ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

The Christmas Message and Christmas Sermon of Bishop Basil of Amphipolis

24 December 2008

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

Dear Brother and Sisters in Christ,

With Archbishop Gabriel I want to greet you on the occasion of this marvellous Feast and to wish you all the joy of the season and an abundance of God’s blessings in the New Year. Just as the Divine Liturgy is new every time we take part in it, so each year brings something new into our lives. With God, however, what is truly new is always at the same time a blessing, for the Enemy, Satan, has, from the beginning, only managed to repeat himself. So let us look forward to what is truly new in the New Year, confident in God’s providential love and strong in our love for one another and for all mankind.

                               Yours ever in Christ,

  BISHOP OF AMPHIPOLIS

A sermon preached by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis at St Andrew Holborn (Parish of the Dormition of the Mother of God) on Sunday, 21 December 2008

In today’s world it is a simple fact that all is history – or is understood as history. We view our place in the world in historical, developmental terms, and this explains our obsession with archaeology, with palaeontology and ultimately with cosmology itself. Whatever we look at we try to analyse in the light of its historical development through time. But what we don’t always realise is that this is a uniquely Jewish way of understanding God’s creation and our place in it. And therefore, of course, it is also one of the fundamental aspects of the Christian revelation. As Christians, we look at everything from the point of view of time, time opening out onto eternity. And so, as we draw near to the Nativity of Christ, it is only appropriate to look at the history of mankind from a specifically Christian and theological point of view.

On the Sunday before Christmas we read the genealogy of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew. This genealogy gives us the ancestors of Christ back as far as Abraham, something that immediately tells us that the audience for whom Matthew is writing is essentially a Jewish audience. In today’s Gospel, Christ speaks of the woman who has been ill for eighteen years as a ‘daughter of Abraham’ (Lk 13:16). This is the fundamental identifying feature of the whole of the Jewish nation: every Jew is a ‘child of Abraham’. But if you turn to the Gospel of Luke, you will find that Luke extends the genealogy of Christ all the way back to Adam, which immediately tells us that Luke has in the back of his mind not just the Jewish people, but all mankind. For a ‘child of Adam’ describes every human being that has ever existed or will exist.

So we see here two attempts to integrate the incarnation of Christ into history. But, to integrate Christ into history is also to integrate Christ into the coming into being of the world (the story of Adam, after all, belongs to the book of Genesis) and into the constant and repetitive cycle of human birth and death. In Greek ‘coming into being’ is genesis, and ‘being born’ is gennêsis, two slightly different words. But the aspect of being born that struck all of the Ancients most forcibly was that to be born means to die. There is nothing that comes into being by birth that does not die.

This is where Christ comes in. He breaks that pattern, and He breaks it in two stages. In the first stage He is born not simply of a human father and mother, but of a Virgin Mother overshadowed by the Spirit of an indwelling God: He is fathered by God and ‘mothered’ both by Mary and the Spirit. This story is, of course, the Christmas story, the story of the Nativity of Christ, which is crucial to our understanding of Christianity and indeed to the development of the culture in which we live.

But Christ goes one step further. At that first stage, as a child of Mary, He must die. But in His death and subsequent Resurrection, He moves towards a second stage, a stage that involves another kind of birth, a birth, as John says, ‘from above’ (Jn 19:11). Resurrection is a birth not into time – and therefore into death – but a birth into eternity. In this new re-birth of man, God is both the Father and the Mother of mankind, for it is God who brings this new creature into being, and brings it into being in such a way that it will never die.

Now, it is no coincidence that we celebrate Christmas at this time of year. Today, the twenty-first of December, is actually the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. From now on every day will become longer, and although we might not see this to begin with, by the time we get into February the change will be quite noticeable.

Christ Himself was born into a time of darkness, into a historical moment when the Jewish people were being systematically oppressed by Rome. Around Him were the seeds of revolution and revolt that will bear their fruit in the Jewish uprising of 66-70AD. And into that world He brings a new kind of light.

Our birth from God and ‘from above’ is always from within darkness. It is both from within the historical darkness of the world in which we live and from within our own inner darkness. In both cases it is a birth – or re-birth – into light. And yet this rebirth does not remove us from history. It does not remove us from the darkness of this world. What it does, however, is add new depth and a new meaning to our presence in this world, to our presence in history, and to the inner struggle with the Evil One in which we are all involved. In other words, our rebirth does not protect us from conflict. It does, however, offer us a kind of protection from the Evil One. And this is what we see in today’s Epistle to the Ephesians, where Paul speaks of putting on ‘the whole armour of God’ (Eph 6:13).

A few days ago I was privileged to see – or to be shown – a marvellous late-fourteenth-century or early-fifteenth-century Byzantine icon of Saint Demetrios. One thing striking about this icon was that the armour of the saint seems to be much bigger, much greater than he is. The breastplate is absolutely enormous, larger than you could imagine any man wearing. And this seems to invite us to look upon it as St Paul’s ‘whole armour of God’, represented in the icon pictorially and in material form. It is the spiritual armour that protected the saint in his struggles. And of course it was given to him in his Baptism.

We too have been given that armour. As part of our rebirth out of darkness into light in Baptism, we were given the grace of the Holy Spirit, both to illumine us and protect us in this darkness, and to enable us to continue in our own lives Christ’s struggle with the Evil One.

We need to understand that this re-birth, which Christ brought into the world through His death and Resurrection, is something still alive within the historical process. The historical process did not disappear with the coming of Christ, but something else began to take place within it.

The same thing can be said of the life of each one of us. The darkness of this world did not disappear when we were baptised, but a new kind of light began to shine within it. This light – and the power of the Spirit that comes with it – is in fact a gift to us from God. So let us – as children of Adam, and of Abraham, and of God – accept this gift that comes to us with Christ and experience, in our lives, that axial moment of Christ’s birth, which has taken place both in eternity and in time. In the history of mankind – and in the story of each one of us – there is only before and after Christ.

Amen.