Christ is Born!
🌞
I wrote about the beginning of the reading and what precedes it here:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/commentaries/13092023.html
The immediate continuation of this reading is the one I wrote about here:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/commentaries/15092023.html
Galatians IV, 6 — 'ἡμῶν' - 'emon' - 'us' (our; in some translations 'your').
The gift of the Holy Spirit, Who as a Person cries out to the Father, Father!
, is the confirmation that the faithful become God's children.
Many statements are important here.
In particular, it confirms that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the Comforter, is a Person, not a power of God, and is a Hypostasis of the Trinity.
The Spirit of God calls the Father Father, though the Spirit is not the Son of the Father
, which also shows that these are names of Hypostases, names of Persons, not descriptions of properties or relationships, this is noticed by theologians.
It is also important that it is not the human being themselves who calls the Father 'Father' — it is not this that confirms that they are a child of God, but the action of the Holy Spirit given to them.
This is well described in the article at the following link:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/Adoption.html
In today's reading, the important idea that the Church testifies to is that God became human so that humans could become gods by the grace of God.
The inheritance
is spoken of in the sense of the likeness to the Trinity — the Father gave the Son to have life in Himself
(see more about this here:
https://oleksandr-zhabenko.github.io/en/Trinity.html
), just as the saved faithful in the Kingdom of God will be established in eternal life — not by nature to have eternal blessed life (the Son of God has by nature), but as an irrevocable and permanent gift of grace.
Matthew II, 1 — 'ἡμέραις' - 'emerais' - (to) 'days' ((in the) days).
A brief description of the events after the Nativity of Christ — the worship of the wise men from the East.
Many interpreters believe that the star that appeared was an angel sent by God to show the way to the wise men. It is also believed that in the East, from the wise and revered prophet Daniel in Babylon and Persia, it was said that the coming of the Messiah would be signalled by God by the appearance of a new special star in the sky. So, the wise men, knowing this tradition, did go to worship the Messiah, that is, Christ. The interpreters also explained that their gifts had a symbolic meaning: gold — as to the King (the Messiah is the King), frankincense - as to God (Christ is God, the Son of God, the Incarnate Second Hypostasis of the Holy Trinity), and myrrh - as to a human being who had to die (Christ is also a human being, He came to suffer for us and rise from the dead on the third day).
The warning to the wise men did not stop Herod from his evil plan, but it did save the wise men from collaborating with the destroyer and tyrant.
The Lord shows His mercy to the wise men as representatives of different nations — in fact, to all mankind who were waiting for salvation from God.
Glory be to Thee, our God, glory be to Thee!