On 25 December the Orthodox Church celebrates the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. This event took place 2000 years ago, in a cave in Bethlehem, Judaea. Just above this place the church founded by Saint Empress Helen has existed for over 1600 years.

The Nativity of the Lord, a royal feast with a fix date, also traditionally called Christmas, is the annual feast of the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

The Feast of the Nativity of the Lord, although not as old as the feast of the Easter or Pentecost, seems to be the first typical Christian feast of the Lord.

In the East, till the second half of the 4th century, the Nativity of the Lord was celebrated on the same day with the baptism of the Lord, namely 6 January; this double feast was generally called the feast of the Revelation of God. The Eastern practice was based on the tradition according to which the Lord was baptised the same day He was born. The Gospel says the Lord was about 30 years old when He came to Jordan to be baptised (Luke 3:30).

The Icon of the Nativity is dominated by light

If from the theological point of view the focus of the feast is the Infant who has just been born, from a compositional point of view it is natural that the whole iconographic scene be seen around, so that the cave is in the centre of the icon of the Nativity, with the manger in the middle where the Emperor of the world was lying because He had not found any other place.

In the Orthodox icons the darkness is very seldom present, and that is only to ostentatiously show the lack of light, but in that of the Nativity the spot of darkness that hypnotises the eye is the symbol of the darkness in which the humankind was living in the Old law, when only the prophets were sending a ray of light announcing the future salvation: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord shall arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.” (Isaiah 60:1-3).

Maria’s womb was turned into a speaking heaven

Besides the Infant there is His mother, on a purple bed, as an empress should be, as the one who participates in the wonderful unusual mystery, in which “the cave has become heaven, the Virgin a throne of the Cherubim, and the manger a noble place where Christ our God reposes”. At the same time with this wonder, the Eden was opened: “because the tree of life bloomed in the cave from the Virgin! Because her womb good understanding paradise was shown, in which the divine tree is, from which when eating we shall be alive, and not die like Adam. Christ is born to rise the image fallen before” (Vesper before the Nativity of the Lord).

Just near the cradle of the Infant there are two animals to which a prophecy of Isaiah refers: “The ox knows its master, and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand” (Isaiah 1:3). Contemplated from top to bottom, three levels can be noticed in the icon of the Nativity: the high one, the heavenly level, the average one, where heaven comes down and joins the earth, and the bottom one, the earthy one, all the three of them focused around the Infant and of His Mother, always painted bigger than the other characters, observing in this way the traditional hierarchic perspective of the Byzantine iconography. In the top, the heavenly dwelling place of the Holy Trinity we see the star that made the wonder known to those prepared: “It was in mystery that you were born in the cave, but Heaven preached you to all people, sending the ray of the star before like a voice, Saviour” (Troparion of the Vesper of the Nativity of the Lord). This ray, of which firm verticality comes through the heavens to reach the earth, is the axis mundi, a symbol and prefiguration of the Cross which, put in the earth red with blood, would travel the other way round, from earth to heaven. In some icons, the ray splits in three, a teophany sketched that underlines the fact that all the three Persons of the Holy Trinity are involved in the salvation iconomy. In the top of the icon there are the hosts of angels, representations of the crowd of the heavenly host present at the Nativity that praised God saying: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!” Luke 2:13-14). Some of them worship the Infant, hands covered as respect, according to rite at the Byzantine court, while some other ones accomplish their mission of anghelos (namely those who announce something, who bring the people the good news of salvation), communicating the wonder to the shepherds.