Hebrews 3:5-11, 17-19; Mark 9:42-10:1; and Luke 2:1-18 on the Sixth Sunday of Advent
You stand on a threshold. The Sixth Sunday of Advent, the Sunday before Christmas, positions you at the edge of mystery—not just commemorating an ancient birth but recognizing that the same border-crossing that happened in Bethlehem is happening now, in you. The readings today converge on a single, devastating question: What do you do when God refuses to stay in the safe places you have built for him?
Luke’s narrative confronts you with the scandal of divine arrival. Caesar Augustus issues a decree—the empire that controls everything, that names and numbers and taxes and owns. Against this backdrop of human power organizing the world through force, a young woman gives birth in a stable because there is no room in the inn. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn (Luke 2:7). This is not quaint. This is God choosing the margins, entering through the back door of creation, bypassing every structure of religious and political power to arrive where no one expected.
The angels appear to shepherds—not to priests, not to kings, not to the religiously qualified but to those who smell like animals, whose work makes them ritually unclean according to Second Temple law. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased (Luke 2:14). The divine announcement comes to those the religious system has excluded. God crosses the border between heaven and earth, between holy and common, between worthy and unworthy, and the crossing itself destroys the categories.
This is your first invitation: to recognize where you have built walls to keep God manageable. Where have you confined divine presence to “spiritual” spaces while keeping actual life—messy, bodily, conflicted—separate? The Incarnation announces that God has already crossed that border. There is nowhere he will not go, no one he will not approach, nothing he considers beneath him. Your body is not too material for his presence. Your anger is not too unholy for his love. Your childhood wounds are not too damaged for his healing. He was born in a stable.
Maximos the Confessor teaches that “the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.” Ambiguum 7 The Incarnation is not a one-time exception but the revelation of God’s eternal will—to embody himself in creation, to unite divine and human, to make matter transparent to glory. What began in Mary’s womb continues in yours. Your flesh is the place where this embodiment happens now.
But Mark’s reading confronts you with the terror this crossing demands. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell (Mark 9:43). This is not about literal mutilation—it is about the ruthless honesty required when God actually crosses your borders. What part of your life are you protecting from divine presence? What addiction, what pattern, what carefully maintained wound are you refusing to let him touch?
The language is violent because the work is violent. Not that God is violent—he arrives as an infant in a manger—but that letting him cross your internal borders feels like dismemberment. You have built your identity around certain stories: “I am the victim,” “I am the strong one,” “I am the one who never needs help,” “I am unlovable,” “I am superior.” These stories are hands and feet and eyes. They let you navigate the world. And Christ is saying: if these stories are keeping you from life, from your own soul’s truth, from participation in divine reality—let them be cut away.
This is the descent from head to heart that hesychastic tradition describes. You live in your head, where you control the narrative, where you analyze rather than feel, where you stay safe. The heart is where the wounded child lives, where the rage you have swallowed for decades sits waiting, where the terror of abandonment that you have never acknowledged still grips you. Going there feels like death. It is supposed to. Gregory of Nyssa writes that “the one who wants to see God will find him in doing good to his neighbor.” On the Beatitudes, Sermon 6 Doing good is not external performance but facing what you have denied internally—becoming good from a whole heart, not performing goodness through gritted teeth.
Jesus in Gethsemane shows you the pattern. He does not pray his terror away. My soul is very sorrowful, even to death (Mark 14:34). He sweats blood. He begs God for another way. He feels it fully. Then—only then, from that place of complete honesty—he chooses: Not what I will, but what you will (Mark 14:36). Not suppressing fear but feeling everything and choosing anyway. This is the hard work: face what you have been avoiding, feel the childhood wound underneath, bring compassion to the wounded parts, then choose love from wholeness rather than suppression.
The Hebrews reading makes the stakes explicit. Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God (Hebrews 3:12). What is this “unbelieving heart”? It is the refusal to let God cross your borders. The Israelites in the wilderness saw miracles—pillar of fire, manna from heaven, water from rock—yet their hearts remained hard. They preferred the slavery they knew to the freedom that required trust. They were unable to enter because of unbelief (Hebrews 3:19).
You have your own wilderness. It is the place between recognizing what needs to change and actually changing. It is the gap between knowing you should forgive and choosing to forgive. It is the distance between understanding that your childhood wound is not your fault but healing it anyway. The Israelites wandered for forty years in that gap. Many died there, not because God punished them but because they refused to move forward. They hardened their hearts.
Athanasius teaches that “the Word was made man that we might be made gods.” On the Incarnation, 54 This is the cosmic reality your personal transformation participates in. When you descend to your heart and face what you have denied, when you let divine presence cross your internal borders, when you choose from wholeness rather than woundedness—you are not just fixing yourself. You are participating in the transfiguration of creation itself. Your body learning to bear divine life is part of matter learning to pray. Your integration of shadow is creation groaning toward redemption. The universe itself is becoming transparent to glory, and your healing is one cell in that cosmic body.
The Incarnation reveals what was always true: matter is temple-in-becoming. The eternal “let there be” resounds through every atom. When God enters creation as an infant, he is not visiting a foreign realm but taking flesh in what was always meant to bear his glory. Created Sophia—the world’s participation in divine Wisdom—is the ground on which you stand. When you encounter beauty that stops your breath, when truth strikes you with its evident power, when love moves you beyond yourself, you are touching what has always been there: divine Glory shining through creation.
Mary is the image of created Sophia fully realized—the human person completely transparent to divine presence. She is not separated from you by an unbridgeable gap; she is what you are called to become. When Gabriel announces the impossible, she does not demand explanation. Let it be to me according to your word (Luke 1:38). She opens every border. She lets divine presence cross every threshold. The result is not her destruction but her transfiguration—she becomes Theotokos, God-bearer. This is your calling too: to become by grace what God is by nature, to let your flesh bear what seems unbearable, to trust that the crossing will not destroy you but reveal you.
The cosmic implication: evil has no future. Mark’s language about millstones and unquenchable fire acknowledges evil’s real power to wound and destroy. The text does not minimize darkness. But evil exists only as parasite—it feeds on the good it distorts. It has no resources of its own to endure eternally. As John Chrysostom writes, “Even the demons tremble before the Cross, for they know their defeat is sealed.” Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homily 2 When Christ descends into your hell before asking you to, when he enters every dark place refusing to call anything unredeemable, he exhausts death itself. His single death contains all human deaths. Trampling death by death means drinking the entire cup with all its bitterness—and rising anyway.
This grounds your hope: the beauty that attracts you is more real than the darkness that wounds you. Divine Wisdom’s compelling attraction will ultimately persuade every freedom—not by violating it but by winning it. God’s long-suffering patience means there is time for the hardest heart to soften. Your freedom determines how you arrive, not whether. The manner matters infinitely; the mode of your participation shapes who you become. But the sophianic foundation remains beneath every distortion. The radiant face of creation shines even through fallen forms. You are standing on ground that cannot finally fail.
The ancient pattern: Christ restores what the First Temple knew. Before Josiah’s reforms centralized and externalized worship, the temple was not primarily about separating clean from unclean but about direct access to divine presence. The Holy of Holies was the place of mystical ascent, where humanity could become angelic, where Day One—primordial unity beyond time—could be touched. The priests were not primarily rule-enforcers but transformers, mediating heaven to earth through their own transfiguration. This is what Christ recovers. He is Melchizedek priest offering bread and wine, not animal sacrifice. He tears the temple veil from top to bottom. He opens access not by maintaining boundaries but by crossing them.
Paul’s critique of the stoicheia tou kosmou—the elemental spirits, the guardians keeping people under bondage—makes sense here. The Second Temple system had replaced mystical transformation with external ritual, direct access with separation structures. The angels had become guards rather than models of theosis. Christ’s coming disarms these rulers and authorities (Colossians 2:15). He does not improve the system; he overthrows it. The shepherds receiving the announcement first is not sentiment—it is revolution. God bypasses the gatekeepers entirely.
This is happening in you right now. The Incarnation is not contained in past events you commemorate but present reality you participate in. Every Eucharist, divine presence crosses the border between heaven and earth, between Creator and creation, and bread becomes Body while remaining bread. This is the pattern for your own transfiguration: you become by grace what God is by nature while remaining who you are. Not evacuation but transformation. Not escape but fulfillment. Your body will be resurrected; your personality will be transfigured; your very atoms will learn to pray.
Cyril of Alexandria teaches that “Christ took on humanity so that humanity might take on divinity—not by nature, but by participation in grace.” Against Nestorius, Book 1 Participation is key. This is not spectator religion where you watch from safe distance while God does something elsewhere. The crossing demands your cooperation. You must open the borders. You must descend to your heart. You must face what you have denied. You must feel your anger instead of swallowing it, name your terror instead of rationalizing it, recognize the wounded child instead of abandoning them again.
The practical work: Notice where you have compartmentalized. Where is “spiritual life” happening separately from actual life? Bring them together. Your body is temple—how you eat, sleep, move, touch matters infinitely. Your work is liturgy—what you create with your hands participates in creation’s transfiguration. Your relationships are theosis—learning to love the difficult person is learning to bear divine nature. There is no secular sphere exempt from transformation. God was born in a stable because nowhere is too common for his glory.
Notice where you protect wounds from healing. What story are you maintaining? What pattern keeps replaying? This is the hand or foot or eye that needs cutting off—not literal mutilation but ruthless honesty about what you are clinging to that keeps you from life. The story that you are uniquely damaged beyond redemption. The pattern of always being the victim or always being the savior. The wound you nurse because letting it heal would require forgiving. These are identities you have built. Letting them go feels like death. But they are keeping you in the wilderness.
Practical method: theurgic prayer. When you feel the rage rising, the terror gripping, the wound surfacing—do not just analyze it. Feel it fully AND pray: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” The prayer does not bypass the feeling; it invites divine presence into the feeling. This is hesychastic descent: bringing Christ into the darkness you have been avoiding. Not white-knuckling through but genuine transformation. Not performing goodness but becoming good from a whole heart.
The eschatological horizon illuminates everything. You are not trapped in the wilderness forever. The wandering has purpose: it is teaching you what is essential, burning away what cannot endure, revealing the sophianic foundation beneath distortion. Birth pangs, not death throes. The groaning of creation is labor—something is being born. Each small death you die prepares you for the final Pascha. Each border God crosses in you prepares you to bear the weight of glory. Each moment of integration is the universe learning its own transfiguration.
The Sixth Sunday of Advent: you stand at the threshold. Behind you, the preparation—the stripping away, the waiting, the gradual opening. Before you, the feast—the arrival that changes everything, the crossing that destroys every wall, the presence that refuses to be contained. The inn has no room. Good. Because the stable is where he comes. To the shepherds, to the unqualified, to the ones who smell like animals and know they need mercy. This is the revolution: God entering through the back door, bypassing the gatekeepers, making himself available to everyone regardless of ritual status. The border between worthy and unworthy is crossed. The separation between sacred and profane is destroyed. Glory shines in a manger.
Your invitation is identical: let him come to the stable parts of you. The wounded parts. The unworthy parts. The parts you have kept hidden because they do not fit your spiritual self-image. He will not wait for you to clean them up first. He comes to what is, not to what you pretend to be. And his coming does not destroy—it transfigures. The stable becomes temple. The flesh becomes God-bearer. The wounded parts become the places where glory shines most clearly, because they are where you finally stopped pretending and let truth in.
Keywords: Incarnation, theosis, hesychastic descent, shadow integration, kenotic love, border-crossing, transfiguration, wounded healer, created Sophia, threshold spirituality
The Greater Horizon 