by Fr Georgios Lekkas
In a world that consistently worships power, the Lord Jesus Christ came to us as the apotheosis of weakness.
The Creator was born in a stable, endured persecution from the beginning of His earthly life, lived in exile in Egypt, performed manual work, and died on a cross like the worst of criminals. He came as a powerless human being, in order to win even the least of men.
The humility and human weakness of Jesus Christ, through which He makes claim upon even the least of men, is incomparably greater than the humility of the most insignificant and weakest human being, if we but briefly consider the distance His self-emptying had covered in order to be born in the form in which we found Him in the Cave in Bethlehem.
The swaddling clothes of Christ in the manger have rightly been described as a foreshadowing of the shroud he was wrapped in at His burial. The Lord Jesus Christ came into this world in order to die. His self-emptying is accomplished not in his Crucifixion but at the hour of His death.
He could have come down from his Cross, as those who crucified Him goaded him to, but in that case he would not have completed the work of self-emptying. The Lord Jesus Christ thus sanctified human weakness, voluntarily accepting it as the culmination of our human weakness, which is our death.
Thanks to the voluntary acceptance of human weakness by the Lord Jesus Christ, any weakness we willingly accept as our least participation in the work of self-emptying that the Lord Jesus performed for us serves as a means of transferring into us God’s power in the Holy Spirit.
With his life and death, the Lord overthrew the established secular order: human weakness is now the necessary precondition for receiving God’s power. Human power, in contrast, prevents us from receiving power from God. Thus for the deification of man the self-emptying of God alone is not sufficient; man’s emptying of his human strength is also required.
At the blessed hour when each of us comes to realize that we cannot even take a breath without the strength given us by God, the countdown to our God-given restoration has already begun. We then seek to decrease even more, so that the Lord of Glory increases in us and in all things. The man of God does not simply reconcile himself with his weaknesses; he turns in confidence to the One who has accepted them all, even a willing death, in order to fill us with Divine Life if we so wish.
Thus the man of God no longer fears either sickness or death, since it is through them that he encounters the human weakness accepted by the Lord of Glory in His humble birth in the Cave in Bethlehem, in order that mankind should be remade.
As the scientific community seeks to extend human life indefinitely, with the now evident risk that evil will become immortal, the man of God regards death, which the Lord Jesus made holy through His own death, as the blessed hour of ultimate weakness that will allow us to live with Him eternally.
For the second year in succession, we are called upon to celebrate Christmas in pandemic conditions. What could be more natural from a spiritual perspective than celebrating Christmas during a pandemic? We are now given the spiritual opportunity on this earthly plane to participate in the self-abasement of Christ, who was born for each of us in the Cave in Bethlehem as a humble and powerless human being.
More than our faith in Christ, the pandemic judges our humility, that is, the degree of our participation in the self-abasement of Christ.
***Protopresbyter Dr. Georgios Lekkas is a priest of the Orthodox Archdiocese of Belgium. He studied Law, Philosophy and Theology at the University of Athens. He has a PhD in Greek Studies from the Sorbonne (Paris IV) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Research Agency. He taught Greek philosophy in Greek Higher Education between 2005-2017. His latest poetry collection, PROSECHOS ANAGENNISI (FORTHCOMING RENAISSANCE) was recently published by To Koinon ton Oraion Technon (Athens, 2021, p.79.)
