HW: Christmas carols and Christian doctrine!

A reflection for Christmas Day 2025, recalling the birth of the Nicene Creed an dits continued significance for us today. Written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA. 

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
D08 F8NW
Christmas 2025

Welcome
If you were watching the news during the year, you will be aware that Pope Leo made his first apostolic journey to two Muslim-majority countries, Turkey and Lebanon. Lebanon has a quite sturdy Christian minority at some 30% of the population. Turkey, on the other hand, has a tiny Christian population. Estimates vary between 0.2% to 0.5%, with even fewer Catholics.

The reason for visiting Turkey was to celebrate the Council of Nicaea, which took place not far from Istanbul seventeen centuries ago, in the year 325. The participants at the Council agreed a shared faith statement about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the original  Nicene Creed.  The creed we actually say most Sundays, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, is an expanded version composed later in the same century at the Council of Constantinople (381). The issue at the Council  Nicaea was the identity of Jesus: was he fully God or was he some kind of second-rank deity?

Topic
The anniversary of the Council has been well-marked, with conferences, discussion documents and visits to Nicaea. In Dublin, this year’s Ecumenical Bible Week was devoted to the anniversary of the Council. Earlier in the year, I was also one of the leaders in a pilgrimage to Nicaea itself. The anniversary is an invitation to all Christian believers to reflect deeply on the identity of Jesus.

Steps
At Christmas we are — perhaps unexpectedly — helped by the traditional carols. Some of these are very clear doctrinally, such a Hark, the Herald Angels Sing or O Holy Night or Adeste Fideles. In the latter, we hear — often on the street and in shopping malls — the arresting words:

God of God, Light of Light,
very God, begotten not created;

These lines are pure Nicaea, especially perhaps in the (to us obscure) distinction between begotten and created.

In the up-to-date translation of the Creed used by Pope Leo XIV and Patriarch Bartholomew I in Nicaea, we can read:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father.
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of one Being with the Father.

There is, of course, a looking back the prologue of John 1:1-18, but there is also an advance in language and understanding: “eternally begotten of the Father,” “begotten, not made,” “of one Being with the Father” (the famous consubstantial or homoousios).
Why would any of this matter or even make sense seventeen centuries later? The core Christian claim is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Jesus, Son of Man, is able to help us because he is like us. Jesus, Son of God, brought the divine into the heart of being human, even into the heart of the darkness of death. Such is the extraordinary love of God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because he is the crucified and risen Lord.

Conclusion
The birth of Jesus Christ is not for us a mere commemoration, a past recollection. On the contrary, the whole Christmas story is alive today because the very same Christ comes to us and we ourselves are in the story. It is a question of opening the heart of faith.

A poem by St John of the Cross can help us here, in its simple directness and deep simplicity: It is short and I’ll read it first in Spanish.

Del Verbo divino,
la Virgen preñada,
viene de camino:
¡ si les dais posada !

With the divinest word, the Virgin
Made pregnant, down the road
Comes walking, if you'll grant her
A room in your abode.

Amen. Let it be so.