The Meaning of Christmas and Its Obscuration
By Protopresbyter Fr. George Metallinos
By Protopresbyter Fr. George Metallinos
With His incarnation and His birth, the God-man Jesus Christ fulfills the purpose of the creation of man: the manifestation of the God-man in history, the union of the created creature with the Uncreated Creator. The purpose of the Incarnation is the deification (theosis) of man.
“Man becomes God, so that Adam may attain God.” (Christmas troparion).
“He became man so that we might be deified” (Saint Athanasios the Great).
“For God became man and man became God” (Saint John Chrysostom).
Within the logic of a moralist, the term “that we might be deified,” which Fathers such as Saint Athanasios use, is a scandal. For this reason they speak of a so-called “moral deification.” This is because they fear accepting that through deification there occurs, “by grace,” what the Triune God is “by nature” (uncreated, without beginning, immortal).
For this reason, Christmas is directly connected not only with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, but also with the Ascension and Pentecost. Christ — the God-man — traces the path that every saved human being is called to walk, through union with Him. The Annunciation and Christmas lead to Pentecost: the event of the deification of man in Christ, that is, within the Body of Christ. If Christmas is the birth of God as man, Pentecost is the perfection of man as God by grace.
Through our baptism we participate in the Incarnation, the Death, and the Resurrection of Christ; we too live our own “Christmas,” our renewal. The Saints, who reach union with Christ, that is, deification, participate in Pentecost and thus attain the perfection and completion of the reborn human person in Christ.
This is what ecclesiastically constitutes the realization of man — that is, the fulfillment of the purpose of his existence. However tiring theological discourse may be, especially for the theologically uninitiated modern person, it expresses nothing other than the reality of the experience of our Saints. Only through this experience can Christmas be understood ecclesiastically — that is, Christocentrically.
By contrast, the inability of the unregenerated-in-Christ human being to give meaning to Christmas has led some to construct myths around it. Those who have no taste of life in the Holy Spirit, being unable to live Christmas, mythologize it, at the limits of imagination and fiction, thus losing its true meaning. As we shall see, this disorientation is not always connected with a denial of the mystery, but rather with an inability to experience it, which inevitably leads to its misinterpretation.
A first mythological response to the question of Christmas is offered by heresy — speculative and groundless (that is, non-experiential) theologizing. Docetism, the most terrible heresy of all centuries, accepted an imaginary incarnation of the Word of God (dokein = to seem). That is, a merely apparent presence of God within worldly reality. Why, one might ask?
The Docetists of every age cannot tolerate, within the limits of their rationality, the incarnation and birth of God as man. Transforming themselves into self-appointed defenders of God’s dignity, they are ashamed to accept what God Himself chose for our salvation: the path of motherhood — to be born of a Mother, even if she is none other than the purest creature in all of human history, the All-Holy Virgin.
All these can be classified among the “exceedingly-orthodox” (according to Saint Gregory the Theologian). For Docetism led to Monophysitism — to the denial of Christ’s humanity. These are the conservatives, the legalists, the easily scandalized. For all of them, truth, reality, and historicity are a scandal. While others reject Christ’s divinity, these deny His humanity.
And yet Orthodoxy, as Christianity in its authenticity, is “the most historical religion,” according to the ever-memorable Father Georges Florovsky. It lives within the reality of God’s saving actions and accepts them with the realism of the Theotokos: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). “And Pilate is in the Creed,” says a fine Serbian proverb — because Pilate, the most irresolute official in history, as a real historical figure, confirms the historicity of the Gospel.
In spite of the Docetists, however, the Word of God “became flesh — that is, man — and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory” (John 1:14), the uncreated light of His divinity. For “in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9): that is, He is perfect God and perfect man.
The incarnation and birth of the God-man are a scandal to human wisdom, which — self-negating and self-annulling — hastens to label the mystery of Christ as “folly,” a mystery that reaches its summit in His death on the Cross (1 Cor. 1:23). Is it possible for God to descend to such a depth of self-emptying as to die upon the Cross as the God-man? This is the scandal for the wise of this world. For the “gods” of this world usually sacrifice people for themselves; they do not sacrifice themselves for people. How could they accept the mystery of divine selflessness?
“For God so loved the world that He gave (sacrificed) His only-begotten Son… that the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:16–17). At the limits of “rational” or “natural” theology, the divine element in the Person of Christ is ultimately lost, and only the human remains — misunderstood and misinterpreted. For historically there is no merely human Christ, but the God-man. The union of God and man in the Person of the Word of God is “without confusion,” yet also “without division.” “Rational” interpretations of Christ’s Person prove irrational, because they are incapable of grasping with reason that which is “beyond reason.”
The juridical–legal consciousness also encounters its own scandal in Christ. It seeks a social expediency in the Incarnation and likewise ends in myth when it does not surrender itself to the Divine Word. The Franks constructed, through their distinguished scholastic Anselm (11th c.), the myth of the “satisfaction of divine justice.” The Word of God is incarnate in order to be crucified, to be sacrificed, and thus provide satisfaction for the offense that human sin inflicted upon God.
The prevailing conditions of Frankish feudal society are mythologically projected onto God, who assumes, within the Franco-Germanic imagination, the role of a supreme emperor. Let John cry out: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son…” (3:16), or Paul: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). No! The Western (or Westernized) man will instead learn to cry out: “to take revenge” and “to demand satisfaction.”
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
