St Gregory of Nazianzen is one of only three saints in the Orthodox Church to be accorded the title: “theologian”. One of the great three Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, the other two being St Basil the Great and St Gregory of Nyssa, St Gregory did much by building on the Council of Nicaea to articulate the mystery of the Holy Trinity. In his theologising and homilies he showed himself to be first and foremost a poet. He understood the mystery of God remained forever beyond human grasping so his preachings and writings are both poetic sober and confined to what has been revealed by God in the Tradition of the Church.

I am presenting for you today extracts from his orations on feast of the Nativity of Christ. I shall intersperse these reflections from contemporary life as the context in which both the promises and the challenges of the gospel are to be worked out by each one of us. St Gregory begins in this fashion:-

The very Son of God, older than the ages, the invisible, the incomprehensible, the incorporeal, the beginning of beginning, the light of light, the fountain of life and immortality, the image of the archetype, the immovable seal, the perfect likeness, the definition and word of the Father: he it is who comes to his own image and takes our nature for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like. He takes to himself all that is human, except for sin. He was conceived by the Virgin Mary, who had been first prepared in soul and body by the Spirit; his coming to birth had to be treated with honour, virginity had to receive new honour. He comes forth as God, in the human nature he has taken, one being, made of two contrary elements, flesh and spirit. Spirit gave divinity, flesh received it.

This first affirmation of the Saint establishes both the presupposition and goal of the divine incarnation. The two contrary elements, flesh and spirit are compatible because humanity has always born the divine imprint as created by God and in-breathed by the breath of God in the Garden of Eden. The image of God has never been defaced by human disobedience and sin. The image of God in humanity is honoured deeply in the incarnation by the uniting of the Logos to our human nature and flesh in the womb of the Theotokos, the Mother of God. Christ, therefore, is able to purify our nature of every accretion of sin much like a ship maintenance crew will scrub a boat’s pristine hull from the growth of barnacles and other encrustations. This divine cleansing of our nature renders it luminous, pure and glorious. Christ voluntarily takes upon himself, the sinless one, the ugliness of our sin and grants to us instead the beauty of the divine likeness according to the measure of our repentance. St Gregory then moves on to consider how Christ achieves this. He says:-

He who makes rich is made poor; he takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty; he is emptied for a brief space of his glory that I may share in his fullness. What is this wealth of goodness? What is this mystery that surrounds me? I received the likeness of God, but failed to keep it. He takes on my flesh, to bring salvation to the image, immortality to the flesh. He enters into a second union with us, a union far more wonderful than the first.

The key idea here is his fullness, that is, God’s fullness in Christ, for our emptiness. In this we may learn something very practical for our repentance. Put very simply we have to recognise and accept, first of all, that we are truly empty before we may be filled. All our accomplishments, our skills and our gifts have to be attributed to God alone who has created all things good and from Whom all goodness proceeds. If we begin to think that we possess these things by our own invention and by our own powers then we shall spoil the goodness that most prize so highly. Pride will make our powers and destructive. Only by accepting that the good in us comes from God alone and that this good can only flourish in God and by his grace and power can we truly live free and productive lives, honouring both God and men. God’s fullness for our emptiness. It is in this measure that we rejoice in the divine grace that God and Man have been united so that Man might participate in the very life of God Himself.

Such fruits of repentance and renewal will only come to us, however, once the deadly illusion of our mastery, of our own fullness, has been broken. Nothing but a humble heart can truly be made glorious. In all things we must consider all men, all men and all children, as more worthy of this than ourselves … and yet none are worthy for all is grace, all is gift, all is the dispensation of the divine love.  As we recite so often in the Divine Liturgy, we are all sinners, each one us the first, so we have no grounds for boasting concerning our virtues, accomplishments, potentialities and powers.  We have no grounds for boasting at all, as St. Paul says, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ in whom is our only redemption and help. St Gregory now comes the heart of the matter; why indeed Christ was born.

Holiness had to be brought to man by the humanity assumed by one who was God, so that God might overcome the tyrant by force and so deliver us and lead us back to himself through the mediation of his Son. The Son arranged this for the honour of the Father, to whom the Son is clearly obedient in all things.

Now we know that we are surrounded by so much sentimentality, hedonistic froth and consumerist excess in this festive season but we must not deny ourselves the simple joyful pleasures of family life: the gifts, the feasting and shared happiness at this time.  This also gladdens the heart of God.  Let us be clear though of the cause of our rejoicing: that God sent his Only-Begotten Son to set us free from the law of sin and death.  It is not for nothing, therefore, that the Church recites of the Gospel of the Incarnation in the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John, not as in the west on the Feast of the Nativity, but on the Eve of Pascha.  There can be no division then whatsoever between the Feasts of Easter and Christmas, between Pascha and the Nativity.  These are two sides of the same coin, the same gospel.  This is not a winter festival to blow away the blues of the cold and the dark.  This is a rejoicing in the everlasting reign of the Son who scatters all darkness before Him; a scattering He only achieves by his glorious resurrection from the dead!

So, Christ was born to die and in death to overcome death. Myrrh was brought by the Magi to the cave as a preparation for this victorious death. The cave itself behind the Christ child is always shown pitch black for this very reason. There is no sentimentality in the birth of Christ.  Joseph is troubled and the whole world hears the praises of the angels but few are they who sing with them.  The Incarnation divides the response.  It is meant to.  People have to make a choice.

This is now the divine theologian, St. Gregory, brings us to the climax of his theme:-

We need God to take our flesh and die that we might live. We have died with him, that we may be purified. We have risen again with him, because we have died with him. We have been glorified with him, because we have risen again with him.

The Christian message is not one of moral improvement, that graceless thing, that husk of the law. The gospel is, rather, a great and glorious song of divine transformation of those who have the humility and abject poverty in grace to choose to become radiant and rich in God.  His fullness for our emptiness.  There is no hope for us unless we submit ourselves to God’s healing grace; unless we put Him first in our lives, unless and until we lay aside all rancour and self-justification and choose His Life rather than our death. In this is the image of God honoured in us and in all. In this is the divine likeness restored both to ourselves and potentially to the whole Cosmos. This is a great and noble calling but few hear it so clearly as to respond in truth. Let us then take care to be numbered amongst the saints who have responded to this divine initiative of love and who have been called into the kingdom of the Son so that we with them might not fall into perdition but receive the blessings of eternal life.