After eight days from His birth, our Lord Jesus Christ submitted to circumcision. On the one hand, He received it to fulfil the law: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets,” He said. “I did not come to destroy but to fulfil” (cf. Matthew 5:17). For He obeyed the law to free those enslaved by it. As the Apostle says: “God sent forth His Son, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law” (cf. Galatians 4:4-5). He also underwent circumcision to prove He had truly taken on human flesh and to silence heretics who claimed that Christ did not assume true human flesh but was born only in appearance.
And so, He was circumcised to make His humanity clear. For, had He not truly taken on our flesh, how could a phantom, rather than flesh, have been circumcised? St. Ephrem the Syrian observes, “If Christ was not flesh, whom did Joseph circumcise? But, as He was truly flesh, He was circumcised as a man, and as a child, He was truly stained with His own blood, like any son of man; He felt pain and wept, as is fitting for one who possessed human nature.”
Yet, beyond this, He also underwent physical circumcision to establish spiritual circumcision for us; for, having brought to an end the Old Law of the flesh, He inaugurated the New, spiritual law. Just as the Old Testament man of flesh would circumcise his physical body, so the new spiritual person ought to cut away the passions of the soul: rage, anger, envy, pride, unclean desires, and other sins and sinful cravings.
His circumcision took place on the eighth day because it foreshadowed for us, through His blood, the life to come — which is normally referred to by Church teachers as the eighth day, or the eighth age. Thus, Saint Stephen, the author of the canon for the Circumcision of the Lord, states, “The life of the coming, endless, eighth age is portrayed, in which the Lord was circumcised in the flesh.” And Saint Gregory of Nyssa comments, “Circumcision according to the law had to be performed on the eighth day, with the number eight signifying the future eighth age.”
It is also helpful to know that circumcision in the Old Testament was ordained as a symbol of baptism and the cleansing of ancestral sin, though that sin was not completely removed by it — and could not be until Christ willingly shed His pure blood for us in His suffering. Circumcision was only a foreshadowing of true purification, not that purification itself. The true cleansing was achieved by our Lord, who took away sin from our midst and nailed it to the Cross, replacing Old Testament circumcision with the new, grace-filled baptism by water and the Spirit.
In those days, circumcision was, as it were, a punishment for ancestral sin and a mark that the infant being circumcised had been conceived in iniquity, as David says, “In sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). This is why a blemish remained on the young body. Yet our Lord was without sin; for although He became like us in every way, He had no sin within Him. Just as the brazen serpent Moses made in the wilderness, which looked like a serpent but had no venom (see Numbers 21:9), so Christ was truly human, but without human sin, and was born supernaturally, of a pure and virgin Mother. Sinless and the Lawgiver Himself, He had no need for the painful rite of circumcision. But He came to bear the world’s sins, and as the Apostle says, “He made Him Who knew no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). He, being without sin, submitted to circumcision as if He were a sinner.
In His circumcision, the Lord revealed even greater humility than at His birth. For in His birth, as the apostle tells us, He took on the likeness of men, and appeared as a man (Philippians 2:7); but in His circumcision, He took on the semblance of a sinner, suffering pain as though it were His due for transgression. He, Who was without guilt, suffered as if guilty, as though echoing David: “I had to restore what I did not steal” (Psalm 69:4) — that is, “I accept the pain of circumcision for the sin which is not mine.” By the circumcision He underwent, He began His suffering for us and the tasting of that cup, which He would drink to the very end, when, hanging upon the Cross, He declared: “It is finished!” (John 19:30). Now, He sheds droplets of blood from His tender flesh; later, it will pour forth in streams from His entire body.
He begins to endure in His infancy, growing accustomed to suffering, so that, becoming a perfect man, He might bear even more grievous afflictions, for one must learn courage from youth. Human life, full of toil, is like a day, where the morning is birth, and the evening is death. So, from the first light of His life, from the swaddling clothes, Christ, the God-man, goes forth to His task, His labour, in toil from His earliest youth, working until evening (see Psalm 104:23), that evening when the sun would dim, and darkness would cover all the earth, till the ninth hour.
And He proclaims to the Jews: “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working” (John 5:17). What work does the Lord do for us? Our salvation: salvation in the midst of the earth (Psalm 74:12). To accomplish this task with utmost perfection, He sets about it from the first light of the day, from His youth, beginning to suffer bodily pain, even as His heart grieved for us, as for His own children, until Christ Himself might be formed in us (Galatians 4:19). From the beginning of His life, He begins to sow with His blood, so that by evening, He might reap a bountiful harvest of our redemption.
Source:
Lives of the Saints in Russian, compiled according to the guidance of the Menaion of St. Dimitry of Rostov: With additions, explanations, notes and images of the saints. – Reprint ed. – Pechenga (Murmansk region): Trifonov Pechenga Monastery; Moscow: Knizhnoye Delo, 2003.
