A Thought for the day from Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

The Cross and the Incarnation

To understand the meaning of the saving death of Christ, we must understand the meaning of the Incarnation. Each of us is born into time out of non-being. We enter a fleeting, precarious life in order to grow into the stability of Eternal Life. Called out of naught by the word of God, we enter into time but within time we can find eternity, because eternity is not a never-ending stream of time. Eternity is not something — it is Someone. Eternity is God himself, whom we can meet in the ephemeral flow of time and through this meeting, through the communion which God offers us by grace and love in mutual freedom, we can also enter into eternity to share God’s own life, become in the daring words of St Peter, ‘partakers of the divine nature’.

The birth of the Son of God is not like ours. He does not enter time out of nought. His birth is not the beginning of life, of an ever-growing life; it is a limitation of the fullness that was his before the world began. He who possessed eternal glory with the Father, before all ages, enters into our world, into the created world, wherein man has brought sin, suffering and death. Christ’s birth is for him not the beginning of life, it is the beginning of death. He accepts all that is inherent in our condition and the first day of his life on earth is the first day of his ascent to the cross.

Metropolitan Anthony, Meditations on a Theme (Mowbrays 1972) 120-1