Rating: 10|Votes: 1
Today, the Church invites us to rejoice and sing: "Christ is born! Give ye glory! Christ cometh from heaven!! Greet ye Him!" Let us then glorify Christ our God, Who descended to earth so as to elevate us, delivering us from sinful death! Everything is now full of great joy, for Christ gives us peace—between man and God, and man and his own conscience: "…and on earth peace among men of good will."
St. John Chrysostom
Rating: 8,5|Votes: 24
Bethlehem this day resembles heaven; hearing from the stars the singing of angelic voices; and in place of the sun, enfolds within itself on every side, the Sun of justice. And ask not how: for where God wills, the order of nature yields. For He willed; He had the power; He descended; He redeemed; all things yielded in obedience to God. This day He Who is, is Born; and He Who is, becomes what He was not. For when He was God, He became man; yet not departing from the Godhead that is His. Nor yet by any loss of divinity became He man, nor through increase became He God from man; but being the Word He became flesh, His nature, because of impassability, remaining unchanged.
Rating: 6|Votes: 2
Today’s Gospel reading is taken from the Beginning of the New Testament, from the first chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew. This reading begins with a long list of Hebrew names that give the family tree of Jesus on the human side. All in all, some 47 names are mentioned – the great, the near great, and the not so great.
St. Gregory Palamas
Rating: 10|Votes: 5
Impossible to recount is Christ’s descent according to His divinity, but His ancestry according to His human nature can be traced, since He who deigned to become Son of Man in order to save mankind was the offspring of men. And it is this genealogy of His that two of the evangelists, Matthew and Luke, recorded.
Fr. James C. Meena
Beware, for we know not the hour or the day in which the Lord shall come and require of us a full accounting of our stewardship. When we talk about stewardship we’re not only talking about our worldly possessions and our money, we are talking about the stewardship of our lives. How have we taken care of our lives and what priorities have we established and maintained by which our lives may be ordered. If our first priority is Christ and our commitment to Him then all these things will be added unto you but if our priorities are disorganized and we put shopping and gift giving and feasting before our commitment to Him then Christmas has no meaning whatsoever. It’s just another pagan feast day among the many pagan feasts that we observe, not the least of which, I might add as a post script to this writing, is the feast of New Year’s Eve which we are about to observe.
