Al Massih wulid! Famajiduhu!
I would like to offer you an explanation I wrote about the Nativity icon. I wrote in Portuguese, so I used a translator to translate. Any doubts, please let me know:
The Icon of the Nativity
of
Our Lord, God and Savior,
Jesus Christ
by Philippe Gebara
(Church of San Basilio,
Greek-Catholic parish Melquita
Rio de Janeiro)
"Today the Virgin gives birth to supersubstancial and offers land inaccessible to the cave. The Angels sing with the shepherds and the Magi go to the star, because the baby was born for us before God of the centuries "(Condáquion of Christmas)
Introduction:
"What we proclaim the Gospel, celebrate the liturgy, the icon in the beauty of paint faces and colors" - shows us the Archbishop Joseph Raya, summarizing the life of the Eastern Church. Today, 25 December, our church celebrates the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, according to the flesh. We'll see how it does so particularly through the icon of the party.
"The land offers to the cave inaccessible"
"The land offers inaccessible to the cave! The icon of the Nativity of Jesus is centered in a cave of a mountain, which is wrapped in strips Our Lord and the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. The Gospel tells us not of a cave, but an old tradition of the church, but as we see in the work of Justin, for example. Near the mountain, are two other mountains, as if forming one. It is the mystery of the Trinity, 3 persons in one God! The Trino that God is not limited to his inner life, "ad intra", but it is addressed to man, finally through the Incarnation of the Son, the work of all Trinity. The mountain covers all the central human characters of the icon, showing us the general scope of the Incarnation to all mankind. Thus represents Christ, the messianic hill on which Isaiah tells us:
"At the end of time that happens the hill from the house of the Lord is placed in front of the mountains and the hills dominate. Acorrerão there for all people, and people will come in crowd: "Come, they say, subamos the mountain of the Lord, the God of Jacob's house: teach him in his tracks, and their paths nos Trilhos ...". (Is 2,2-3)
"Do not hurt or damage in all my holy mountain, because the earth is full of science of the Lord, as the water covers the bottom of the sea" (Is 11.9).
And it is not Mary who is also the slope of the mountain recostada the mount desired by God, on which the psalmist tells us?
"The hills of Basã are high, alcantilados are lots of Basã. Montes rough, jealous that the mountain that God chose to live, to establish a dwelling therein forever" (Ps 67,16-17)
This holy mountain is still, basically, all humanity, as in Mary, "the bearer of God," is foreshadowed our destiny in Christ:
"What should you offer, O Christ,
when you came to earth as a man for our salvation?
Every creature that should be his surrender to you, thanks Vos
The angels offer hymns of praise
The heavens give a star
The wise men present their gifts
And the shepherds wondered.
The land provides a cave
And the desert, a manger
And we, we offer you
a mother, a Virgin Mother
O God, you are from all eternity, glory to You! "
(Sticher of psalms to light the lamp)
The inside of the cave is painted with what appears to be a black, but actually is a very dark blue, because the black is banned in iconography, by symbolizing the evil. This "very dark blue," since then, is also seen in the icons of Easter and Pentecost. On Easter, tinge the underworld, to which Jesus down, and smashes the gates to save us. As of Pentecost, which involves the king represents the cosmos, representing the darkness and evil that the world was taken by the sin of man, whom God wanted and wants to dispel the work of his Christ and his Holy Spirit. The icon of the Nativity, we therefore have the Christ who meets the man, to death and the underworld, and obscured the nature, to bring them light and life. Jesus, in fact, is wrapped in strips, in such a way to refer to flax which was involved with after his death, and his manger is similar to a grave. With his birth, Christ has started his delivery for the salvation of men and their surrender to death, death with which overcame death. "It was tied to the tracks to free humanity from moorings of sin" - said S. Cyril of Jerusalem. Jesus has accepted his guilt nakedness hidden by those who once dressed in skins of animals; accepted was born in a cave, the fault of those who were expelled from the delights of the Garden, the Eden. With his birth, Christ has already reached all mankind to deify it.
Boy are next to an ox and a donkey, representing the pagans who turn to God incarnate, through its past practice - referring to the ox and ass worship idolátrico, the lust - while much of the People of God does not recognize the Messiah. We read in Isaiah:
"The ox knows its owner, and ass, the stable of his owner, but Israel does not know anything, my people have no understanding" (Is 1.3).
"Today the Virgin gives birth to supersubstancial"
"Today the Virgin gives birth to supersubstancial"! In the Byzantine tradition, the Virgin Mary has great prominence in the Birth of Christ, so that the icon, your body is the largest proportion, and the liturgy is celebrated on the day Christmas, Dec. 26, the "Mother of Sinaxe of God. " Do not look for the boy, but for the infinite, in contemplation, "keeping everything in your heart" (Lk 2.19). Is reclined, tired, because the birth was real labor. You are dressed in purple, color that represents majesty, and is surrounded by a red. Mary is the sweetbrier which Moses saw burning on top of a hill, of Mount Horeb, which was taken by fire, but was not consumed in the same way that the Virgin was taken by fire of the Spirit of God in the Annunciation, but had its virginity consumed. Maria is the Red Sea, which Moses and the Jewish people, with the power of God, crossed the foot dry, and then returned to be impassable. Virgin Mary was before, during and after childbirth. "Kaire kekharíthomene" - Ave, all pure and forever!
Already Joseph, the husband of the Mother of God, is far from the scene. He is not the father of the boy. Is concerned with a feature and meditative; represents the tragedy of every man to the mystery. Reinforcing your question, in front of you is a strange figure, a pastor Soturno, supported on a stick - figuration of the devil himself - the question: "Just as this can not produce cane leaves, nor can an old man like you, and generate therefore, no virgin can give birth. " But among them is a bush:
"A shoot out of the trunk of Jessé, and a shoot forth from its roots. They rest on the Spirit of the Lord ... At that time, the scion of Jessé since as standard for the people, will be sought by nations and glorious will be their abode. At that time, the Lord will raise a new hand to rescue the rest of their people ... "(Is 11,1-2, 10-11)
The bush is a response to the snare of the devil:
If not more, if, in fact, a rod of Aaron also produced in a single night what other trees produced in many years. Do you not know that a stick, after losing his shell, never goes forth, even if planted in the middle of rivers? Once, however, that God is not dependent on the nature of the trees, but is the Creator of nature, a dry stick and bark can germinate and produce fruit. He, therefore, for the good of juice-priest "typos" gave fruit sobrenaturalmente through a stick, he would not for the good of juice-priest in fact the ability to design a Virgin a child? (St. Cyril of Jerusalem, catechesis, XII)
Already we see the sheep represent the amazement of all creation with the birth of the Lord.
"The angels sing to the shepherds"
"The angels sing to the shepherds! The icon, we see a large number of angels, symbolizing that all the angelic powers gave praise to the Lord on the day of his birth in the flesh, with hands covered, a sign of worship. Three of them, especially, represent the Trinity, as the icon of the visitation of Rublev, with two of them look to the sky and the other for the land and the shepherds. This is the Person of the Son, which is tilted to humanity. Along with the pastors and their flautins, the angels sing. The angels sing "Glory to God in the highest", and the pastors, adding, "and on earth peace to men that He loves." The singing of worship is the only this that the shepherds, poor, can offer.
"The Magi go with the star"
"The Magi go with the star!" Breaks out of the sky a star, which is the light of God, because we see in some offices as its source the Trinity, to guide the Magi to the Savior.
"Your birth, O Christ our God, has shown the world the light of knowledge, because it learned the worshipers of the stars of a star to worship You, O Sun of justice, and recognize that you are coming from the East High. Lord, glory to you "(Apolitíquion Christmas).
Although the horse, the wizards are prefiguração of miróforas, the carriers of flavor, which is directed to the tomb of Our Lord to honor him with their perfumes, and finding it empty, went to announce to all of His resurrection. As you know, the wizards will give the boy three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Income they will, therefore, a triple sun, as the anthem of serafins, who sang in our liturgy, which proclaims the holy three times.
The midwives
At the bottom, we see two women giving bath to the baby Jesus. To the policy, would, according to a tradition apócrifa, called Salome. Jose would have found it to be searched by a midwife. When you have said that the neophyte was the Lord of Israel, born of a virgin, she doubted. Suddenly, his hand was dry as if it had caught fire. Prayed to God that the cure. An angel told him to get close to the boy and take it to be cured. And so it happened. The second woman, also in accordance with a spurious, it would be Eva, going to the cave to praise their Savior and Liberator, born of a virgin, virgin and when she was in paradise and fell to the sin of disobedience. Already the importance of the gesture is bath ratify the true humanity of Christ and foreshadow his baptism in the Jordan. Baptism is, in turn, according to iconography particularly, the anticipation of death and descent into hell, because the water is represented as an icon of the liquid in the tomb of our Lord Teofania.
Conclusion:
With this reflection, we could see the nuance that the East brings the Birth of Christ, is focusing more on the whole mystery of salvation - since Christmas, start of the Incarnation, is inseparable from the "economy" Paschal, and has a cosmic dimension -- than just the fragility of the boy God. According to Archbishop Raya: "The West believes the man, Christ who is God, while the East looks to God who became man. The East emphasizes the divinity. The West, the humanity. The West is concentrated in close proximity of the "holy family", the cute little baby and redondinho as attractive in their nakedness, smiling all the way to babies who are in comfort, that scene was invented by S. Francis of Assisi. "
Glory to God in the highest, because today "the baby was born for us before God of the centuries," the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and always, and are scarred for life! Amen
Bibliography:
PASSARELLI, Gaetano The icon of the Nativity of the Lord São Paulo: Edições Hail Mary, 1996 (part of the collection Iconostácio, promoted by the then Bishop Melquita Brazil, D. Pierre Mouallem).
RAYA, Joseph Christmas - Birth of Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ & His Private Life Ontario, Madonna House Publications, 1997.
