Question
The Christmas Greeting, “Christ is born! Glorify Him!”?
Answer
I was born and raised in London, England, as a member of the Cypriot community. I was a regular member of the spiritual family of St. Sophrony, attending church services at the Monastery every week, for decades, where the liturgy and daily services were served in Slavonic, Greek, French, and English. I studied theology in Greece for five years; I undertook research for my doctoral studies at Oxford for seven years. I studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris, and German at the Goethe Institute in Göttingen, as well as Russian at Oxford. And yet, I do not recall hearing the greeting, “Christ is born! Glorify Him!” until I began teaching at St. Tikhon’s Seminary.
Christmas, as indubitably great as it is - is not on the same level as Pascha, which alone is styled by the Church as the “Feast of Feasts”.
So when you hear the greeting, “Christ is born! Glorify Him!”, repeating the first words of the first Irmos of the first Christmas canon (written by St. Cosmas the Melodist, Bishop of Maiuma, d. 773 or 794), it is perfectly correct in theological terms.
But… as a Feast in the liturgical calendar of the Orthodox Church, the Nativity of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ according to the flesh, while it is the determining Feast of all immovable Dominical feasts, yet it takes "second" place to the Resurrection, Pascha (Easter), which uniquely is the Feast of Feasts in the Orthodox tradition.
Hence, “Christ is born! Glorify Him!”, cannot be an equivalent greeting to “Christ is risen! Truly, He is risen!”. And this is why the Christmas greeting above is not found either in the practice of the early Church or in the wider Orthodox Christian world community today.
It would appear that the Christmas greeting among certain Orthodox goes back to a local custom - for it is not a practice of the ancient Church of Jerusalem, whence the bulk of our liturgical tradition comes - and is evidently influenced by the exalted place that Christmas has in Western Christendom.
For an explanation of why Christmas is the greatest feast in the West, see my presentation, Beatific Vision vs Theosis: The Goal of the Christian Life.
So, the greeting,
Dr. Christopher Veniamin
President
The Mount Thabor Academy