Daily Reading for December 26 • The First Sunday after Christmas Day

Nurslings of purity and disciples of chastity, raise we our hymn to the Virgin-born God with lips full of purity. Deemed worthy to partake of the flesh of the Spiritual Lamb, let us take the head together with the feet, the Deity being understood as the head, and the Manhood taken as the feet. Hearers of the Holy Gospels, let us listen to John the Divine. For he who said, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, went on to say, and the Word was made flesh. For neither is it holy to worship the mere man, nor religious to say that he is God only without the manhood. For if Christ is God, as indeed he is, but took not human nature upon him, we are strangers to salvation.

Let us then worship him as God, but believe that he also was made man. For neither is there any profit in calling him man without Godhead nor any salvation in refusing to confess the manhood together with the Godhead. Let us confess the presence of him who is both King and Physician. For Jesus the King, when about to become our Physician, girded Himself with the linen of humanity, and healed that which was sick. The perfect Teacher of babes became a babe among babes, that he might give wisdom to the foolish. The Bread of heaven came down on earth that he might feed the hungry.

From The Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Lecture XII, “On the Words Incarnate, and Made Man”; found at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf207.ii.xvi.html.