From Monachos.net
The mysteries of the Christian life are many: the mystery of the crucified God, the risen dead, the sight-filled blind, the joyful broken. And present within the Church's chief mystery—the holy gifts of the holy offering, become none other than the holy body and blood—lies another mystery still: the mystery of love. This sacrament of God's creative self-communication, of dynamic love which transcends and transforms the cosmos of love's fashioning, actualises in each human life—whether realised or not—the eternal love, the very life, of the most holy Trinity. Love has come to us, love comes to us, love each day may re-create us wholly to the active life of its own image.
The Mystery of Love, that creative, energetic life of the eternal God, stands at the centre of our Christian existence. All the sacraments, all the mysteries of this life, are bound up in this; for Love has come to us, has bowed down the heavens and descended to the throne of our human heart. The self-communication of love, which ever expresses itself in the mutual love of the Trinitarian life, has communicated itself into the cosmos as light into the darkness.
Love has come to us. The holy incarnation, which the Church celebrates today in the Nativity of the Saviour, is meaningless and distorted if not seen as this mystery of the advent of Love. Though such realities be true, the full meaning and purpose of this fearful birth are not summed up in the sin of human life, in the weight of sin demanding sacrifice, of the wandering, lost sheep in need of guidance. The reverent dread, the full wonder of the Nativity of God, lies in the pure and greatest mystery of Christian reality: the love that orders the cosmos, the love that creates and fashions, the love the Theologian calls God himself, comes directly, fully, gently yet forcefully into the world.
The world into which love has become incarnate has, since that advent (and never more than today), misunderstood that love and its coming. The ways and life of God are a folly to the world—a folly that would defy all knowledge outside of prayer. And so love becomes but an emotion, a feeling; and the emotion is assigned by preference, choice, perspective and position. 'Love is gentle', but gentle no longer in emulation of the Gentle Light that burns away the darkness of sin; rather, gentle in mere and sheer acceptance—of every cancer, of any wrong. 'Love is kind', but its kindness is not as that of the one who rebuked the healed sinner, 'Go, and sin no more'; rather, a kindness which says simply, dreadfully, 'Go', and lets the sin abound.
As the Church celebrates the great mystery of the incarnation, of the holy Nativity of God according to the flesh, we are compelled by the child's visage of the pre-eternal God to take into our hearts the gentle rebuke of our worldly misconceptions.
This one is Love, who has fashioned the cosmos from the void, yet who lays enshrined in a stable.
This one is Love, who fashions man, and bears upon His shoulders his sins.
This one is Love, who offers peace, yet overturns the squalor of the Temple stalls.
This one is Love, who forgives absolutely yet makes the highest of all demands: 'Come, take up your cross, and follow me'.
This one is Love, who does not merely dismiss sin and all its tragic reality, but comes into its midst to condemn, conquer and destroy is captivating false-power.
This one is Love, and Love is no other.
Such sin do we commit when we call or treat as love anything other than the life of the one born in Bethlehem of Mary, love's Mother. In the life in Christ, love is defined for us always by that eternal reality of the Father's great paternal love for the Son, his love worked in the sacred person of the Holy Spirit—in the mutual co-inhering love of their united Trinitarian life. It is this love which has come to us in the incarnation of the Son, for love is God and God is love, and we are proved fools in every division of such a reality.
Yet divide it we are wont to do—and perhaps amongst the chief challenges posed to us in keeping this holy feast is to see anew the singular reality that is God's life, his will, and the substance of our love—even as he is one reality who comes among us as man and God. As God has taken to himself the whole of human life and united it inseparably to his divine being, becoming for us the one known ever in two, so ought we see in our Christian life the perfect synonymity, the full and absolute union, of 'love' and 'God'. Our lives and our loving are defined by the Love who has taken our life, to make ours his and his our own.
Christ is born, and love is held out to all the world.
Christ is born, and the Trinity makes manifest the extent of his compassion.
Christ is born, and life is joined to Life, will to Will, man to God.
Christ is born — let us glorify him!
M.C. Steenberg
25th December 2004 / 7th January 2005
The feast of the Nativity according to the flesh of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ