first of all, a spiritual meaning: the gold means the pure right faith – the Orthodox Faith, without error, mixture, and confusion. The right faith or the Orthodox Faith is the gold that we bring to Christ when we confess the Creed and when we confess the faith of the Holy Apostles, Prophets and all the saints in the history of the Church.”
“Frankincense means fervent prayer. If frankincense is not placed on an incandescent coal, it does not produce any smell. Therefore, it symbolises fervent prayer, when a person prays with fervent faith, with all his heart.”
“Myrrh means pure life and good deeds, for only good deeds enter the Kingdom of God. We take none of the things gathered around us into eternal life. Only the light of good deeds imprints itself on the human soul. Man will take this light into the Kingdom of Heaven.”
God is not only almighty but also all-humble
God, His Beatitude stressed, “did not come into the world as a 30-year-old man, just to be crucified for us. He came as an infant, the God-Child. This is the miracle of Christmas. Our carols have captured, like the Holy Fathers of the Church, this great contrast between the omnipotence of God and the humility of the Child who is born in the cave and then is laid in the manger. We also see that the Child Jesus is, like any baby, like any little baby wrapped in a cotton diaper, totally helpless.”
“What God wanted to show is that He is not only almighty but also all-humble. His humility is seen in the fact that he was a Child. A child cannot do anything for himself; he perishes if he is not loved and helped. He needs the love of his parents to clothe, feed and be carried. So, the Almighty is totally powerless in the Child Jesus, but if he had not been an infant, the Child Jesus could not speak later about God’s parental love towards the world because the child learns what parental love is during childhood. He who was not a child is not a full human because he did not learn parental love from his parents.”
“Through the birth of the Virgin, Christ sanctifies the humanity within her. The earth is sanctified through the birth of the Infant in the cave. Through the sleeping of the Baby in the manger, the vegetable and animal kingdoms are sanctified. Through His Baptism in the waters of the Jordan, the nature of the waters is sanctified, and through the crucifixion on the Cross, air and wood are sanctified, as the liturgical books indicate.”
Photography courtesy of Basilica.ro / Mircea Florescu
