PUTTING THE CROSS BEFORE THE INCARNATION
CHRIST IS BORN! GLORIFY HIM!
There is a prevailing tendency today in contemporary Christianity to overlook the significance of the Incarnation. This is because the teaching of the Church regarding Theosis as the essence of the Christian Faith and of Salvation has been lost.
In contemporary Christianity there is hardly any emphasis on the Incarnation. Everyone wants to quickly relate His birth to His cross and His death as though that's all that matters. Everyone wants to jump immediately from Bethlehem to Calvary. "He was born to die for our sins" is the prevailing understanding. This is because salvation is perceived primarily as the forgiveness of sins, a sort of fire insurance, if you will.
But not so in the Orthodox Christian Church. In the Church, the Incarnation stands on its own as a crucial and vital truth that reveals the renewal/redemption of creation and of mankind as the point of reunion between heaven and earth and the means by which fallen man can once again partake of the Divine Nature. Redemption is in the Incarnation. In Christ the God-Man, all of creation is renewed and once again has the potential of being used for our salvation and returned to God as a sweet smelling offering.
The Incarnation reversed the fall of Adam just as the obedience of the Blessed Virgin Mary reversed the fall of Eve. The forgiveness of our sins is one very important part of our redemption but only one part. The forgiveness of sins is the prelude and continuing condition for Theosis. The goal of the Christian Faith is not merely to be forgiven but to return to union with God and to paradise, a journey that begins here and now and is possible only via the Incarnation. God was in Christ, not merely forgiving sins, but "reconciling the world unto Himself". Or in the words of St. Peter to make us "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1: 4). This, of course, is a participation in the Divine Nature by Grace, and that only in His Energies and not in His Essence. These, too, are important distinctions that have been lost in contemporary Christianity which are crucial to avoiding false teachings and understandings about salvation.
In the Church we linger with the Incarnation in a special way until the Feast of Theophany as we remember and celebrate His circumcision, Naming, flight to Egypt, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the visit of the Magi, His earthly Mother and Father and His earthly kinsmen, but mostly of how the God/Man reunites and restores the human with the divine.
But it doesn't end there. The Incarnation is celebrated throughout the year in the life and worship of the Church in our daily and weekly hymns and prayers, the fasts and Feasts, the reliving of His earthly life and that of His Blessed Mother, and first and foremost in the Communion of the Body and Blood of the Incarnate Saviour.
The cross finds it meaning and power in the Incarnation. Not the other way around.
