At this time of the year letters to the papers, radio & TV comments etc, try to assert Christmas day is an offspring of a pagan feast. Hereunder is a rebuttal you can now use in answer to this myth. God bless and happy Christmas to you all.
The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son,
this day have I begotten thee. (Ps 2:7) and (Heb 5:5-6)
In Genesis, the literal reading suggests that God created the world and all that is in it in six literal 24-hour days. St Augustine however, believed God created all instantaneously, and gave causal order to created things over the next five allegorical days.
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, ‘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 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 [from Creation to Christ]. According to a sacred tradition, the creation of man took place on a Friday; the day Christ suffered death 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 had put upon them.’ ‘It is referenced not to the divisions of time marked out by God himself, which is called a week, 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 ascendency 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? --- The Liturgical Year.
St Augustine said ‘The day he chose was that on which the light begins to increase, it typifies the work of Christ, who renews our interior man 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.’
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. ‘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; in other words they deny what Revelation asserts, namely, that God only created the world for the sake of his Christ and his Church.’
Topic: The assertion that Christmas Day is pagan. (Read 362 times)