https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ncZEwOdPar4
The other tradition which is quite old is the fact that Christ was born in a cave. Now that in scripture doesn’t say that. The only thing it says in scripture is that Christ was laid in a manger, which means that Christ was laid in a food trough for animals. That’s what a manger is. Sometimes we forget. A manger is basically a food trough for animals. And so it doesn’t say that he was born in a stable or born like we know we have these little images of nativities with Christ in the little stable. But the tradition from very early, from the first century we have in St. Justin Martyr talks about how Christ was born in a cave. One of the secrets to kind of understanding why Christ has to be born in a cave is if you look at the manger. Look at the manger. What does it look like? Sorry? Yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. And so the manger is already a tomb. And so this descent into the cave, this image of Christ being born in a cave is already showing us what the whole story is about. What the whole story is about, which is it is already this descent into death. And the descent into death appears, you know, we symbolize the imagery of the manger as a tomb, but the manger itself is already an image of that. This idea of descending down into animality, descending down into the place of animals, that is the state of the fall itself. When Adam and Eve fell in the garden, God gave them these garments of animal skins to cover them. And so this idea of descending into the place of the animal is this descent into death. And the early Christians knew that very, very well. They would actually create images which would link all of those things together. A good example here in the, these are images taken from the catacombs. So these are images taken from literally from the graves of Christians. And so what do they represent in the space of death? They represent something which is akin to what we saw. That is, these three images, can anybody guess what that image is? Yeah, it’s Noah’s Ark. It’s very strange Noah’s Ark, but that’s Noah’s Ark. You can tell because you see he’s got a bird and he’s got this giant box floating in water. Who can guess what this one is? Yes, Jonah. And then this one, you can read his name is written, so it’s not that hard. So there’s Daniel in the lion’s den. So there are three images, three images from the Old Testament, which help us see what it is that’s going on. This descent into death, this descent into a cave, this descent into the place of animals, into the animal existence, you could say, which is that existence of death. There are other images of Christ, other icons of Christ which happened underground, you would say, and we’ve got two of them. One is this one. Do you know what this is? The baptism of Christ. And the other, I’ll show it later. The other is the Anastasis, which is Christ descending into death. Those two images happened underground. And those two images are also images of Christ descending into death. So you have this repeated pattern from the nativity of Christ descending into death. And then the baptism of Christ and the Anastasis. In this version of the Anastasis, of the baptism, he’s actually standing on the doors of death, just like in the icon of the resurrection. So in the icon of the resurrection, you see Christ standing on the doors of death. Just like Christ is born hidden in this cave. Of course, there are different levels here. We have to be careful. I’m not saying that the whole world is the incarnation. But the incarnation is showing us how God is hiding in the world and is hiding behind phenomena. And in fact, without this divine spark or this child, this invisible thing which is hidden inside all phenomena, the world doesn’t exist. And I’m saying this very technically. I’m not saying it in a way that is just, I’m not just spouting this off. The world is actually, the world is made of too much stuff. Everything in the world scatters into details. Why is it that this microphone, how is it that you say that it’s a microphone? Why don’t you see all its parts without seeing that it’s one thing? There’s something about the world, the way the world works, which makes the world come together into unity. And that’s for anything, any object, anything in the world. Everything has multiple, multiple, multiple parts, an indefinite, infinite amount of parts. How is it that we can say that some things exist? And you hear people kind of talking, people say that, it’s all just a quantum flux, it’s all just flux. Nothing is actually real. If you take the microphone, you could say, this is a wire and it’s a mesh of steel and it’s black paint and it’s white paint and I could keep going and keep going and keep going. I could describe the microphone forever without ever saying that it’s a microphone. How is it that I can see that it is something? And it’s a mystery. We can’t totally know exactly how it works, but what we do know is that that is the ontology that we are living in. That is the worldview that the Orthodox Christian lives in. St. Maximus the Confessor talks about this explicitly. He talks about how hidden in the world are these purposes, these hidden kernels that bring things together, that make us actually make the world exist. And so when we see Christ coming down into this cave, hidden in the world, it is an image of how the world exists.