A homily of the abbot of the Great
and Holy Monastery of Vatopedi,Mount Athos, Archimandrite Ephraim, in the refectory
of the monastery at the Feast of the Mother of God on September 8th.
The Panagia has a central place in
divine worship. Feasts of the Mother of God frame the ecclesiastical
year; it begins with the feast of the Birth of the Theotokos, and ends
with the feast of the placing of the Holy Girdle of the Theotokos.
Today is a cause for spiritual joy and
rejoicing, my dear brothers and fathers, for today we celebrate the
birth of the ever-virgin and God-bearing Maria, that most fragrant
flower who sprung forth “from the root of Jesse.” We celebrate the
“birthday of universal rejoicing,” which constitutes the “entrance of
all of the feasts and the prelude to the mystery of Christ,” according
to St. Andrew of Crete. Birth, which became the agent of the rebirth, of
reconstruction, and the renewal of all things. Today she is born who
will give birth, in time and in an incomprehensible and strange fashion,
to the timeless and pre-eternal God the Word, the Creator and Savior of
the world.
In the Old Testament there
are many passages that foreshadow, prefigure, and prophesy Her. She is
the completion, the fulfillment of the Old Testament pedagogical
preparation of humanity for its acceptance of the incarnated Savior God.
Our Panagia was prefigured by the burning bush in Moses’s vision, by
the God-written plaques and the tabernacle of the Law, by the heavenly
manna, by the golden seal, by the lamp and the altar, the blossoming rod
of Aaron, by Jacob’s ladder, the wool of Gideon, Daniel’s uncut
mountain, the fiery furnace which with its fire cooled the Three
Children, as well as by the Holy of Holies in the tent of witness. The
Theotokos is the borderline between the Old and the New Testament. For
the Old Testament, she was the message of the prophets, the hope of the
righteous; while in the New Testament she becomes the sweetness of the
angels, the glory of the apostles, the courage of the martyrs, the
delight of the venerable, the boast of humanity, which is why she is
glorified by “every generation.”
All of creation awaited her
birth. Our Panagia is the “fruit of creation” according to St. Nicholas
Kavasilas, she is the measure that all of creation is to attain. Just as
the tree exists for its fruit, in the same way creation exists for the
Virgin and the Virgin for Christ. The Fathers emphasize that not only
people, but also the heavens and the earth, all of visible and invisible
creation were created for the spotless Virgin. When God, at the
beginning of the ages, fixed his gaze on His creation, He said that it
was “very good,” He essentially saw before Him the fruit of all
creation, the All-Holy Theotokos, and His praise was truly the “good
report of the Virgin.”
On this day, all creation
receives a blessing from the birth of our spotless Lady. “This new
creation,” was not simply the greatest woman on earth, nor the greatest
woman of all periods, but it was she who alone could draw heaven to
earth, to make God into man. The creator God the Word created human
nature in such a way that when He needed to be born, He would be born
from His mother. The invisible and unseen God comes to earth through her
and becomes visible; He is united and communes with creation in a more
substantial and united manner. Through His human nature, He unites all
of creation in His hypostasis and divinizes creation. The unique and
unrepresentable God takes on the “form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7),
human flesh and a rational soul, lives among men and walks upon the
earth. The “One who is unable to be held” will fit into the virginal
womb of the Theotokos, such that His All-Holy Mother will be regarded as
the “land that held Him who could not be held.”
Today Anna’s barrenness is
overcome and the “keepsake of all the world,” as St. Cyril of Alexandria
described her, is born. Many times in the Old Testament, God made a
similar miracle: with Sarah the wife of the patriarch Abraham, with
Rebecca the wife of Isaac, with Anna the mother of the prophet Samuel,
with Elizabeth the mother of the prophet and forerunner John the
Baptist. But today’s miracle is very different from these miracles. The
children of the aforementioned mothers, whose barrenness was
miraculously cured, might have been virtuous and holy, but only Mary the
child of Anna and Joachim was “the one who was full of grace,” and was
made, unbelievably for both men and angels, the Mother of God.
Our Panagia was not born
through a virginal, supernatural conception, as the Roman Catholics
mistakenly believe, but after natural relations between Joachim and
Anna. Anna’s natural barrenness was overcome thanks to God’s immediate
intervention as an answer to the prayers of the righteous grandparent’s
of God. The elderly Joachim and Anna came together without any fleshly
attraction or pleasure, but only out of obedience to God. In this way,
with this action they put a stamp on their chastity. In this way, the
Virgin was conceived, “chastely in the bowels of Joachim and Anna.” That
she was conceived chastely means that the way she was conceived was
pure. However, in order for the Virgin to be free of the ancestral sin,
to have had an immaculate conception, she would have had to have been
born of a virgin, as Christ was.
In order to bear such a
child, the righteous grandparents of God revealed an unshakeable faith,
unswerving patience, they fed the hope that does not put to shame, they
had great endurance in the prayer that God would fulfill their request.
And they did not endure their barrenness for a short period. The
tradition says that Anna conceived the Theotokos after fifty years of
barrenness.
This stance of the
grandparents of God should be an example for all of us, my dear brothers
and fathers. It’s not only our lay brothers, who are unable to conceive
children, who should not lose their trust in God for, “the things which
are impossible with men are possible with God” (Luke 18:27), but for us
monks also and all the faithful who fight the “good fight.”
We often give up, or grow
impatient in our struggle and say that we haven’t realized anything, we
don’t sense grace, we get anxious. So, saddened as we are, our zeal is
quenched, we slacken our fighting spirit and our asceticism.
We mustn’t be this way,
though, my brothers. What would have happened if, because God didn’t
respond immediately to their prayers, the grandparents of God had
stopped calling on Him and believing that they would receive? What if
they had stopped calling out, beseeching God, hoping? What great
patience and strength they showed for so many years!
So as to develop the
spiritual “need for great patience,” St. Isaac the Syrian lived the
lessening, the absence of divine grace, the pains of noetic warfare, for
thirty years. He received a constant stream of divine grace after these
long years of bloody battle and patience. We refer to this, especially
for us monks, who were called to receive the fullness of grace. Patience
in sorrows is necessary, faith in the promises of God, perfect
obedience to the will of God and hope, for we “always ought to pray and
not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). God knows when it is in our interests to
give us His inexplicable, unexplainable, and priceless divine gift, His
divine grace as a constant state. “Spiritual gifts come upon us,” Abba
Isaiah notes, we don’t decide when and how we receive them.
In fact, before God gives us
some blessing, a gift, He often tests us with a temptation, the result
of which determines whether or not we’re found worthy to receive this
divine gift. We note this, also, in the grandparents of God who, when
the time approached for God to give them a child, He allowed them to be
tested even further. It was the Feast of Tabernacles, and when they went
to the temple to offer gifts the priest Rubin shamed them by telling
them that they weren’t worthy to offer gifts to God, as they hadn’t had
any children for Israel. The grandparents of God were very saddened
after this, but they did not despair. They took refuge in “deep prayer,”
Joachim went to the mountain and Anna went to the garden, and their
prayer was finally heard, when the angel of the Lord informed each one
individually that the conception would take place, along with the birth
of a child that would be known throughout the world.
And so we, too, my dear
brethren and fathers, let us show ungrudging patience in our sorrows and
in temptations, which God allows for our own good and spiritual growth.
I pray that our Lady Theotokos and the grandmother of God Anna, who
have the gift of healing barrenness, might heal our barren hearts,
lacking spiritual good works, so that God might send His sweetest divine
grace into our hearts, which beautifies, renews, destroys death, and
saves man from corruption.
Source-Pemptousia.com
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