Christos Razdajetsja!

Last updated on: December 25, 2017 at 8:27 pm by Chase Padusniak

Christos Razdajetsja! 2017-12-25T20:27:20-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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A Nativity Icon. Source.

These are the words with which my Church greets the birth of Christ: Christ is born! The traditional response is slavite Jeho, or “glorify Him!” Slight variations obtain, depending if you’re Russian, Ukrainian, or whatever other Slavic Byzantine tradition one might happen to be, but the point is always the same: God dwells among us; let us offer Him His due praise.

This is, in a way, impossible. We cannot offer God all that He deserves. If we could, He simply wouldn’t be God. And yet we try; we give ourselves over to Him in confessing our sins, in loving one another, and (importantly) in attending the liturgy in these days surrounding His birth. This is a multifarious mission: praise in speech, attendance, and act. We go to church and hear the Gospel, offering songs of praise. The Byzantine tradition has its own particular canon to this end:

Christ is born; glorify Him! Christ comes from heaven; come to welcome Him! Christ is on earth; lift up your hearts! Sing to the Lord, O earth! Be exalted and sing with hearty gladness, O ye people, sing His praise for He is glorified!

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.

Man was made in the image of God, but he sinned, and lost immortality. He fell from the divine and better life, enslaved completely by corruption. Now the wise Creator fashions him again, for He has been glorified!

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.

The Creator shaped man with His own hands, but when He saw us perishing eternally, He bowed the heavens and came down to earth, and clothed Himself completely in our nature, truly incarnate from a pure and holy Virgin, for He has been glorified! (The Nativity Canon, Ode One)

And here we see yet another complication. To glorify Christ is our duty and yet beyond us insofar as His Incarnation is His glorification. God has become man—a scandal and yet to His glorify as it means our redemption. What seems lowliness is shown to be grandeur. The child born in nothingness fills the world. The Canon goes on to be even clearer. His glory is always already His, something we partake in in praise, but not something that we ourselves can offer God:

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.

Thou hast assumed a body of lowly clay, O Christ. By sharing our humble flesh, Thou hast made our race partakers of divinity. By becoming mortal man yet remaining God, Thou hast raised us from death to life. Holy art Thou, O Lord!

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.

Make merry, O Bethlehem! Thou art the King of Judah’s princes. Christ, the Shepherd of Israel, who rides on the shoulders of the cherubim, has come forth from thee for all to see. He has raised us from death to life, and reigns over all.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen. (The Nativity Canon, Ode 3)

The question then remains: when we declare that Christ is born, when we respond that He must be glorified, how can we do this? How can we possibly find anything to do for a God who so loved us that He created the world, who, in the person of the Son, so loved us as to take on our besmirched flesh? Again, we might look to the Nativity Ode as it teaches us that joy, the love that stems from happiness in Christ, ought to motivate us. The final bit above demands merriness at the knowledge of the Lord. Joy should motivate us as we come to grips with the heartening and difficult truth that is the Incarnation.

How does one express this happiness? We go to church, yes. We see our families; we offer ourselves even to those relatives who might otherwise irk us, remaining steadfast in the knowledge that we glorify God in our joy. We break bread together and know each other as broken subjects of sin given hope in the coming of the Lord. Looking around our houses, our apartments, and our tables we see that, no matter how horrible we may seem to one another, we are all God’s children in need of His redemption.

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