The Gospel Is a Song
Recently, I had the very good fortune to overhear a deacon in our church make the passing comment that the gospel is a song, and it takes the Church a full year to sing it.
Far from being something reducible to an elevator pitch, the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ is a kind of cosmic saga, more akin to epic poetry than Instagram reels. The gospel, the song of Christ’s victory over Sin, Death, and Satan, is so multi-faceted that it takes a full trip around the sun. After that year, we do it again, year after year, proclaiming “His salvation from day to day” (Ps 96:1).
Within the Orthodox Church, our singing and proclamation of the gospel is not limited to spoken words but also includes the full range of human creativity interacting with the created world. Perhaps the most well-known to outside observers is the tradition of preaching the gospel through icons. Each icon within the Church’s tradition tells a story. They sing to us.
In every Orthodox parish, there is always a Nativity icon. All year, not just during the Christmas season. There are of course variations, but there’s something they all share that we might reflect on.
Unlike Nativity sets and scenery coming from Western European contexts, there is no wooden stable, the manger is placed in a cave. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is historical. In first-century Palestine, wood and straw stables were not the norm. Animals were often kept in the lower level of a house, or they were stabled in caves. But the icon is not just concerned with historical accuracy. There is another, more profound, reason for the cave.
The cave represents the lowest parts of the earth, a place of utter darkness in the world. As the Apostle John tells us, this “darkness” is blinding, disorienting, full of hatred and destruction, and we end up tragically “loving” this abysmal darkness because of our own evil deeds (1 Jn 2:11; Jn 3:19). To put not too fine point on it, it is hell.
In the icon though, notice something has been placed into the darkness. Or rather someone. Christ, clothed in white, lays in stark contrast. He is the Light breaking into the abyss. This Light, this newborn child, will now grow in the darkness’s midst, and the darkness will not overcome Him (Jn 1:5). In fact, in the icon He Himself is illumined by the star’s shining light from Heaven. In many depictions, this light descends in three beams, reminding us that the Incarnation and Nativity of our Lord is the work of the Holy Trinity.
In a very real way then, the whole gospel of Christ is contained in just this piece. It is an eikon of Christ’s ministry. It images to us His birth yes, but also His death, burial, invasion of Hades, and His glorious resurrection. Jesus’s swaddling clothes are a shroud, His manger more coffin than crib. Yet, He still shines in it.
Later in the year, we’ll sing of Christ’s illumined glory revealed to the apostles at Mt. Tabor, and the Light ascending the Cross, from where He will be taken down and placed in yet another cave. The Light will invade that darkness as well, breaking out into the lowest depths of the earth (Eph 4:9-10), and Hell will not be able to withstand Him there either.
Something I am far too often tempted with, and may I be so bold as to say some modern theologies as well, is to think that the darkness is almost exclusively ‘out there’. Be it other people, systems, institutions, ideologies, or what have you. And to be clear, this is true. We can all too easily call to mind the evil imposed upon us, its sinister genius seemingly creeping around each corner, infecting whatever it touches. But that’s not the whole story. The truth is, within us, there is a darkness. Each of us has a cave, an abyss of “deep darkness” (Pr 4:19), and if we follow it down deeper and deeper, we’ll find ourselves in its hellish depths.
The good news that the Nativity icon preaches to us is that in the darkness, be it world’s or the one within each of us, we are not left alone. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware famously said that “faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.” Christ Himself invades our darkness and offers every single one of us the way out. The Light and the song of His salvation is not available to some and not others. The Father desires that all might find salvation in His Son (Jn 3:17; 1 Tim 2:4).
This Nativity then, all of us have an invitation to turn towards the Light and join in the music. The gospel is a song, and it has the power to dispel and vanquish the night. Christ descended into the darkness of both caves, in His birth and in His death, to not only join us there, but to lift us up into the Light. In Christ, we sing our way out of the cave. We sing our way into God Himself, Christ lifting us up into the very life of the Holy Trinity.
Singing and praising thine All-holy Name, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
