Sunday Before the Nativity of Our Lord  
By Fr. John Mack

Today's Gospel is the genealogy of Christ. For those who know Old Testament history, there are a few names that stand out in the list. For example: "Judah begot Perez and Zerah by Tamar." Tamar was Judah's daughter-in-law. Her first two husbands, Judah's sons Er and Onan, died, and Judah refused to give her to his third son Shelah, as it was his duty to do. Then Tamar disguised herself as a harlot, deceived her father-in-law, and bore his child. It's a very unsightly passage. Yet Jesus comes from the line of Judah and Tamar.

A little later comes Rahab. Rahab was a harlot, a sinful woman, and she was not even an Israelite; she was a Canaanite. Our Lord has among his ancestors Rahab the harlot, the Gentile. Then a little later comes Ruth. Ruth was a virtuous woman, but she also was not an Israelite, but a Gentile.  Our Lord includes in His line an incestuous relationship (and the son born out of it) and a harlot. Then we find that of all the many sons of David, our Lord came from the line of Solomon, the son of Bathsheba. Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah, whom David had killed because Bathsheba was pregnant with David's child. It's very striking that in our Lord's line would be these prominent examples of sinfulness and depravity.

It is all the more striking when we think about His Mother, Mary, and her purity. We call her the Panagia, which means the All-holy One. The most pure Virgin Mary was chosen of God to be His Mother. We are told in our tradition that our Lord had to wait until there was a pure and holy one He could not be born of just anyone, because the fire of His divinity would consume anyone who was filled with wickedness. Our Lord had to wait for this chosen Virgin, this holy, pure, and immaculate Virgin, who committed no actual sin, who was sheltered in the Temple and kept from the devices of the evil one and the temptations of the world. He could not be born of a sinful woman; He could only he born from a pure and holy Mother. On the one hand we have the paragon of virtue, the height of innocence and virginity, and at the same time we have wickedness and depravity in His ancestry. What is it that the Gospel writer wants to teach us by this juxtaposition of holy and sinful people in the line of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ?

There are two lessons presented here. The first is that our Lord came to save those who are sinners. The wonderful announcement that is found right in the beginning of St. Matthew's Gospel is that our Lord did not come only for the righteous. In fact, He Himself said over and over again, "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Over and over again He said, "I am not come for the healthy, but that I might bring healing to those who are sick, and those who are struggling and suffering with the illness of sin and depravity" (cf. Matt. 9:13; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:32). So we are reminded by His genealogy that the sins of our past do not keep God from saving us. No matter what we have done, God's love is greater than our sin. The Apostle Paul wrote, "Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more" (Romans 5:20). Our Lord came not to dwell with the righteous, or the rich, or those who were acceptable in society. As the Pharisees said with horror: "He lives with publicans and sinners, He is a friend of harlots and tax collectors" (cf. Luke 5:30; 7:34). Our Lord came to save those who were lost in sin, to heal those who were made sick by sin. Whatever sin we may carry in our pass is not greater than the love of God. It does not keep God from accepting us and using us. Think about it: a harlot, one who had lived in sin, became an ancestress of God in the flesh. There is no sin that is greater than the love of God.

This Christmas as we celebrate the Incarnation of Christ, we are made joyful by the reality that He came to live with people like you and me. All of us have skeletons in our closets. We hide those things, and then we mention them in confession and hang our heads. We are so thankful that the priest is under an obligation never to share those things with anyone, because it would be awful, we think if others knew.  Yet this Christmas we are reminded that God knows everything and yet God does not recoil from us. God does not step back from us and say, "Oh, such awful people!" In knowing everything, God reaches out His arms to us and embraces us with His love. St. Paul's Letter to the Hebrews says that God is not ashamed to call us Hip brothers and sisters (Heb. 2:11). He's not ashamed to count us who have committed great sins as belonging to Him. He does not reject us, but accepts us, reaches out to us, and embraces us in His love.

So we are reminded first, as we come to celebrate this Feast of the Nativity, that there is no sin that is greater than God's love, and that God longs to gather us all. God will never push us away. But as we stop and think not only about the genealogy, which is filled with these terrible sinners, but also about the most pure Virgin, we are reminded of another truth. While God loves all of us in our sin and does not reject us because of our sin, we have to choose between sin and God. We cannot cling to sin in our hearts and expect the Lord Jesus to make His home in our hearts at the same time. All the sinners found in this genealogy are characterized not only by their sin. They are also characterized by their repentance. Rahab, it is true, was a harlot. But she showed great faith in accepting the Israelite spies, and she risked her life to save the spies who had been sent. Her faith and her repentance brought her into the family of God.

Ruth grew up as a pagan. But she said to Naomi, her mother-in- law, "Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried" (Ruth 1:16, 17). Unlike the other daughter-in-law of Naomi, who turned and went back to Moab, Ruth turned her back on Moab and her pagan lilt. In repentance she journeyed to the land of Israel, and she lived a repentant and holy life. Consider David and Bathsheba. Yes, there was great sin-adultery and murder. But there was also great repentance. David, we know, penned Psalm 50: "Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your great goodness. According to the multitude of Your tender compassions blot out my iniquities, for I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against You and You only have I sinned and done that which is evil in Your sight."

So this Nativity, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, we must realize that in order for Christ to make His home in our hearts, it is necessary for us to turn our backs on sin. Our sin cannot keep God from us, unless we hold onto our sin and cherish it. St. John says: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." But he goes on to say that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:8, 9).  All of us have sinned; we will never be like the Mother of God, pure and immaculate and without stain. But we can be like the harlot who recognized her sin and hated it, who came to Jesus and fell at His feet, washed His feet with her tears, and dried them with her hair. As we come to celebrate the Feast of Our Lord's Nativity, let us bring to the Lord our repentance. Let us make a clean break with sin. Let us turn our backs on anything that would drive Christ from us, and in humility and repentance let us invite Christ to come and be born in our hearts.

The ancient tradition was to put a candle in your window on the Eve of Nativity. In the ancient world, if there was room for travelers, you put a candle in the window. If there was no room for travelers, you blew the candle out. There was no Motel 6 or Super 8 in those days-travelers stayed in people's homes. So as you were traveling and you came into a town, you would look for a candle in the window, and you would know that you could go to that home and find lodging. The Christians throughout the ages, on the Eve of the Feast of Nativity, would put candles in their windows, as a sign that their homes and their hearts were open to the Christ Child, and that they desired Him to be born within on that Christmas morn.
Beloved, let us put candles in the windows of our hearts. Let us clean our hearts and drive out all the dirtiness and uncleanness of sin, so that when Jesus comes, He will be born in us anew. That's the wonderful thing about the Feast of Nativity-it's fresh and new every year.

Like the Mother of God, we cherish these things in our hearts. Each Nativity we cherish the newborn Christ, and we ask Him to be born within us. We ask Him to complete the work of repentance in us, because we cannot wholly repent. We try, but we can't. We scrub and we scrub, and when we get done there's still sin sticking to the walls. This Christmas we ask that Christ would come and finish the work which we have begun, that He would cleanse our hearts of all impurity, and that He would do the impossible-that He would take sinners like you and me and make us as pure as His Holy Mother.

St. Simeon the New Theologian says that we should not think that the Mother of God is the only one who can give birth to Christ. He says in a mystical way, each Christian is called to be a Theotokos, a God-bearer. Each Christian is called to receive God and to give birth to God in this world.