“I cannot describe to you how much our Panagia likes chastity and purity. Since she is the only pure Virgin, she wants and loves everyone to be like that. As soon as we cry out to her she rushes to our help. You don’t even finish saying, ‘All-holy Theotokos, help me’ and at once, like lightning, she shines through the nous and fills the heart with illumination. She draws the nous to prayer and the heart to Love.”
~ Elder Joseph the Hesychast
Daily Scripture Readings
Galatians 4:22-31 (Epistle, St. Anna)
22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman.
23 But he who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the freewoman through promise,
24 which things are symbolic. For these are the two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar –
25 for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children –
26 but the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all.
27 For it is written: “Rejoice, O barren, You who do not bear! Break forth and shout, You who are not in labor! For the desolate has many more children Than she who has a husband.”
28 Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise.
29 But, as he who was born according to the flesh then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now.
30 Nevertheless what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.”
31 So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free.
Luke 8:16-21 (Gospel, St. Anna)
16 No one, when he has lit a lamp, covers it with a vessel or puts it under a bed, but sets it on a lampstand, that those who enter may see the light.
17 For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light.
18 Therefore take heed how you hear. For whoever has, to him more will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.”
19 Then His mother and brothers came to Him, and could not approach Him because of the crowd.
20 And it was told Him by some, who said, “Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see You.”
21 But He answered and said to them, “My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it.”
Conception of the Most Holy Theotokos by Saint Anna
The Gospels and other books of the New Testament do not mention anything about Saint Anna, the mother of the Theotokos. According to Tradition, the priest Matthan (Matthew 1:15), a resident of Bethlehem, had three daughters: Mary,1 Sobe (Sobḗ), and Anna. Mary was married in Bethlehem, where she gave birth to Elizabeth, the mother of Saint John the Baptist.
The Holy Righteous Anna was the youngest daughter of the priest Matthan, who was from the tribe of Levi, of the family of Aaron. Her husband, the Holy Righteous Joachim was from the tribe of Judah, from the house and family of King David. According to the ancient promise, the Messiah was to come from the lineage of King David (Luke 2:4).
The couple lived in Nazareth of Galilee. Every year, they gave two-thirds of their income to the Temple in Jerusalem, and to the poor. By God's Providence, the holy couple had no children until their old age. They were greatly saddened by this, since the Jews considered childlessness a great misfortune and a punishment from God. They prayed fervently for the Lord to give them children.
On a certain feast, when the Israelites were bringing gifts to God in the Temple at Jerusalem, the High Priest, believing that the childless Joachim did not have God's blessing, refused to accept gifts from him. Saint Joachim was grief stricken. He consulted the genealogy of the twelve tribes of Israel and ascertained that all righteous men had offspring, including Abraham, when he was a hundred years old. Without returning home, Saint Joachim went into the wilderness and spent forty days there in strict fasting and prayer, entreating God's mercy for himself, and washing away his disgrace with bitter tears.
Saint Anna thought that she was to blame for their sorrow. One day saw a nest with barely fledged chicks in the branches of a laurel tree, she wept and prayed for the gift of a child, promising to bring the infant to God as an offering. As soon as Saint Anna spoke these words, an Angel of the Lord told her that her prayer had been answered, and revealed that she would have a daughter named Mary, through whom all the peoples of the world would be blessed. Rejoicing, Saint Anna hastened to the Temple in Jerusalem, in order to give thanks to God. She repeated her vow to dedicate the child to Him. An Angel came to Saint Joachim in the wilderness with the same news and commanded him to go to Jerusalem. There, the Righteous Anna conceived and gave birth to the Most Holy Theotokos.
The Orthodox Church does not accept the teaching that the Mother of God was exempted from the consequences of ancestral sin (death, corruption, sin, etc.) at the moment of her conception by virtue of the future merits of her Son. Only Christ was born perfectly holy and sinless, as Saint Ambrose of Milan teaches in Chapter Two of his Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Luke. The Holy Virgin was like everyone else in her mortality, and in being subject to temptation, although she committed no personal sins. She was not a deified creature removed from the rest of humanity. If this were the case, She would not have been truly human, and the nature that Christ took from her would not have been truly human either. If Christ does not truly share our human nature, then the possibility of our salvation is in doubt.
Re-discovering Mary
By ARCHPRIEST LAWRENCE FARLEY
The Mother of Jesus is without dispute or serious rival the most famous woman in human history. This being so, it seems odd to speak of the need to re-discover her. Surely the most famous woman in history could hardly get lost? But that, I would argue, is just what happened to her, at least here in the West.
The Mary with whom we have to do was a Jew in first century Palestine. She was about fourteen years old when she was betrothed to Joseph (the normal age of betrothal for Jewish girls at that time) and, apart from a few months when she was a refugee in Egypt along with her husband and her young baby, she spent all of her life within the narrow confines of the Holy Land. (The claim of Ephesus to contain her tomb is late and cannot be sustained.) She was raised in the town of Nazareth in Galilee, and ended her days as part of the embattled little assembly of Christians in Jerusalem, where she was finally buried. The Mary of history was a very Jewish Mary.
This Jewish Mary has become eclipsed by a Catholic Mary and a Protestant Mary, as both Catholics and Protestants fought it out beginning shortly after the birth of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. Mary became less of a person in her own right and more of a symbol, a cause, a source of strife in a larger war of words. This war, sadly, became soon enough more than a war of mere words, as blood was spilled by both sides in this long religious conflict. For Protestants in those days, Catholics were not really Christians. They were benighted and deluded idolaters, crucifying Christ afresh at every Mass and worshipping idols of wood and stone, strangers to the grace of God. The Pope was the Antichrist himself, the Man of Sin long expected since St. Paul first wrote of him in his second epistle to the Thessalonians. The Pope’s church was not the church of Christ, but Babylon, mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Rome for its part denounced the Protestant movement in turn as heresy and schism in the strongest possible terms. The Reformers were apostates, enemies of Christ, and those who accepted their teaching were bound for hell. Indeed, in the centuries to follow it was considered by Catholics a mortal sin to even enter a Protestant Church.
In this furious turmoil, Mary of Nazareth quickly became a casualty of war. It didn’t have to be that way, and for the first few years of the Protestant Reformation, it seems as if the role of Mary was one of the few things Catholics and Protestants might agree upon. In the first generation of the Reformation, we find Martin Luther accepting Mary’s perpetual virginity and her sinlessness, and he referred to her as “the Mother of God” and as “the Queen of heaven”, but this more traditional western attitude of his soon began to change. By 1522 he was teaching that any Christian was as holy as Mary, though he still affirmed the value of asking her for her heavenly intercession.
Zwingli also accepted the perpetual virginity of Mary, as did John Calvin. These two Reformers however rejected any veneration of Mary, Calvin stating that to ask her to obtain grace for us was “execrable blasphemy”. It seems that the Reformers began their new careers accepting almost unexamined the Marian piety of the medieval West from which they came, but soon reacted against it, having concluded that it was incompatible with their new doctrines about grace and salvation.
In counter-reaction to this Protestant reaction, Rome grew ever more determined and militant in its Marian piety. Marian piety became a kind of growth industry. Her Immaculate Conception was increasingly stressed, and was finally declared to be a dogma in 1854. The Catholic Church set its seal of approval on Mary’s alleged apparitions to Catherine Labouré, in Paris in 1830, to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in 1858, and to others as well, including the supposed apparitions to Lucia dos Santos in Fatima, Portugal in 1917. In 1950 Rome declared Mary’s Assumption a dogma of the Catholic Church. At the present time, pressure is growing to have her declared Co-redemptrix.
The Protestant reaction to Rome’s reaction was predictable. Protestants soon abandoned the view of the earliest Reformers that Mary was a perpetual virgin, and sought to minimize her role as much as possible. She was viewed as no different than any other believer in Christ apart from the historical fact that she gave birth to Him. The “brothers” of Christ referred to in the Gospels were considered as a matter of course to be her other biological children, and any assertion that she might have a unique or special role in Christian devotion was condemned as idolatrous.
The battles lines were starkly drawn. Mary the Catholic and Mary the Protestant had little in common with each other. Mary was now no longer simply an historical individual who once lived in Palestine. She had become the battlefield upon which a larger war was being fought. Protestants now read the Bible and the history of the church to find confirmation of their own minimalist views of Mary, while Catholics read the Bible and the history of the church to find confirmation of their own lately developed Marian dogmas such as the Immaculate Conception and her bodily Assumption. Those now committed to this polemical approach inevitably look less at the face of Mary and more at the faces of their opponents, and the historical Mary, the young Jew who gave birth to Christ, rapidly gets lost behind the smoke of battle.
I suggest stepping back from this battlefield entirely and returning to the Scriptures and to church history with fresh and open eyes. It is only from that vantage point that we can hope to recover the real Mary, the young adolescent chosen by God to be the Mother of the eternal Word.
This week’s calendar reminders:
Monday 12/9: Matins 8:30 am; Steward’s Meeting 6:30pm
Tuesday 12/10: no services or events
Wednesday 12/11: no services or events
Thursday 12/12: Matins 8:30 am
Friday 12/13: Paraklesis to Theotokos 8:30 am
Saturday 12/14: Catechumen Class 4:30 pm; Great Vespers 6 pm
Sunday 12/15: Divine Liturgy 9:15 am
