Christ is born; let us glorify him. Christ comes down from heaven; let us go out to meet him. Christ lives on earth; let us exalt in joy. All you faithful, sing to the Lord, for He has been glorified.
So begins a series of the most beautiful poetry in Byzantine worship. It is fitting that such a great feast should be blessed with the best words men have to offer. Christmas is one of the twelve largest feasts on the Byzantine calendar, and even among those twelve, is among the top three. Most people get excited for the lights and the carols and the presents—I get excited for the poetry. This poetry.
The melody (which I wish I could share) is not overflowing with joy, such as “Joy to the World” or “Angels We Have Heard on High”. It’s more solemn, yet no less joyful. The Byzantine view of Christmas can be encapsulated like this: yes, the Christ Child is absolutely adorable, like all babies. Even more so, since He doesn’t cry. But at the same time, this is God lying in the manger: the Creator, the Savior of us all. He’s done so much for us that we spend our entire lives trying to repay Him—and we all inevitably fail, because of our sinful nature. Incredibly, He still loves us, despite all the wrong we’ve done, all the good we’ve failed to do. Some people say that they find Christianity hard to believe, it’s just too good to be true. I’ve got to agree with them, to a point. No human could have ever thought of a God who loves us despite everything, who encourages us to be perfect as He is perfect, and to become one of us so He can show us how it’s done. None of the pagan gods and goddesses come close to such levels of absolute love.
This first verse is a herald’s call: the King is born! Come and see for yourselves! God has truly come down from heaven! The lyrics themselves are so simple, I find it hard to expound any more on them. Christ is here. We’ve been waiting a long time, but the wait is over.
To Christ our God, who is the only-begotten Son of the Father before all ages, and in these latter times has become flesh of the Virgin without seed, let us cry aloud: You are our strength; glory to You, O Lord!
The second major verse (there are a few minor verses in between each major one) fleshes out the details of the Incarnation. The adorable baby in the crib is truly the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. “Only-begotten” means He is of the same substance as the Father. A man creates a sculpture, but begets his son. While Joseph is the lawful husband of Mary, he is not the biological father of Jesus. Mary conceived without seed. Another set of incredible concepts!
I will focus more on the Virgin birth in the next verse. For now, I will point out the brief phrase “in these latter times”. If you take the fundamentalist view of creation, and the world is six thousand years old, Christ was still born in latter times. Four thousand years before Christ’s birth, as opposed to only two thousand years after. Or, you could take the modern scientific view, which makes these words even more striking: hundreds of millions of years before Christ’s birth, as opposed to only two thousand years after. Regardless of how you look at it, Christ’s birth was relatively recent. It’s not something that happened back then, but something that’s happening now, that affects us directly.
O Christ, You have come forth from the Virgin as the rod of the root of Jesse and the flower that blossomed from his stem. You became flesh from her that know not wedlock, from the Mountain overshadowed by the forest; O God, you are not formed from created substance. Glory to Your power, O Lord!
This verse refers to the Incarnation in terms of Old Testament symbols. Aaron, the brother of Moses, had a staff which flowered, contrary to the laws of nature. There was no seed in the staff, no way for the flower to begin growing. And yet, it did. In just such a way, it was impossible for Mary, a virgin, to conceive and remain a virgin. And yet, she did.
Why? Why was it necessary for Mary to conceive in a miraculous manner, and not in an ordinary manner? There are numerous Old Testament prophecies that refer to it. Isaiah even goes so far as to tell King Ahaz directly that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and name him Emmanuel. In order to show the Israelites and everyone else that He was Who He said He was, Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies in the Old Testament. He humbled Himself first to become man, to take on flesh, to enter into His own creation; and then He humbled Himself further to be circumcised (a very painful process); and then He humbled Himself further to be baptized, even though He, sinless, did not need it. And He humbled Himself so far as to die. He didn’t have to do any of it. There was no need to create all of us sinners in the first place.
And yet, He did.
Since You are a God of peace and a Father of mercies, You have sent Your angel of great counsel to us to bring us peace. Thus we are directed towards the light of the knowledge of God, and at the night vigil we glorify You, O Lover of Mankind.
We are God’s creation, God’s work of art. A persevering artist doesn’t abandon his work, but slowly perfects it more and more over time. And, of course, we need peace. We all yearn for it, but so few realize that we’ll only have it when every knee bends and every head bows to the Lord. Christ is here to bring us to His Father, to bring us peace in Him.
Taking pity on Jonah, the sea monster that took him kept him safe, like an infant from the womb. The Word, which inhabited the Virgin and took flesh, came forth from her and kept her incorrupt. He underwent no change, and kept intact the one who bore Him.
Again, the poetry refers to the Incarnation in terms of the Old Testament. When an animal eats something, the enzymes in the mouth and the acids in the stomach break it down to gain the nutrients. But Jonah was not consumed or corrupted in such a way. He remained fully alive and unchanged. Christ also did not change while in the womb of His mother. He is completely God and completely man. No one else could claim such a ridiculous lineage. The pagans have dozens of demigods, heroes whose mother was a human and whose father was a god, or vice versa. The hero ended up half-man and half-god. They were greater than men, but less than gods. Christ is not one of these pagan heroes. He is God; we offer Him worship, which we do not give to created things. And He is a man, able to share in all joys and sorrows, even the greatest sorrow of death.
Christ is not the only one unchanged. In all Eastern Christian depictions of the Virgin Mary, three stars adorn her robe: one on each shoulder, and one on her hood. This is to show that she was a virgin before, during, and after birth-giving. She was kept pure, because she was the chosen vessel of Christ. God freed her from original sin, as is taught by the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. But He did not take away her free will. She is known as the new Eve. Like Eve, she was sinless when she was created; unlike Eve, she remained sinless, and chose always to do God’s will. God kept her pure, because the conception and birth of Christ were unlike any other.
The youths, brought up together in piety, despised the order of the impious king. Undaunted by the threat of fire, they stood in the midst of the flames and sang this hymn: Blessed are You, O God, of our fathers.
The furnace cooled like dew, miraculously, foreshadowed a great marvel, for it did not burn the youths it received, nor did the fire of divinity burn the Virgin’s womb by entering it. Therefore, let us strike up a hymn and sing: Let all creation bless and exalt the Lord forever.
The sixth and seventh major verses form two parts of a story, the story of Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. They were Israelite youths in the time of the Babylonian exile, who refused to worship a huge idol forged by the king of Babylon. For this, they were sentenced to be thrown into a furnace—and in the flames, they gave praise to God. The fire didn’t harm them in the least, but burned the torturers standing too close.
This is another prefiguring of the Incarnation, as the seventh hymn details. Christ remained fully God, and having the Creator of all inside the womb of an ordinary, sinful woman would undoubtedly result in catastrophe. That is why God kept Mary pure from the beginning—so the story would end with eucatastrophe. The fire did not consume the Israelite youths, nor did the unabridged divinity of Christ consume the Virgin Mary.
I see a strange and marvelous mystery: heaven is a cave; the cherubic throne, a virgin; the manger is the place in which Christ, the incomprehensible God, lies down. Let us praise him and extol him.
This eighth and final verse may very well be the basis of Byzantine church architecture. The four walls form a square, while the ceiling rises as a spherical dome above it. The square represents earth, and the sphere, heaven. The church is a thin place, where the two of them merge. “We did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth”; such was the report of Prince Vladimir’s ambassadors when they visited Hagia Sophia, the greatest church of the Byzantine Empire, in the tenth century.
The same sentiment of overwhelming awe and wonder permeates this verse. Earth and heaven come together in this moment. The dark, slimy walls of the cave are transfigured into the endless vaults of heaven. Mary is more glorious than the cherubim, for who among the angels has born God Himself? And in His utter humility, Christ desires no bed better than a manger, a bunch of dry straw. I can’t imagine it could have been very comfortable, or very clean. But Christ did not come to surround himself with the most comfortable, cleanest portions of His creation. He came to enter into the worst parts of it, to perfect them through His example.
There are many more verses than the ones I showed here. Each major verse has three or four minor ones after it, all inspired by the same theme that the major one introduces. Together, they examine the event of Christmas from various viewpoints—and they still don’t exhaust all the possible ways of meditating on this glorious feast.