-- the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn,
observed on 16 December 2020
He Came Down from Heaven
“And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” (John 3.13)
When we look at the Baby Jesus in the manger, with His Mother the Theotokos and His Foster Father the Righteous Joseph looking on, we join them in adoration. We share their tenderness for the Child Christ.
Think about that. We feel tenderness at the Nativity scene. We identify with the overwhelming maternal desire to care for, to nurture, and to protect this tiny little Baby.
It is a holy, tender, glowing, warm, and touching scene.
It is also shocking.
The Nativity scene is shocking because it is God Who is lying where gods do not belong -- in a feeding trough deep within a cave, surrounded by beasts of burden and only poor people like an adolescent orphan Girl, a carpenter, and illiterate shepherds.
Here, in this dark obscurity, in weakness and dependency and vulnerability, God does not look like God.
In Heaven, the Son of God had all the divine prerogatives of being God. In other words, He “looked like God,” as St Paul says in his Epistle to the Philippians, “He was in the form of God, and did not count equality with God as robbery” (2.6). In heaven, Christ Jesus enjoyed all the glories of divinity as a natural right. There was no “robbery” of egotistical self-aggrandizement, of trying to be “king of the hill.”
Christ, in Heaven, looked like God, was glorified as God, simply because He is God, equal in divinity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The heavenly tranquility, the divine glory of complete apatheia, was His “natural state” that He never had to grab for Himself, it was never a wealth that He had to keep away from others, like the Rich Fool who built barns (Luke 12.16-21) to protect his wealth from the needs of the poor.
Glory was His. It was never something He had to gain.
But it was always His to lose, to surrender. He did so completely by free choice, in complete and voluntary obedience to the Father.
This He did in Heaven, a decision made above and out of Time. You can’t even try to suggest a date when our Saviour freely decided to give up His heavenly glory (i.e., His “being in the form of God,” His “equality with God”), when He chose freely to submerge His divine nature completely under the human nature that He received from the Virgin Mary’s womb.
You cannot date this decision, simply because in Heaven this decision is date-less, an eternity before the Fall: “According as the Father hath chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love” (Ephesians 1.4).
The Incarnation that is celebrated at Christmas was a sacrifice freely chosen forever.
And it was chosen as an act of kenosis, which is the beautiful Greek New Testament term for “pouring oneself out” -- like a pitcher of water that is totally emptied of itself for the sake of the vessel it is poured into.
We are that vessel into which Christ’s kenotic love is poured.
Kenosis is just the way of Divine Nature. I repeatedly tell our seminarians, “There is no theosis (i.e., salvation) without kenosis.” In the same way, “There is no divinity without kenosis.” The Holy Trinity is the Trinity just because of kenosis: the Father pours Himself completely into the Son and Spirit. The Son and Spirit, in turn, pour Themselves completely into Him.
And this mutual outpouring (which the Greek Fathers called “perichoresis”) is the very Love which God is, and which overflows into Creation. The divine and never-ending act of creation itself is a kenotic act of the pouring out of Self. Creation is the result of God’s self-sacrificial love. There is no part of Creation that is not the recipient of this divine gift.
But when the recipient vessel of this divine, creative outpouring fell into the outer darkness of sin and death (where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”), God once again sacrificed Himself. “God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son” (John 3.16).
God the Father asked -- He didn’t force. There is no compulsion in self-donating love. And the Son said “Yes” -- very much like the Theotokos on March 25th, who said, “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord, be it unto me according to your word” (Luke 1.38).
Or, it would be more accurate to say that the young Virgin Mary said this after the standard of Love set first by the Son.
So the Son of God came down from Heaven. God the Creator entered into and became part of Creation. This is the greatest, most fundamental truth of all life -- your life, my life, and the life of the world.
God became man, and most assuredly not as Superman. God became man in weakness and need, dependency and vulnerability. The Child in the Manger is God. But at the same time, He is so not apparently Godlike. He is a real, helpless baby. He needs His Mother to nourish Him. He needs His foster father to protect Him.
The timeless Creator chose to become, to develop as an unborn infant after conception, to be born as a baby, to suckle at His Mother’s breasts, to grow as a child, to “increase in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2.52). In the Heaven of Divinity, there is only timeless Being -- but the Creator entered into the realm of “becoming.” The Timeless One now experienced Time. The Infinitely Present One was now located in Space.
We must never lose our sense of overwhelming wonder at this Revelation. We must always gasp in surprise at the Truth of God becoming “not-God” while still remaining God. We must weep at the tender majesty of it all.
There is no way in heaven or on earth for anyone to even imagine such a truth -- it lies far above the intelligence of humans and even angels to invent this thought. If you had all the time in the world, you could not have made it up: it can only have been whispered to you by the Holy Spirit.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1.14). This wasn’t a “visitation,” such as those splendid moments in the Old Testament when the Pre-Incarnate Christ appeared to Abraham at the Oak of Mamre and wrestled with Jacob at the Brook of Peniel.
No, this was a “dwelling,” not a visitation but a habitation. He became not just one of us, but, in a sense, all of us. He became the Second Adam, the integral Man, Who would succeed where the First Adam failed. He would bless all of life through His own Life, “recapitulating” (to use St Irenaeus’ favorite word) all of humanity.
“Therefore He had to be made like His brethren in every respect,” St Paul wrote in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “Because He Himself has suffered and been tempted, He is able to help those who are tempted” (2.17-18). “For we have not a high priest Who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one Who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4.15).
He became flesh. He became weak. He hungered and thirsted. He became tired, weary from travel and ministry to the crowds. He grieved and wept at the tomb of His friend. He mourned the stubbornness of the very people He came to save.
And, what most people do not realize, He could only pray out of the depths of His incarnate weakness -- there was no other way: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord” (Psalm 129.1 LXX). In the state of his self-humiliation (for that is what laying aside His glory meant), He had to pray to the Father as God. His prayers were not prayed as mere demonstrations. His prayers were real. Through His prayer the Son received from the Father salvation from death: the Resurrection was an answer to this most tragic, the most significant, the most powerful prayer in all Time and Space..
He suffered pain -- not just the physical Crucifixion, but the pain of all the sin, all the evil, all the death of the entire human race and the strain of the entire Creation. He suffered the groaning weight of hell.
This was the life the Baby Jesus was born to. This was His destiny.
This is the lesson of the Manger: “When He ascended on high He led a host of captives, and He gave gifts to me,” wrote St Paul to the Ephesians, quoting Psalm 67.18 LXX. And the Apostle further commented, almost quoting word for word John 3.13: “In saying ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that He must have had also descended into the lowest parts of the earth? He who descended is He who also ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things” (Ephesians 4.8-10).
He came down from heaven and descended into humanity, just so He could ascend and take us with Him.
He gave up His heavenly glory to become lowly like us, so that He could transfigure humanity in heavenly light.
He left the free conversation of Heaven, that He could teach us to pray.
He was born in the darkness of the cave, that He might return in uncreated brightness as the never-setting Sun.
He lay in the manger as a helpless Infant, that He might reign as Risen Lord.
Here He is, in the cave with the donkey and the beast, the shepherds, Joseph and the Virgin.
He was born for this, for you and me.
Venite adoremus.
Prijdite poklonimsja.
O come, let us adore Him.