The history of creation and its meaning are shown in the Book of Revelation from several different points of view. This is hardly surprising, for it is a vision, a picture unfolding before the apostle's spiritual sight. And it changes depending on the point from which he looks at what is happening. The same processes may look different when viewed from different points in spiritual space. So it is in the book: at first John is shown historical events as they are seen by a person from within the fallen world. The spectacle, of course, remains symbolic. What is shown here is not historical realities as such, but symbols disclosing the spiritual meaning of events to come. Yet what is happening is presented as though seen by a person of this world, a world not yet transformed or made part of the Kingdom.

Now the apostle is shown the same thing as seen from the Throne of Glory, from the perspective of God's eternity. And here, as one would expect, the Messiah and His path stand at the centre of everything. Even before Christ's coming, believing Jews were certain that the Messiah, His coming and everything connected with Him had been conceived by God before the creation of the world. And this conviction is confirmed by the picture disclosed to the apostle. He sees the birth of Christ as the centre of history, not only the history of humanity, but of creation as a whole. The image of the Virgin Mary, “the woman clothed with the sun,” giving birth to Christ, stands at the centre of the spiritual cosmos that John sees when he finds himself at the Throne of Glory.

The entire meaning of world history, not only in its universal human but also in its cosmic dimension, comes down to the confrontation between God and the devil, who is represented here as a dragon with seven heads and ten horns. In the Bible, heads usually symbolize knowledge and authority, while horns symbolize strength. The seven heads indicate a claim to omniscience, to knowledge of everything that exists in the world, for the number seven in biblical books usually symbolizes the fullness of the created world, while the ten horns indicate superhuman and supernatural strength. This strength and this omniscience naturally oppose God's authority, God's power and God's plans for creation, including everything connected with the coming of Christ, Whom the dragon seeks to devour as soon as He is born.

As for a third of the stars which the dragon casts down from heaven with himself, commentators often see in them the angels carried away by the fallen spirit at the moment of his fall. But it is also possible that what is meant here is the damage inflicted by the devil upon creation itself in the course of that fall. It is no accident that, at the end of time, catastrophes and cataclysms strike a third of nature: it suffers to exactly the extent to which it was damaged at that moment.

Believing Jews knew about the universal resurrection long before Christ came. They knew that the day of Judgment would come, and that everyone who had ever lived on earth would have to return to life, stand before God, and give an account of the life they had lived. They also knew about the messianic Kingdom, where those raised from the dead would become neighbors of those who were still alive when the Messiah came. In Paul's day, the messianic Kingdom was regarded as the Kingdom of God, in which the earthly and the heavenly were joined so that the righteous, raised from the dead and miraculously restored to life by God, would live alongside those who entered it without having died.

In those days, however, the Messiah was not regarded as the bearer of the Kingdom. He was merely its King, while the Kingdom itself was established by God according to His will. The Messiah was considered an ordinary human being by nature, given a special vocation: messianic ministry. One did not necessarily have to be born the Messiah; one could become the Messiah just as others became prophets. God called a person to ministry, and the prophet became what he was meant to be.

Paul, however, speaks of a different Messiah, the One who revealed Himself to him on the road to Damascus. This Messiah was not merely the King of a Kingdom established by God: He Himself bore that Kingdom within Himself and had borne it from His own birth, which was itself extraordinary. A Messiah who contains within Himself the entire fullness of the Kingdom is a new image; nothing like it existed in the traditional Judaism of the Gospel era.

The image of such a Messiah and such a Kingdom compelled people to look differently at familiar things. The Kingdom entered the world not simply as an external force, like the breath of God, originally foreign both to the fallen world and to fallen human nature. It entered the world through a Man who differs from each of us only in that His humanity is entirely free from the dominion of sin.

And the bonds of love established with this Man open the fullness of the Kingdom to each of us: they open it in a human way, just as these bonds of love unite us with Him in a human way. Human relationships themselves become the spiritual foundation of the Kingdom, and God enters into them, making them divine-human. Thus the life of the Kingdom becomes our life, its history becomes a fact of our spiritual biography, and its triumph becomes our salvation.

Today's reading is devoted to an event described by two evangelists: Matthew (Mt 1:18-23) and Luke (vv. 26-38). It is reasonable to think that Luke used in his Gospel the testimony of the Virgin Mary herself, unlike Matthew, who relied on Joseph's account. In addition, in Luke's presentation the story of the Annunciation is joined to the story of the Virgin Mary's visit to Elizabeth (vv. 39-56). Using such a composition, the evangelist, as it were, compares and relates two events: the birth of John the Baptist and the Nativity of Christ.

At first glance, such a comparison can appear rather conditional: after all, the birth even of such a prophet as John is still incomparable in significance with the birth of the Messiah-Christ. And yet this comparison has its own meaning. For every miracle is nothing other than God's intervention in nature and history, changing, though not completely stopping, the course of natural and social processes. From this point of view, the Nativity of Christ too could be considered an ordinary miracle, if only the word "ordinary" were appropriate in this case. For even the birth of the Messiah-Christ and the entry of the Kingdom into the world are not something absolutely external to this world; otherwise Christ would have had no need to be born, and the Incarnation of God would lose all meaning.

The Kingdom is amazing precisely because it includes our world and does not destroy it. Perhaps for this reason the Incarnation of God was absolutely necessary: by containing Himself within the bounds of human nature, which is by definition limited, God enters the world not from outside, but from within; now His greatness does not prevent Him from becoming wholly, to the end, part of the world He Himself created. Apparently, in a fallen world it was not possible to act otherwise; it was possible to set it right only from within, and God resolves on this step for the sake of His love for people.

But even before this He did not abandon humanity, and above all His people. Every miracle, every theophany, was a step toward the world and toward the human person. Therefore Luke quite rightly relates John's birth to Jesus' birth: all "ordinary" miracles find their meaning only in the main miracle - the birth of the Messiah and the manifestation of the Kingdom.