In our Orthodox Church tradition, Christmas is technically called in the service books: The Incarnation in Flesh of the Only-begotten Son and Word of God.” Now, of course, traditionally the celebration of the Nativity of Christ is understood as the birth of the Son of God in human flesh. And the question that we have to ask ourselves, especially those of us who consider ourselves real Christians, genuine Bible-believing evangelical-proclaiming Christians, whether or not we really believe that and whether we know what it is, we realize what it is that we are really saying when we proclaim and sing that the Son of God has become the Son of Mary, the eternal God has become a little Child, God has become human to make humans divine. In all of the psalms that we sing in church, the question is: Do we understand what we’re singing, and do we really believe it?

Now of course we can say, before getting to that question, is that there are many understandings about Christmas that are existing on the planet earth right now. In New York City right now, there’s a huge billboard as you drive across Lincoln Tunnel into the city that shows a huge billboard with a Christmas tree with lights on, and the only words that it says are, “You know it’s a myth.” That’s what it says. Some kind of atheist society put it up. Apparently some Roman Catholic society put up a counter billboard that showed a manger scene and said, “You know it’s the truth.”

But there are many understandings about what is it. What is this birth of Christ? Who is this Christ anyway? In the gospels, of course, the claim is in the economy of God, the Apostle Peter says it very clearly. When Jesus says, “Who do you say that I am? And who do the people say that I am?” various answers are given. And then when he asks the apostles themselves, “Who do you say that I am?” the Apostle Peter, the leader of the Twelve, says, “You are the Christ, the Son of God.” In Luke and Mark he says simply, “You are the Christ, the Messiah.” In Matthew: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And of course Jesus himself asks in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, “When the Messiah comes, whose Son is he going to be?”

And when the leaders of the people say, “The son of David,” Jesus says, “Why, then, does David call him Kyrios? Why does the Lord call him Lord, saying: The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand’? Why is he called Lord if he is David’s son? Why does David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, call him Lord?” Then in the Scripture it says they simply decided to kill him.

If you take the gospel according to St. John, the theological gospel, the gospel that begins in heaven, so to speak, that begins in God, you have the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”: the Logos, the Devar Yahweh, the Debar, the Word of God. “The Word was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him nothing came to be that came to be.” So it says in the beginning was the Word, the Logos. The Word was with God, and then it says, “And the Word was God.” The Word was Theos. And then in the 14th verse: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”

So that’s the biblical proclamation, and Jesus is not only called Son of God, Word of God, but as we know from our series on the names and titles of Jesus that we did on Ancient Faith Radio, he’s also called the exact image of the Father’s person. In Greek it would be haraktir tis hypostaseos aftou. That’s in the letter to the Hebrews, the express image of the Father’s person or being or nature. He’s called the icon of God; he’s called the icon of the invisible God. He’s called the wisdom of God. He’s called the power of God. He’s called the truth, he’s called the life, he’s called the light—all those names are given to Jesus, and that is the biblical teaching, and that is the Orthodox teaching, the original orthodox ancient Christian teaching.

Now, not everybody believes that. Some folks say there wasn’t even any Jesus; some say he was a kind of demented Jewish prophetic teacher; some say he was an apocalyptic prophet; others say that he was just beside himself and didn’t know what he was; some say he was a very good man, a very nice man, prophetic, inspired by God. Some folks even think he had the highest achievement of— or highest achievements of God-consciousness, everybody is divine; everybody is god in the depth of our being; every human being is divine somehow, and we have to realize it, and Jesus has realized it; he’s a perfectly self-realized human being which shows that he in fact can be called divine.

There’s all kinds of teachings about him. There were early Christian heretics who said that he never even really became human, that he’s a divine being who just masqueraded as a human being, that he’s a divine being who just indwelled a body, or he is a divine being who was joined to the man Jesus—that would be what is called the Nestorian teaching, that the Son of God, born and begotten from all eternity from the Father, who proceeds from the Father as his divine image and his divine Word, that he joined himself to Mary’s son, Jesus, therefore forming the Christ. There are all kinds of teachings, and we spoke about them very much on Ancient Faith Radio already, and I’m sure as long God allows we’ll keep talking about these things until the end.

But what our question has to be this year on this Christmas, what we want to ask our self right now is: What do we believe? Do we believe what the holy Scripture says? Namely, that Jesus of Nazareth pre-existed as the divine Son and Word and Image of God, and at a certain moment in human history, in the fullness of time, that very same Word of God—wisdom of God, power of God, life of God, light of God, Son of God—actually was born as a real human being on the planet earth. That’s the question. Do we really believe it?

I have a friend, a very good friend of mine; he’s a priest, Fr. Steve Tsichlis, actually. Some of you may know him. He’s in California. But he used to say to me sometimes; he’d say, “You know, Father, you know what the real trouble is?” He said, “We don’t really believe in the Incarnation. We don’t really believe it. We say that we do, but we don’t really believe it.”

Unlike liberals, to use jargon, unlike some liberal Protestants, for example, who would say, “Jesus is just a man, there is no Holy Trinity,” like Unitarians would claim, “There’s just a monad God, a one God, a divine Being, a force, and that God never became a human being at all. He joined himself to a human being. He reveals himself to human beings.” You know, that would be, in a sense, the Jewish teaching and the Islamic teaching, there’s one supra-marvelous God, even a personal God. Some people would say God is impersonal, beyond personhood. But anyway, the teaching would be that Jesus is just a man, just a man like the superstar records say: “He’s just a man. He’s just a man.”

But the temptation for us Orthodox Christians who are so strict and firm and wanting to defend the divinity of Christ, the real divinity of Christ—we are Nicene Christians following the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of the holy Fathers that said that I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not created, of one essence with the Father, one same identical divinity with the one God and Father, of one essence with the Father; who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became human. Now that’s the line: Became human.

Do we really believe that he became human exactly as you and I are? Let’s ask our self that question this year, especially if we believe in the divinity of Jesus. Let’s say, “Okay, we confess that he is God. He is God, but is he God who has really become a man, really become human? Or is he God who acts as if he were a human? Or is he a God who indwells a human, like in a temple? Or is he a God who has joined himself to the man named Jesus, so that if you see Jesus you see God? Is he really divine with the same exact divinity as God his Father, or isn’t he?”

And then, if we say yes, then we ask this question: What does it mean to say en anthropisanta, as the Creed says: and became human, and became man? And was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate? And suffered and was buried and the third day rose again, according to the Scriptures—the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets? And ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will return in glory, to judge the living and the dead—as a man, as the Son of Man? That’s also a biblical teaching, in St. John’s gospel. It’s the funeral service in the Orthodox Church, where the Lord Jesus says in St. John’s gospel that he receives the authority to judge because he is the Son of Man, because he is human. We are judged by a brother human, and he becomes our brother; he becomes our friend. He bears our flesh. In the letter to the Hebrews, it says he becomes like us in every possible way except sin. And that would be the Christian teaching.

It’s so interesting that through the ages that’s what was always from the beginning denied in one way or another. Almost all the heresies about Jesus in the first thousand years of Christianity were denials of his humanity—not his divinity, his humanity. We’ve spoken about this before, but it’s time to speak about it again, because we cannot speak about it too much or too often.

Now let’s ask this question: What do we mean when we say that Jesus is really human, exactly as we are? What did the Third Ecumenical Council mean when it insisted that Mary his Mother, Jesus’ Mother, is truly Theotokos, because the One who was born as a man from her is God, that she gave birth to God as a man. That’s the whole point. Her Child is human, but he is God who, in her, becomes human, conceived of the Holy Spirit. St. Cyril, the great Father of that council, he said, “The Son of God, the Son of Mary, one and the same Son.” And that one and the same Son was conceived in her womb. That one and the same Son was an embryo inside her womb. That one and the same Son was born from her, went through her birth canal. The midwives took that Baby, and we have on the icon of Christmas they’re washing that Baby. Mary takes that Baby with Joseph on the 40th day and offers him according to the Law in the Temple to sacrifice. That takes place after the eighth day, when he’s circumcised in the flesh and given the name Jesus. That humanity in the Scripture is real; it’s not in fantasy. That’s what St. Cyril was insisting upon.

God became human. God was a baby. God was an infant. God was a juvenile. God increased in wisdom and stature before God and man. God learned from his parents. God was obedient to them. God in human flesh, as a man, as a real man. And that same God, who is uncircumscribed in divinity, becomes circumscribed; who is infinite, becomes limited; who is invisible, becomes visible; who is beyond time, enters time and becomes temporal; who is nowhere because he’s not within the created order where anything can be in space, yet he’s found in space; he’s located. He’s a man in human flesh. He’s a Jewish man. He’s a Jewish man, a first-century man, in a particular time, born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, preaching in Galilee, killed outside the walls of Jerusalem: a real man with a real history. That is Jesus: really human.

And then we would say further, as a man, because he’s a real man, he has a human soul. Apollinaris, a heretic, said he had no human soul. St. Gregory the Theologian said, “Oh, yes, he does!” Because if he had no human soul, he wouldn’t really be human. It isn’t that the Logos replaced the human soul. The Logos took on a human soul, a human life, with a human body, with a human brain. And having had a human brain, he has to learn as a human being. You know, we have to say if Jesus is really human, then he is ignorant, like we are, of many, many things. He doesn’t ever sin in any way, that’s for sure; that’s a dogma. He’s a perfect human being ontologically. He has all that belongs to humanity, and he’s a perfect human being morally. He never sins at all in any way.

But he does that as a human being. You cannot say, “Well, of course he was sinless; he was God.” But he’s a God who becomes a real human being. And as a real human being, he has all the qualities, all the characteristics, all the limitations, and all the finitude and circumscription of a human life. So the claim is with his human brain he had to learn who he was.

Here I want to say it again—I’ve said it before and caused some reaction, but it’s true—the man Jesus was not omniscient. He did not know everything. He knew what he could know and learn as a man. Now, as a man and as a perfectly sinless man, he could see into people. He could know what they thought. He could read their minds, so to speak, as many saints even were able to do by the grace of the Holy Spirit. But he does that not simply inasmuch as he is divine; he also does that inasmuch as he is human, and he does it in a human way.

Here we can say that Jesus suffered also as a human. He who is impassible becomes passible. He can be acted upon. And then of course, as St. Cyril insisted, he can grieve; he can weep. He can suffer, and even he can die. Patristics scholars call this the Theopaschite Formula of St. Cyril of Alexandria in the Fourth Century. God himself suffered as a human being, as a man. Now, God as God cannot suffer. God as God is not ignorant of anything. God as God is omniscient. God as God is not bounded anywhere. God as God is beyond time and space. God as God—ineffable and inconceivable and incomprehensible, invisible, and we can know him through his actions and nature and in the Prophets and in the Scriptures, but what we come to know about God as God is that he’s the unknowable. He’s the supremely unknowable. As St. Maximus the Confessor said, he is super-unknowable God who can only be super-unknown through an act of supra-non-knowing. But it is this One, the image, the Son, the Word—of this One, God’s Son, who is divine with the same divinity as the Father—he is the one who becomes really human, with all of the characteristics and qualities, what the Fourth Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon, and following the Fathers called the idiomata: all the properties, qualities, characteristics of human being, he has. That’s the Christian faith.

And then that means that everything that he does, he does as a human being. He not only hungers and thirsts and goes to the bathroom and does everything that a human being does, but he does it without sin; he does it perfectly. But it’s still human. It’s still really, totally, completely human. He is human. And if we deny Jesus’ humanity, we are denying the Holy Scripture, and we are denying the holy Fathers, and we are denying the Ecumenical Councils, all of which said that he is human. And the Third Council, the Fourth Council, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Seventh with the holy icons—when the iconoclasts said, “You can’t paint his picture; he’s divine,” they said, “Yes, but he’s become visible.” They say, “Yes, but his Person is divine. He became human. He took on human nature, but you can’t paint his Person.” But then the holy Church would say, “Yes, but his hypostasis, his Person, now really becomes human and acts in a completely totally human way, suffering all the limitations, as the letter to the Hebrews would say, even all of the temptations of human life on this earth.” In fact, the letter to the Hebrews says he was temped in every way as we are temped, so that he could be with us in our trials, our tribulations, our temptations, the testing of our life. And he had to be tested. He’s the new Adam. Yes, he is the Man who comes from heaven, but he’s still a man. And we have to ask our self if we really believe that.

Now, when we think about those things, there are some people, you know, smart-alecky type of people, who would say, “Why did God send his divine Son into the world? Why does God have a divine Son anyway? Why would we say that God has the Son before the creation of the world and that all things were made by him, through him, for him, and in him? Why would we say that? Why is that necessary?” Well, we say that because the Scripture teaches that, because that’s the fact, that that’s what’s taught to us by Christ himself in the gospels. “He who sees me sees the Father. I and the Father are one, yet the Father is greater than I.” These are the lines of Jesus himself in John’s gospel.

But we could answer the question, “Why was that necessary?” again following the holy Fathers who said if God is really perfect, if God is really love, if God is really goodness, he has to share himself divinely perfectly. He’s got to express himself in a perfect divine manner, not just in a perfect human manner, not in a created manner.” And so the divine self-expression of God Almighty is his begetting the Son from all eternity, that God the Son proceeds from the Father in the manner of a son—the Holy Spirit proceeds, too, in the manner of a Spirit—but the Son proceeds in the manner of a son, an image, a word, to express everything that God is, so there is a perfectly divine expression of God that’s an expression of his perfect love.

St. Paul, in the letter to the Colossians, called Jesus the Son of his love. Because he is love, he produces this Son. And then because he loves the creation that he made and the human beings that he made, male and female, he sends this same Son in the world to become a real human being, a male human being, yes, but his humanity is the same humanity as all men and women and children have. It’s the humanity that every human being has, whether that person is whatever nationality, whatever race; we have to say even nowadays even whatever sexual orientation they have in the fallen world, gay or straight or whatever. Anyone who’s a human being, it’s that same human being that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, born of the Father, begotten of the Father before all ages, born on earth as a man from Mary—it’s that same humanity that he has and that he shares.

And he shares it all for the sake of our salvation. He shares it all to be the perfect human being, because the human beings that God created, none of us are the perfect self-expression of God. None of us are really perfect images of God, however holy, however great, however enlightened, however compassionate. Only Jesus of Nazareth, completely and totally sinless, is the perfect God-man, Theanthropos, really Theos, really anthropos.

Now, we are called to be theos, god, by grace, by faith, but he is God’s unique Son. That’s what monogenis, only-begotten, means. It means it’s the only one of the genus. There isn’t any other like him. No other human being is God’s Son, begotten of the Father before all ages. No other human being pre-existed in a divine manner before being born on earth. And no other human being was born of a virgin, without the seed of man. Only Jesus.

But when that happens, then he is a real man. That’s the miracle. That’s the wonder. That’s the marvel that no one can explain. He’s a real man. It blows our mind, but he’s a real man, and that has to be affirmed completely and totally.

Sometimes people will say, “Well, if God has this divine Son, why did he send the Son to suffer? Why didn’t he come himself?” There was a talk show guy on the radio when I was young. His name was Phil Donahue was raised a Catholic. He was married; he had a whole bunch of kids. And then he lost his faith, and he divorced his wife, and he married Marlo Thomas, and he became kind of an atheistic spokesperson. And he wrote a book called Donahue by Donahue. And in that book—I remember it very well because I read it on the afternoon of my father’s funeral— I went to my father’s funeral, and in the afternoon when we were sitting at the house with our mother, my sister came and said, “Hey, Tommy, you ought to read this book.” And she threw this book at me, called Donahue by Donahue, and I read it. In that book, he was ridiculing Christianity, and he was ridiculing it by saying, “If there is God, and if God really has a Son, why did God send his Son into the world to be crucified and to redeem the world? Why didn’t he come himself? Why didn’t God the Father get incarnate? Why did he send the Son to be incarnate?”

Well, the answer to that for anybody who’s got half a brain and a little bit of purity of heart in them and understood and read the Scripture would know why. It’s because, first of all, all of creation in the whole of the world was made by God’s Son. All things were created through him, it says in Scripture, through the Logos. The world was made for him. It was made by him, through him, for him, in him, and even exists toward him: eis afton, it says in the Greek, St. Paul. It’s his. God made the world for him. God his Father made the whole hundred thousand billion galaxies with a hundred thousand billion stars for him! For him, to be his, to be his body, to be his bride, to be the epiphany of his glory, to be in a created form everything that he is in an uncreated form. He coming forth from God by way of generation and birth and everything else coming forth from God by way of creation, being called out of nothing by God’s will, and he being the agent of that creation.

So St. Athanasius the Great, in his book, On the Incarnation of the Son of God, he said it very clearly. The only One who could be the Savior and Redeemer of the world is the One who is the Creator of the world. The agent of creation is the agent of redemption. If the world was made by him and for him, then the world has to be saved by him. Then he also said— St. Athanasius also said in his book, On the Incarnation of the Son of God; he said if God has a Son, and human beings are created to be sons of God—and here the Scripture would say that women are created to have the status of sonship. We are all called to be children of God. That’s a New Testament expression, too: children. But children who all have the status of an only-begotten, firstborn son! The firstborn and the only-begotten. I spoke about this in the series of the names and titles of Jesus.

So men and women and every human being are made to be by grace what the Son of God is by nature, divine by nature and also man by nature. Jesus has two natures; that’s our Orthodox Christian faith. He has divine nature and human nature. He is God; he is man. He is divine; he is human. And therefore we are created to be what he is. Not to be personally what God the Father is, but to be personally what God the Son is, the Son of God is, namely, to be a son, and to be an expression of God, an icon of God, an image of God. The Bible says that in its first verses in the first chapter, that God created us by his word. He spoke his word and the Holy Spirit came upon us. The Holy Spirit was over the abyss, it says in Genesis, just like the Holy Spirit was over the barren womb of Mary. And the birth of Christ in Mary is a creation story. Mary doesn’t marry God and have a seed of a divine Person; there’s no hieros gamos in the Bible. Mary is the virgin earth over which God speaks his Word and pours out his—breathes his Spirit so that in her womb the Son of God could become the Son of Mary, the Son of Man, a human being, a creature, having all the characteristics of creaturehood. That’s the Christian faith.

So the claim here would be that the Son of God had to be the Redeemer, because it’s human beings who have to be redeemed. See, this is the second point. The first point is he has to be the Redeemer and the Savior because it all belongs to him and it’s his and it’s for him and he’s got to save what he made. But he also has to be the Savior and the Redeemer because it’s human beings who have to be saved and redeemed in order to be the prophets and the kings and the governors and the rulers over the whole of creation. That we human beings are supposed to be, vis-à-vis the angels and the demons and all the plants and animals and so on, having exactly the same relationship that God has through his Son from all eternity and through Jesus Christ the Man, God’s Son as a Man, by being incarnate on this earth on Christmas, and being born of the Virgin Mary, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, and therefore becoming human.

So this is what we want to think about today. Do we really believe this? First of all, do we really believe that Jesus is God with the same divinity as God the Father? Do we really believe that he is Light from Light, true God from true God? Do we really believe that, as divine, he has all the properties, characteristics, and qualities of God himself, who is is Abba Father? Then we ask the further question: And do we really believe that he has really become human? Not just joined himself to a human, not just indwelling a human, not just acting like a human, not just pretending to be human, but really human, with all human qualities that we have: time, space, circumscription, being bound, being limited, being of a certain nationality, being of a certain sex, and, of course, being ignorant of many things, humanly speaking, having to learn, having to grow, having to be obedient, having to express every divine quality in a completely human form—because that’s what we’re called to do, too, who are human beings who are not God incarnate. We’re also called to incarnate by grace and by faith every divine quality in human form.

Do we believe that what St. Paul said in the Philippian letter is true? That being in the form of God, en morphe tou Theou, that he was found en morphou tou doulou, in the form of a slave; and being found in the [homoiomati] tou anthropou, the likeness of human; that he became not only human but that he became a doulos, a slave; and not only a slave, but dead; not only dead, but dead on the cross, in order to allow us to be everything that he is as God and as man! That we, remaining human from all eternity, could be the human beings who, more and more and more, deeper and deeper, greater and greater, participate in the divinity of God that is given to us through the humanity of Christ, where the divinity is perfect and the humanity is perfect, full, complete, nothing missing, nothing lacking, and there’s a fullness of grace, a fullness of truth, a fullness of life, that we can participate in ever more fully, forever and ever and ever and ever, because God has become man as Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s Child, whose Father literally is God, the one, true, and living God, the only God there is, who, with his divine Son and the Holy Spirit, constitute the Holy Trinity, the Godhead, theotis, one in essence and undivided. Do we really believe that?

Do we believe, really, that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, lived a really human life just like the life we live? And therefore he’s our model, he’s our pattern, he’s our example. He shows us what it means to be human, that is, to be divine grace that we’re supposed to be. He shows us everything. Every possible question that you could ask, he answers. Any question we have about God, look at Christ and you get the answer. Every possible question we have about humanity, look at Christ and you get the answer.

So let us on this Christmas season really reaffirm our faith in the Incarnation. Let’s pray to God to give us the grace to believe it, really to believe it in all its scandalous— You know one Protestant, great Protestant scholar, called it a scandal of particularity: in one human life, God was the one who was living that human life. So Jesus is really from all eternity God and really a fetus, a little child, a baby, an infant, a juvenile, a youth, a young man, the Messiah, the messianic prophet, the messianic teacher, the messianic High Priest, the messianic High King, the messianic sacrifice; and that he does all this in the fullness of his human life, between the ages of 30 and 33. And then he dies the most vile, horrible death a Jew could possibly die, in the height of his life, so that we indeed could be exactly what he is and have exactly his relationship to the one, true, and living God, who is his Father.

Let’s pray to God that we would believe this. Let’s pray to God that we would never deny the divinity of Christ, but let’s also pray to God with all our heart and soul at Christmas that we also would never deny his humanity. As one theologian once said, “Those of us who believe in the divinity of Christ must never, ever, ever surrender his humanity to those who don’t.” Many people believe in the humanity of Jesus—in other words, they believe he was a man—but not everybody believes that he is the Man, real man, true man, that God’s divine Son has become and has really become.

But that’s the ancient Orthodox Christian faith. People denied it from the beginning. There were Docetists, there were Gnostics, there were Ebionites, there were Montanists, there were Marcionites—there were all kinds of heretics right from the very beginning and all through history. Some denied the divinity, some denied the full humanity, but the real Orthodox Christians, the Bible Christians, the evangelical Christians, they believe in the mystery of both: truly divine, truly human, one Son of God, one Word of God, one power, one icon, one wisdom, one glory. And that One is Jesus of Nazareth, God’s Son and Mary’s Son, divine and human, truly human just as we are, so that we could become divine with the divinity that he has become human to bring to us for our participation, our communion, our salvation, our glorification, our deification, and our everlasting, more fully lived divine life. He came as a Man that we men, human beings, could live the life of God.

A blessed festal season to all!