201412.09
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The feast of Lord’s Nativity

V. Rev. Fr. Demetrios Antonopoulos

V. Rev. Fr. Demetrios Antonopoulos

On the 15th of November every year begins the fasting period for the Lord’s feast of Nativity. It is the time to prepare ourselves in order to receive the good news of our Lord’s birth.

All the texts of the Church that we chant and read during this period provide for us all the information we need as living members of the Church about the incarnation of the Logos, the only begotten Son of God-the Father. In this period we also celebrate the feast of the Entrance of the Virgin Mary in to the temple. The feast describes the role of the Theotokos within the feast of the Lord’s Nativity. The Virgin Mary remained in the temple for a certain time and she was prepared to conceive the Lord. She became the purified temple within her the only begotten Son of God will incarnate.

During this time before Christmas we also commemorate and celebrate the memory of great Saints of the Orthodox Church whose lives are witness to the message of the Lord’s incarnation. They adopted His life into their lives and they convey to us His message of salvation and of redemption.

The feast of Lord’s Nativity is the metropolis of all the feasts of the ecclesiastical year. The incarnation of the Logos puts an end to our captivity by Satan and the entire human race as well as the entire creation will be born again.
The eternal God, the everlasting Logos of God, the Father, took flesh and bones in time, in history, and the entire creation became new.

The uncreated and everlasting God, with His love, activates the divine, salvific and everlasting plan for our deliverance and he revealed Himself to the world in the person of Christ. The One who created the World and everything we see and do not see and who provides everything in safekeeping became perfect man, and as perfect God wants to save us from the captivity of sin. He becomes the new Adam and he wants to elevate the fallen human race and lead us back to the communion with Triune God, as it used to be in the past before the fall.

St-Athanasios the Great says characteristically, that the Nativity of Christ revealed the Church, and he made the Church from spiritual into His true Body. So the members of the Church are sanctified and saved. God became man so that man becomes God by Grace.

I wish and pray that we all experience spiritually the Nativity of our Lord in our hearts and that we experience His grace from now and in to the ages of ages. Amen.
V. Rev. Fr. Demetrios Antonopoulos