Galatians 6:11-18; John 3:13-17
Most people
probably think of birth and death as totally different and unrelated things. We often associate one with great joy and
hope, while the other is simply a sorrowful ending. If we think simply in terms of our experience
in this world of corruption, then it makes sense to view them in that way. But if we place them in the context of what
our Lord has accomplished through His Cross, then we will understand them very differently.
Today
we continue to celebrate the Nativity of the Theotokos even as we anticipate
the feast of the Elevation of the Cross later this week. That we magnify the Cross should not be
surprising to anyone who knows anything about Christianity, for it is through
His great Self-Offering on the Cross that our Savior took the full consequences
of sin and death upon Himself, and thus conquered them in His glorious
resurrection on the third day. His death
is our entryway into the new life of the Kingdom, into the “eighth day” of the
new creation.
The importance
of the birth of the Virgin Mary may be a bit more obscure, however. Perhaps the
place to begin understanding the importance of her birth is with our first
parents, Adam and Eve. By choosing to
satisfy their own prideful desires instead of fulfilling their calling to
become ever more like God in holiness, they ushered in the cycle of birth and
death that has enslaved every generation.
But instead of leaving us captive to corruption, God prepared across the
centuries to restore us to the ancient dignity for which He created us in the
first place. Joachim and Anna were a righteous, elderly Jewish couple who, like
Abraham and Sarah, longed for a child.
God heard their fervent prayers and gave them Mary, whom they dedicated
to the Lord in the Temple in Jerusalem.
That is where she grew up in preparation to become the Living Temple of
the Lord when she miraculously contained Christ in her womb.
We call Mary
“Theotokos” precisely because the One Whom she bore is truly divine, the
eternal Son of God. We call her the New
Eve because she gave birth to the New Adam in Whom our calling to become like
God in holiness is fulfilled. As the
God-Man, He united humanity and divinity in Himself, making it possible for us
to become “partakers of the divine nature” by grace. The first Eve chose her own will over God’s
and gave birth to those enslaved to death, beginning with Cain and Abel. The New Eve said “Behold the handmaiden of
the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word” and gave birth to the One Who
conquered death.
As St. Paul
knew, Christ’s healing of our fallen humanity is so profound that we become
through Him “a new creation.” The
references to Adam and Eve are especially fitting in this context, for we
cannot understand the gravity of our healing if we do not recognize the depths
of our sickness. Unlike the Judaizers
who wanted Gentile converts to be circumcised, St. Paul saw that corrupt
humanity, whether Jew or Gentile, was enslaved to death, the wages of sin. Our problem is not so slight that we need
only a few rituals or rules to improve us.
No, as the Savior told Nicodemus, we need to be reborn. We need to move from death to life. That is why Christ offered Himself in free
obedience on the Cross: in order to
raise us up from the tomb as participants in the eternal life for which He
breathed life into us in the first place.
He did not come to condemn the world, but to save it—and all of us-- as
a new creation.
The good news of
Christ’s salvation is so glorious that we do not want to leave out any
dimension of how He has set right all that has gone wrong with humanity across
the ages. We want to tell this beautiful
story in full detail--past, present and future. Since He had to be a real human being in order
to save real human beings, Jesus Christ had to have a mother. At one level, that is simply a fact of what
it means to be human. But as we know
from St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation, He also had to have a mother who
freely welcomed Him into her life. He
had to have a mother who chose to obey God’s calling to her, even though she
could not have possibly known all that her agreement would mean. Mary did not know how a virgin could become
pregnant and give birth while remaining a virgin. Well, who does? But her humble, trusting obedience played a
crucial role in how salvation came into the world. He could not have been the God-Man unless he
was born of a woman. He could not have
become the Second Adam were it not for the consent of the New Eve.
The Theotokos’
birth resonates beautifully with so much Old Testament imagery. She was miraculously conceived by an elderly
couple whose barrenness represents the pain and despair of a world enslaved to
sin and death. Joachim and Anna could
not overcome childlessness by themselves, even as we cannot overcome the grave
by our own power. God’s blessing on their intimate union in
conceiving the Theotokos is a sign of the healing of the frustrations of the relationship
between man and woman, which also result from the rebellion of our first
parents. Like Abraham and Sarah, they
had to wait for a very long time, but finally God gave them a child. As Hannah
did with Samuel, they gave the child to God in the Temple, where she grew up in
preparation to receive Christ into her life in a unique way as His Living
Temple. The promises to Abraham are fulfilled in Christ and extend to all with
faith in Him. The Theotokos’ birth is a crucial
dimension of how God prepared for the fulfillment of those promises. We cannot tell the story of Christ without
also telling hers.
If we want the best example of what it means
to become “a new creation” in Him, we need only look to her as the first and
model Christian who, like St. Paul, did not “glory
except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been
crucified to me and I to the world.” Nothing
about the Theotokos’ life was a conventional religious accomplishment that drew
the praise of others at the time. She
is the mother of One Who was crucified as a blasphemer and a traitor. She saw
Him on the Cross with her own eyes. As
St. Symeon told the Theotokos at Christ’s presentation in the Temple, “a sword
will pierce your soul as well.” (Luke 2:35) But it was precisely through the horror
of the Cross that the Savior brought the world into the new day of the
Kingdom. He makes us “a new creation”
not by giving us mere rules and rituals by which we can try make ourselves
worthy or respectable, but by enabling us to become participants in the great
victory He won through His crucifixion and resurrection.
In order to accept that high calling, we must be
willing to die to all that holds us back from playing our role in fulfilling
God’s purposes for the new creation.
Like Joachim and Anna, we must be prayerful and patient. Like the Theotokos, we must say “yes” even
when we cannot have a full understanding of what it will mean to obey. In all things, we must unite ourselves to the
Lord in His great Self-Offering on the Cross, and refuse to base our lives on
anything or anyone else. We should
remove from our lives anything that we cannot offer to Him for blessing. We should welcome into our lives every
opportunity to become more like Him in holiness. In other words, we should move in Him from
death to life. The point is not to become
conventionally religious or morally impressive, but to embrace the salvation He
worked on the Cross that extends to you and me, as well as to the rest of the
world. For His death truly is our life, our birth
into the new creation of the Kingdom of Heaven.
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