Today we commemorate the eve of the birth of Jesus Christ with Royal Hours and Vespers and Liturgy, looking toward the celebration of our Lord’s birth tonight and tomorrow morning for Christmas Day.
As the Gospel of John tells us, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehends it not. Jesus Christ tells us that I Am the light of the world, even as he tells us to let our light shine in Him. His birth is a great bringing of the uncreated light or grace of God to the world, so that His light may shine forth from each of our hearts in Him.. The Christmas star is often depicted in our iconography as coming down from a dark aureola, signifying that divine grace of God that comes to us through Christ’s birth.
We can adapt the words of a famous Anglo-American hymn to our location for this Christmas Eve service, here in Union township:
O little town of Winfield, how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light, the hopes and fears of all the years, are met in thee tonight.
The darkness tonight in our 21st-century world is broken by light pollution and the glow of our devices, by global wars and rumors of wars. Yet the star of Bethlehem, understood by the Church Fathers as an angelic being, shines on to guide us to the cave at Bethlehem.
The angels coming to the shepherds sing, “Glory to God in the highest,” and this is part of the priestly prayer repeated before each Liturgy, a reminder of how the good news at Bethlehem grounds our participation in the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist throughout the year. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace good will among men,” is a proclamation that is also a prayer, a proclamation of God’s greatness and of His coming to earth, and a prayer for peace and good will among men.
On Christmas Eve, Union, the name of our local township, can be a reminder of the Russian Orthodox term sobornost, referring to the mystical unity highlighted at Christmas Eve, the solidarity of mankind saved in Christ. His birth as the Second Adam in the flesh reminds us and redeems us in our common human nature. We find our self by losing ourself in Him, in the dreamless sleep from which He wakes us tonight. He gives us the gift of unity in Him, in His Body the Church, our Church family, the basis for each of our homes and daily work and lives.
As the Christmas carol puts it, tonight is the culmination of the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Him tonight. All the thousands of years of struggles of the patriarchs, prophets, and faithful.
Even the very biblical term for Church reminds us of this. For the Greek term ekklesia in the Bible, usually translated into English as Church, is also the term in the Old Testament for the remnant assembly who kept faithful to God’s law in the Old Testament.
The Church in the New Testament on Christmas Eve transforms into the fully realized Israel, and the remnant find their faith made real in the babe in the cave at Bethlehem, the King of Kings for all nations and peoples and races, including here in Appalachian America.
In His Ascension he took up into heaven the human form in which He was born at Bethlehem tonight, fully God and fully man. May our mission work with God’s grace now save ourselves and others, that still our Lord may come quickly again.
For Christmas Eve links the first and the last books of the Bible, Genesis and Revelation. In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth, Genesis tells us. That “in the beginning” means “in the Logos,” for as the Gospel of John tells us, “in the beginning was the Word.” The Creed tells us that by Jesus Christ “all things were made,” by Him of one essence, unconfused and undivided, with the Holy Trinity.
Then in the Book of Revelation, at the sounding of the seventh trumpet marking the end of time and of this world, we are told of the woman travailing in birth. A great red dragon stands ready to consume the newborn child. The man-child is caught up to God and the woman is given a place of safety in the wilderness for three and a half years.
In this account, the Church Fathers saw a description of the Church reflecting also the account of Christ’s birth. They saw the birth of the child as about the kindling of the light of Christ in each of our hearts, accompanied by persecution of the Church by the antichrist, just as the evil king Herod had sought to slay the little boys after Jesus’ birth. The woman and the child also reference the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, along with each believer born again in Jesus Christ.
So Christmas Eve has reference both historically and to our day too. The sharp rugged rocks often depicted in the icon of the night-time scene at the cave reference the harshness of the world. But above shines the star, and in the hidden cave comes the beauty of redemption, God’s love made tangible and personalized for us forever.
St. John Damascene wrote of how at Christmas the Logos, God the Word, thickened into image. So too at Christmas the law of God–for principle or law is another translation of Logos–became flesh. Jesus Christ fulfilled the law of God from the Old Testament in the New Testament that has made all of us in the Body of Christ part of the new covenant with Israel, the people of God. Christmas Eve resides today in the Gospel book that has replaced the Stone commandments in the Holy of Holies, through the Person of Jesus Christ.
The Icon of Nativity at the table of preparation in the altar is now out in the middle of the Church, with a relic from the cave of Bethlehem. Before this icon of the Nativity the bread is made ready for Holy Communion. And the secret priestly prayer repeats from the angels, “glory to God in the highest and on earth peace good will among men.”
As that early American hymn put it,
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell…
Our Lord Emmanuel.
The mystery of Christmas Eve is that amid the darkness of the world and the mounting worldly powers of the antichrist around us, the light has come to shine from within our hearts, the divine light, given to us as we live in Jesus Christ, the hidden God who came to illumine the world from within a cave.
Christ is born!