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Is it more faithful to say that everything that happens is God’s will, or destiny? Is fate a Christian concept? Is there an alternative to either viewing events as fate or as coincidence?

This podcast explores these and other questions.

This topic will be explored in more detail in relation to the Regensberg lecture of Pope Benedict XVI at a later time.

This is a Holy Communion Podcast. This is a prayer of the great mystical poet St. Ephrem the Syriac, who wrote many hymns about the Nativity. St. Ephrem was Syriac Christian deacon and theologian of the 4th century. Venerated in the East he is also considered a Doctor in the Roman Catholic Church. There are various public domain versions of this prayer available on the Internet.

St. Ephrem’s Nativity Prayer:

The feast day of your birth resembles You, Lord

Because it brings joy to all humanity.

Old people and infants alike enjoy your day.

Your day is celebrated

from generation to generation.

Kings and emperors may pass away,

And the festivals to commemorate them soon lapse.

But your festival

will be remembered until the end of time.

Your day is a means and a pledge of peace.

At Your birth heaven and earth were reconciled,

Since you came from heaven to earth on that day

You forgave our sins and wiped away our guilt.

You gave us so many gifts on the day of your birth:

A treasure chest of spiritual medicines for the sick;

Spiritual light for the blind;

The cup of salvation for the thirsty;

The bread of life for the hungry.

In the winter when trees are bare,

You give us the most succulent spiritual fruit.

In the frost when the earth is barren,

You bring new hope to our souls.

In December when seeds are hidden in the soil,

The staff of life springs forth from the virgin womb.

St. Ephraim the Syrian (AD 306-373)

This is a Holy Communion Podcast. This hymn on the Nativity of Christ is read from “Divine Eros: Hymns of Saint Symeon the New Theologian.” This podcast is part of our 12 parts series containing sermons and hymns on the Nativity of Christ by Fathers and saints of the Church. Let us briefly recall that Pope St. John  Paul II made a  statement that, “the words of the West need the words of the East, so that God’s word may ever more clearly reveal its unfathomable riches,” Thus , we seek to present work of both Latin and Eastern Theologians of the Church on the Nativity of Christ. The full text that this excerpt is quoted from is available from St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Reference information can be found on this podcast post at www.cooperatorsoftruth.com

…the Logos descended (Jn 10.36)

and dwelt entirely in the womb of the virgin,

and He was wholly in the Father and wholly in the womb,

and wholly in the universe, being uncontainable.

 

Not reduced, not diminished at all, He went entirely in

and remained unchanged. He took the form of a slave

and having been begotten He became human in every way (Phil 2.7).

 

The whole of Him went through the womb and He came into the world;

again He was taken up from whence He was not separated (Mk 16.19).

 

Glory to You, Father, and Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Boundless Divinity, indivisible by nature,

prostrate, we all worship You in the Holy Spirit,

we who have your Spirit, as we have received from You.

Hymn 21, St. Symeon the New Theologian, excerpted from Divine Eros: Hymns of St. Symeon the New Theologian, translated with introduction by Daniel K. Griggs (SVS Press, 2011).

A Sermon by Saint Issac the Syrian on the Nativity of Christ. This work is in the public domain and can be found in various translations on Eastern Christian websites. Text below.

This Christmas night bestowed peace on the whole world;

So let no one threaten;

This is the night of the Most Gentle One –

Let no one be cruel;

This is the night of the Humble One –

Let no one be proud.

Now is the day of joy –

Let us not revenge;

Now is the day of Good Will –

Let us not be mean.

In this Day of Peace –

Let us not be conquered by anger.

Today the Bountiful impoverished Himself for our sake;

So, rich one, invite the poor to your table.

Today we receive a Gift for which we did not ask;

So let us give alms to those who implore and beg us.

This present Day cast open the heavenly doors to our prayers;

Let us open our door to those who ask our forgiveness.

Today the DIVINE BEING took upon Himself the seal of our humanity,

In order for humanity to be decorated by the Seal of DIVINITY

A Sermon by Pope Saint Leo the Great on the Nativity of Christ. This sermon is read from Volume 12 of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Second Series. This work is in the public domain. It has been edited for comprehension. Bibliographic information is available on this Holy Communion podcast post at www.cooperatorsoftruth.com.

This Sermon is the Sixth* of Eight Sermons on the Nativity written by Pope Saint Leo the Great .

*Sermon #5 was missing from the collection I relied upon so it was skipped.

On the Feast of the Nativity, VI.

I.  Christmas morning is the most appropriate time for thoughts on the Nativity.

On all days and at all times, dearly beloved, does the birth of our Lord and Saviour from the Virgin-mother occur to the thoughts of the faithful, who meditate on divine things, that the mind may be aroused to the acknowledgment of its Maker.  Whether it be occupied in the groans of supplication, or in the shouting of praise, or in the offering of sacrifice, the minds of the Christian faithful may employ their spiritual insight on nothing more frequently and more trustingly than on the fact that God, the Son of God, begotten of the co-eternal Father, was also born by a human birth. 

But this Nativity which is to be adored in heaven and on earth is suggested to us by no time more than this when, with the early light still shedding its rays on nature, there is borne in upon our senses the brightness of this wondrous mystery.  For the angel Gabriel’s converse with the astonished Mary and her conception by the Holy Ghost as wondrously promised as believed, seem to recur not only to the memory but to the very eyes.  Today the Maker of the world was born of a Virgin’s womb, and He, who made all natures, became Son of her, whom He created.  To-day the Word of God appeared clothed in flesh, and That which had never been visible to human eyes began to be tangible to our hands as well.  Today the shepherds learnt from angels’ voices that the Saviour was born in the substance of our flesh and soul; and to-day the form of the Gospel message was pre-arranged by the leaders of the Lord’s flocks, so that we too may say with the army of the heavenly host:  “Glory in the highest to God, and on earth peace to men of good will.”

II.  Christians are essentially participators in the nativity of Christ.

Although, therefore, that infancy, which the majesty of God’s Son did not disdain, reached mature manhood by the growth of years and, when the triumph of His passion and resurrection was completed, all the actions of humility which were undertaken for us ceased, yet to-day’s festival renews for us the holy childhood of Jesus born of the Virgin Mary.  In adoring the birth of our Saviour, we find we are celebrating the commencement of our own life.  For the birth of Christ is the source of life for Christian folk, and the birthday of the Head is the birthday of the body.

Although all the sons of the Church are separated from one another by intervals of time, yet as the entire body of the faithful being born in the font of baptism is crucified with Christ in His passion, raised again in His resurrection, and placed at the Father’s right hand in His ascension, so with Him are they born in this nativity.  For any believer in whatever part of the world that is re-born in Christ, quits the old paths of his original nature and passes into a new man by being re-born.  No longer is he reckoned of his earthly father’s stock but among the seed of the Saviour, Who became the Son of man in order that we might have the power to be the sons of God. 

For unless He came down to us in this humiliation, no one would reach His presence by any merits of his own.  Let not earthly wisdom shroud in darkness the hearts of the called on this point, and let not the frailty of earthly thoughts raise itself against the loftiness of God’s grace, for it will soon return to the lowest dust.

A Sermon by Pope Saint Leo the Great on the Nativity of Christ. This sermon is read from Volume 12 of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Second Series. This work is in the public domain. It has been edited for comprehension. Bibliographic information is available on this Holy Communion podcast post at www.cooperatorsoftruth.com or in the podcast feed.

This Sermon is the Fourth of Eight Sermons on the Nativity written by Pope Saint Leo the Great.

On the Feast of the Nativity, IV.

The Incarnation fulfils all its types and promises.

The Divine goodness, dearly beloved, has indeed always taken consideration for mankind in many different ways, and in many degrees. Out of His mercy has He imparted many gifts of His providence to the ages of old; but in these last days He has exceeded all the abundance of His usual kindness, when in Christ, mercy itself, has descended to sinners.  He is Truth to those that are astray, Life to those that are dead, that same Word, which is co-eternal and co-equal with the Father, took our humble nature into union with His Godhead, and, being born God of God, He might also be born Man of man. 

This was indeed promised from the foundation of the world, and had always been prophesied by many intimations of facts and words7:  but how small a portion of mankind would these types and fore-shadowed mysteries have saved, had not the coming of Christ fulfilled those long and secret promises. And now what had  then benefited but a few believers in its expectation, now benefited myriads of the faithful in its accomplishment.  Now no longer, then, are we led to believe by signs and types, but being confirmed by the Gospel we worship that which we believe to have been done.  The prophetic lore assists our knowledge, so that we have no manner of doubt about that which we know to have been predicted by such sure oracles.  For hence it is that the Lord says to Abraham:  “In thy seed shall all nations be blessed”  hence David, in the spirit of prophecy, sings, saying:  “The Lord swore truth to David, and He shall not frustrate it:  of the fruit of thy loins will I set upon thy seat.”  And again the Lord says through Isaiah:  “behold a virgin shall conceive in her womb, and shall bear a Son, and His Name shall be called Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us,” and again, “a rod shall come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower shall arise from his root.”  In this rod, no doubt, the blessed Virgin Mary is predicted, she who sprung from the stock of Jesse and David and was impregnated by the Holy Ghost, and brought forth a new flower of human flesh, becoming a virgin-mother.

II.  The Incarnation was the only effective remedy to the fall.

Let the righteous then rejoice in the Lord, and let the hearts of believers turn to God’s praise, and the sons of men confess His wondrous acts.  For it is in this work of God especially that our humble estate realizes how highly its Maker values man.  After His great gift to mankind whereby he created us in His image and likeness, He contributed far ever more exceedingly to our restoration when the Lord Himself took on Him “the form of a slave.”

For though all that the Creator expends upon His creature is part of one and the same Fatherly love, yet it is less wonderful that man should advance to divine things than that God should descend to humanity.  But unless the Almighty God did deign to do this, no kind of righteousness, no form of wisdom could rescue any one from the devil’s bondage and from the depths of eternal death.  For the condemnation that passes with sin from one upon all would remain, and our nature, corroded by its deadly wound, would discover no remedy, because it could not alter its state in its own strength.  For the first man received the substance of flesh from the earth, and was quickened with a rational spirit by the in-breathing of his Cr...

A Sermon by Pope Saint Leo the Great on the Nativity of Christ. This sermon is read from Volume 12 of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Second Series. This work is in the public domain. It has been edited for comprehension. Bibliographic information is available on this Holy Communion podcast post at www.cooperatorsoftruth.com or in the podcast feed.

This Sermon is the Third of Eight Sermons on the Nativity written by Pope Saint Leo the Great.

On the Feast of the Nativity, III.

I.  The truths of the Incarnation never suffer from being repeated.

The things which are connected with the mystery of the solemn feast (of the Nativity) are well known to you, dearly-beloved, and have frequently been heard.  But as distant visible light affords pleasure to eyes that are unimpaired, so, to sound hearts does the Saviour’s nativity give eternal joy.  We must not keep silent about it, though we cannot treat of it as we ought. For we believe that when Isaiah asks, “who imagined his purpose?”, this question not only applies to that mystery, whereby the Son of God is co-eternal with the Father, but also to this birth whereby “the Word became flesh.” 

And so God, the Son of God, equal and of the same nature from the Father and with the Father, Creator and Lord of the Universe, Who is completely present everywhere, and completely exceeds all things, in the due course, chose for Himself the day on which to be born of the blessed virgin Mary for the salvation of the world. He did this without loss of the mother’s honour.  For her virginity was violated neither at the conception nor at the birth:  “that it might be fulfilled,” as the Evangelist says, “what had been spoken by the Lord through Isaiah the prophet, saying, “behold the virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.” 

For this wondrous child-bearing of the holy Virgin produced in her offspring one person which was truly human and truly Divine, because neither substance so retained their properties that there could be any division of persons in them; nor was the creature taken into partnership with its Creator in such a way that the One was the in-dweller, and the other the dwelling; but rather so that the one nature was blended with the other.  And although the nature which is taken is one, and that which takes is another, yet these two diverse natures come together into such close union that it is one and the same Son who says both that, as true Man, “He is less than the Father,” and that, as true God, “He is equal with the Father.”

II.  The Arians could not comprehend the union of God and man.

This union, dearly beloved, whereby the Creator is joined to the creature, Arian blindness could not see with the eyes of intelligence. They did not believe that the Only-begotten of God was of the same glory and substance with the Father, and spoke of the Son’s Godhead as inferior. They used as an evidence the scripture that refers to his coming in the “form of a slave,” and also when he says  “The Father is greater than I,”. But He also says, “I and my Father are one”  For it is true that in “the form of a slave,”, that is in his humanity which He took at the end of the ages for our restoration, He is inferior to the Father.  But in the form of God, in which He was before the ages, He is equal to the Father.  I

In His human humiliation He was “made of a woman, made under the Law”,  in His Divine majesty He is truly the Word of God, “through whom all things were made”  Accordingly, He Who in the form of God made man, in the form of a slave was made man.  For both natures retain their own proper character without loss:  and as the form of God did not do away with the form of a slave, so the form of a slave did not impair the form of God.  And so the mystery of power united to weakness,

A Sermon by Pope Saint Leo the Great on the Nativity of Christ. This sermon is read from Volume 12 of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Second Series. This work is in the public domain. The text of sermon read in this podcast is provided below. It has been slightly edited for ease of comprehension.

This Sermon is the Second of eight Sermons on the Nativity written by Pope Saint Leo the Great.

On the Feast of the Nativity II

Part 1. The Mystery of the Incarnation Demands Our Joy

Let us be glad in the Lord, dearly-beloved, and rejoice with spiritual joy that there has dawned for us the day of ever-new redemption, of ancient preparation, of eternal bliss. 

For as the year rolls round, there recurs for us this commemoration of our salvation, which was promised from the beginning. Accomplished in the fulness of time this grace will endure for ever. On this feast we are bound with hearts up-lifted to adore the divine mystery:  so that what is the effect of God’s great gift may be celebrated in the Church’s great rejoicing.  For God the almighty and merciful, immeasurably good and all loving, whose will is power and whose work is mercy, as  soon as the devil’s malevolence killed us by the poison of his hatred, foretold at the very beginning of the world the remedy His devotion had prepared for the restoration of us mortals. It was then he proclaimed to the serpent that the seed of the woman should come to crush his head by its power. This signified no doubt that Christ would come in the flesh, God and man.  Born of a Virgin and through His uncorrupt birth the despoiler of the human stock was foiled. Thus in the whole and perfect nature of true man was true God born, complete in what was His own, complete in what was ours.  And “ours” we call what the Creator formed in us from the beginning and what He undertook to repair.  For the evil that the deceiver brought in and the sin that the deceived allowed had no trace in the Saviour.  Nor did He share in our faults on account of him partaking of man’s weaknesses. He took the form of a slave without stain of sin, increasing the human while not diminishing the Divine.  The “emptying of Himself” whereby the Invisible made Himself visible, and the Creator and Lord of all things took on fragile mortality itself was the condescension of His pity rather than a failing of His Power.

II.  The new character of the birth of Christ explained.

Therefore, when the time came, dearly beloved, which had been fore-ordained for man’s redemption, there entered these lower parts of the world, the Son of God, descending from His heavenly throne and yet not quitting His Father’s glory, begotten in a new order, by a new nativity.  In this new order, being invisible in His own nature He became visible in ours, and He whom nothing could contain, was content to be contained. He who abides before all time began to be in time.  Though the Lord of all things, He obscured His immeasurable majesty and took on Himself the form of a servant.   Being God and beyond all change and suffering, He did not disdain to be man, subjecting Himself to suffering and to death.

By a new nativity He was begotten, conceived by a Virgin, born of a Virgin, yet without carnal desire and without injury to the mother’s chastity.  In this birth that knew no taint of human flesh came the One who was to be the Saviour of men, while at the same time possessing in Himself the nature of human substance.  For since God was born in the flesh, God Himself was the Father, as the archangel witnessed to the Blessed Virgin Mary:  “because the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee:  and therefore, that which shall be born of thee shall be called holy, the Son of God.” 

The origin is different but the nature alike:  not by intercourse with man but by the power of God was it brought about:  for a Virgin conceived, a Virgin bore a child,

A Sermon by Pope Saint Leo the Great on the Nativity of Christ. This sermon is read from Volume 12 of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Second Series. This work is in the public domain. The text of sermon read in this podcast is provided below.

On the Feast of the Nativity, I.

I.  All share in the joy of Christmas.

Our Saviour, dearly-beloved, was born today:  let us be glad.  For there is no proper place for sadness, when we keep the birthday of the Life, which destroys the fear of mortality and brings to us the joy of promised eternity.  No one is kept from sharing in this happiness.  There is for all one common measure of joy, because as our Lord the destroyer of sin and death finds none free from charge, so is He come to free us all.  Let the saint exult in that he draws near to victory.  Let the sinner be glad in that he is invited to pardon.  Let the gentile take courage in that he is called to life.  For the Son of God in the fulness of time which the inscrutable depth of the Divine counsel has determined, has taken on him the nature of man, thereby to reconcile it to its Author:  in order that the inventor of death, the devil, might be conquered through that (nature) which he had conquered.  And in this conflict undertaken for us, the fight was fought on great and wondrous principles of fairness; for the Almighty Lord enters the lists with His savage foe not in His own majesty but in our humility, opposing him with the same form and the same nature, which shares indeed our mortality, though it is free from all sin.  Truly foreign to this nativity is that which we read of all others, “no one is clean from stain, not even the infant who has lived but one day upon earth.”  Nothing therefore of the lust of the flesh has passed into that peerless nativity, nothing of the law of sin has entered.  A royal Virgin of the stem of David is chosen, to be impregnated with the sacred seed and to conceive the Divinely-human offspring in mind first and then in body.  And lest in ignorance of the heavenly counsel she should tremble at so strange a result, she learns from converse with the angel that what is to be wrought in her is of the Holy Ghost.  Nor does she believe it loss of honour that she is soon to be the Mother of God.  For why should she be in despair over the novelty of such conception, to whom the power of the most High has promised to effect it.  Her implicit faith is confirmed also by the attestation of a precursory miracle, and Elizabeth receives unexpected fertility:  in order that there might be no doubt that He who had given conception to the barren, would give it even to a virgin.

II.  The mystery of the Incarnation is a fitting theme for joy both to angels and to men.

Therefore the Word of God, Himself God, the Son of God who “in the beginning was with God,” through whom “all things were made” and “without” whom “was nothing made,” with the purpose of delivering man from eternal death, became man:  so bending Himself to take on Him our humility without decrease in His own majesty, that remaining what He was and assuming what He was not, He might unite the true form of a slave to that form in which He is equal to God the Father, and join both natures together by such a compact that the lower should not be swallowed up in its exaltation nor the higher impaired by its new associate. Without detriment therefore to the properties of either substance which then came together in one person, majesty took on humility, strength weakness, eternity mortality:  and for the paying off of the debt, belonging to our condition, inviolable nature was united with passible nature, and true God and true man were combined to form one Lord, so that, as suited the needs of our case, one and the same Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, could both die with the one and rise again with the other.

Rightly therefore did the birth of our Salvation impart no corruption to the Virgin’s p...

Here St. John of the Cross introduces his motivation for undertaking this study. He addresses various situations where such a study could be helpful. He also speaks of his submission to the Church and his intended audience for this text.