The Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord is the middle link in a chain of three feasts that show the Lord humbled in man and for man, to such a degree that it is thought provoking and scandalizes our faith.
The first is the birth in the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, which we celebrated just a week ago, where the Lord, putting on human nature, “emptied himself”, humbled himself and “took the form of a servant” (Philippians 7).The third is the one we will celebrate in a few days, the Baptism of the Lord. Here He appears to receive even greater humiliation, since the Lord, having already put on human nature, touches not of course in substance but in type, and in that terrible sickness of His, the fall.
The second is the feast of the Circumcision, where the Lord receives a further humiliation of his flesh; it is the humiliation before the old law. The other despotic feasts, the Transfiguration, the Entry into Jerusalem, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, with the exception of those of the Passion, which, however, immediately follow the Resurrection, are feasts which show the glory of His divinity.
This feast is somewhat difficult to understand and closed in its message. Circumcision was an old legal requirement of the Jews. This law of the circumcision of the flesh, in extreme humiliation, is “fulfilled” by the Lord today. But the circumcision of the flesh is combined with two other circumcisions, one spiritual and one symbolic, which hint at a third, the mystical one of which the apostle Paul speaks to us in his epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Colossae.
Spiritual circumcision is the breakthrough, the abolition of the law and the inauguration of grace. “Christ circumcised, the law was circumcised, and the law circumcised, grace was introduced,” the verses of the synaxarion tell us. “The shade of the law of grace that came” (Doxast. esper. b’ echo), emphasizes the hymn writer of our Church. The law is abolished, stripped of all that is superfluous and illiberal and the freedom of grace is offered to the faithful.
But there is a third circumcision apart from that of the flesh and the law. It is the circumcision mentioned in the canon’s troparia as a commentary on the fact that the event took place on the eighth day after the birth. The eighth day from the birth of the Lord and the regeneration of man, as it is mentioned in the New Testament, is a symbol of eternity. That is why the name is given to the eighth day. The name is for each of us the certificate of eternity.
Today, then, when time changes as a year and chronology, it would be good to know that time changes as an essence; it becomes imbued with the spirit and the grace of eternity. The circumcision of the Lord also marks the circumcision of time, its transformation into eternity.
These three circumcisions, my dear brothers, of the flesh – the essential, the law – the spiritual and the time – the symbolic, anticipate the perfect, the mystical circumcision; they are the “uncircumcised circumcision” of today’s apostolic reading (Col. b’ 11), the circumcision of the heart “in spirit not in letter” (Rom. b’ 29) and (Acts g’ 51).
The first circumcisions in essence mean a partial incision; what defiles the flesh, what narrows the law, what makes time fat today is cut off and thus the flesh is transformed into spirit, the law into grace, time into eternity. But the mystical circumcision is an absolute excision of the passions and the mind of sin. It is that which makes man not a hunter, but a partaker of the life of the spirit, of grace, of eternity, from the time when we still wear the flesh, when we live in time, when we are called to keep the commandments she is the one who transforms us into divine people; who puts an end to our passions, circumcises our nature and shortens our time. It makes us not to live in the nature, the flesh, the law, the time.
Strange about that last one and yet I choose it for a wish. That our time may be shortened this year, “shortened”. Not, of course, shortened in length. Anything else but shortened in its physical essence. The more it shrinks in physical substance and cosmic significance, the more it loses its thickness, becomes thinner, transformed into eternity.
I wish you “happy birthday”, and I wish you “eternal years” – the many of this life and the eternal ones that begin today and never end.
Happy New Year and blessed!
Metropolitan Nicholas of Messogaia and Lavreotiki
