‘The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.’(Ps 2:7) and (Heb 5:5-6)Let us now consider the ‘day’ referred to in Ps 2:7 and Heb 5:5-6 above. As we know, Christians celebrate the birth of Christ on the 25th December, a fixed 24-hour day set in the calendar, ‘whilst the whole liturgical Cycle has, every year, to be changed and remodelled to yield that ever varying day, which is to be the feast of the Resurrection.’ (Abbot Guéranger, O.S.B: The Liturgical Year, St Bonaventure Publications,) Abbot Guéranger goes on to say the four weeks of our preparation in Advent before they reach the 25th day of the month of December are in the image of the four thousand years that preceded the great coming of Christ (Genesis Creation to Christ). According to a sacred tradition, the creation of man took place on a Friday; Incarnation day, 25th March, also the day Christ died on the Cross to redeem mankind. He chose to rise from the dead after ‘three’ days, a Sunday, the day light was created, visible on Earth.
Christmas day however, is different to others, it falling on all the days of the week in turn so that its holiness may ‘cleanse and rid them of the curse that Adam’s sin had put upon them.’ This of course applies to the whole universe, which, as St Paul told us, was also affected by Original Sin. ‘This day is referenced not to the divisions of time marked out by God himself, but to the course of that great luminary that gives light to the world, because it gives light and warmth. Jesus our Saviour, the Light of the World, was born when the night of the idolatry and crime was at its darkest; and the day of His birth, the 25th December, is that on which the material sun begins to gain his ascendancy over the reign of gloomy night, and show the world His triumph of brightness.’
“On this Day which the Lord had made,’ says St Gregory of Nyssa, ‘darkness decreases and light increases, and Night is driven back again. No, brethren, it is not by chance, nor by any created will, that this natural change begins on the day when he shows himself in the brightness of his coming, which is the spiritual Life of the world. .. Nature seems to me to say; Know, O Man, that under the things which I show thee Mysteries lie concealed. Hast thou not seen the night, that had grown so long, suddenly checked? --- Abbot Guéranger: The Liturgical Year.St Augustine had said ‘The day he chose was that on which the light begins to increase. It typifies the work of Christ, who renews our interior day by day. For the eternal Creator having willed to be born in time, his Birthday would necessarily be in harmony with the rest of creation.’
Creation of course is the whole universe, right out to the furthest star. So, how can the 25th Dec. on Earth be in harmony with the rest of creation? Genesis tells us how, literally, but it is a long time since this harmony was rejected in both Church and State
This created God time of the world has to be the same for every observer, the same time in every era and every place. But how then does the universe provide and comply with the time that serves both Revelation and mankind? It must be that God achieved the measurement of time by incorporating the whole cosmos within a finite revolving geocentric universal timepiece, a universal clock. The sun, moon and stars, as we observe, participating together in this cosmic timer, no matter how many of them there are or how far away they are, no matter whether they can be seen by the naked eye or not, no matter their distances, every star in the heavens rotates together in unison with the sun once every twenty-four hours. A ‘day’ then, is actually a universal day everywhere, and a year is a universal year, everywhere. As to the credibility of such things, well is God not able to create it the way we observe it, every hour, every day and every year of our lives, our cosmic time as used even by heaven:
Guéranger then addresses those who dare scoff at the divine plan as having its origin in the pagan feast of the sun on the winter solstice that occurs days earlier, on Dec. 21/22. ‘In their shallow erudition they conclude that a Religion could not be divinely instituted, which has certain rites or customs originating in an analogy to certain phenomena of this world; they deny what Revelation asserts, namely, that God only created the world for the sake of his Christ and his Church.’
Topic: Understanding the 25th December (Read 703 times)