My most beloved brothers and sisters in Christ,
In the magnificent Kontakion of Christmas, the great hymnographer of our Church, Romanos the Melodist (6th century), writes: “For our sake was born a young Child, the God who exists before all ages.”
Similar expressions that convey the paradox of the Incarnation are found in many other hymnological and patristic texts of the Christmas feast, emphasizing the mystery of the eternal and timeless God who enters time and becomes an infant!
The supreme theologian and poet St. Gregory of Nazianzus (the second person, after the Evangelist John, whom the Church named “Theologian”) says in one of his magnificent orations on the Nativity of Christ:
“The incorporeal One takes on human flesh. The Word of God clothes Himself in a material body. The invisible One becomes visible. He who cannot be touched is touched and handled. The timeless One condescends to have a beginning. The Son of God becomes the son of man for our salvation—‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever’ (Heb. 13:8).”
The mind truly reels before the incomprehensible mystery of the incarnation of the Son and Word of God. Human words fall silent. Faced with this great and ineffable Mystery, man attempts to cover his awe with silence. That is why another great theologian and hymnographer of the 7th century, St. John of Damascus, writes in the ninth ode of the Christmas Katavasia (the Iambic Canon): “It is easier for us, out of fear of saying something unworthy, to choose silence as the safer path.”
Let us reflect, my brothers and sisters, on the utter humility of God: The Holy of Holies becomes a crying infant who hungers, who needs help and a mother’s embrace. The Holy God is wrapped in swaddling clothes—not because He lost His divinity, but because He willed to implant His holiness within our sinfulness and make it our own inheritance.
Why did God “bow the heavens and come down” (Ps. 17:10)? Merely to make us “better people”? No! Christ came to earth to make us “citizens of heaven,” to make us, in other words, saints as He Himself is holy (Lev. 20:7, 26; 1 Pet. 1:16)—not through external rules and moral commandments, but through His very presence within us. And His holiness is not a distant ideal or a moral perfection we can never attain. Holiness is His very presence within us. It is our heart burning with God. It is when nothing else can fit inside us except Him.
On the night Christ was born, the angels did not sing “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth joy.” They sang the wondrous heavenly hymn: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill among men” (Luke 2:14). Peace and goodwill—meaning: God was well-pleased to dwell within man.
The Angel of the Lord reassured Joseph when, upon learning of the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy, he decided to quietly end their betrothal: “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel,” which means, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23; cf. Isa. 7:14). This is holiness: God within us and man within God!
At the moment of our baptism, the Church, quoting the Apostle Paul—“As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27)—assures us that we have been born anew in Christ and urges us to put on holiness as a second skin. In other words, may the divinity of Christ become our very breath, our thought, our desire, our very being.
For the Incarnation is not merely a historical event that occurred 2025 years ago. It is a mystery that continues. Every time we allow Christ to be born within us, Bethlehem is repeated. The manger of our heart, though filled with the “straw” of sins, becomes the very manger in which Christ wishes to be born—precisely in our disorder, in our poverty, in our inability to contain Him.
We must all walk the path to holiness—not tomorrow, but today, now. Holiness is born amid weariness, amid imperfections, amid our daily failures, within the family, within the sinful society in which we live. For holiness is not for the perfect. It is for those who continually hunger and thirst for God.
“Holiness,” writes St. Basil the Great, “is not one virtue among others; it is the sum of all virtues; it is the very presence of God within us.” Christmas reminds us that this holiness is not our own achievement—it is a divine gift. A gift given to us wrapped in swaddling clothes, hidden in the humility of a helpless newborn infant.
My beloved brothers and sisters, let each of us ask himself: Is the manger of my heart properly prepared this year to receive the great Gift of holiness brought by the newborn Child? Am I ready and determined to empty myself of all superfluous material things so that my heart may become so poor and so pure that the Holy God may finally find room to dwell there?
Let us all pray that this year’s Christmas may fill us with the vision of holiness that captivates and shakes us to the core. And while the world around us rushes with greedy frenzy after gifts, lights, feasts, and other fleeting material pleasures, may we remain silent before the manger, listening to His heart beating within our own. And there, in the absolute silence of Bethlehem, may we gain the experience of holiness—not because we achieved something by ourselves, but because “He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
For Christmas is the feast of Holiness breaking powerfully into our defiled world. Christ is born—let us therefore glorify Him with our holy life. Following His command, let us strive for holiness, “for this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3).
On behalf of all our clergy and co-workers in the Lord, I wish you a healthy and spiritually joyful celebration of the great feast of Christmas.
With much love and honor in the Incarnate Lord,
+ Ambrose Metropolitan of Korea and Exarch of Japan