LIFE IN THE WORLD OF THE FEMALE
1 Corinthians 9.2-12
Matthew 18.23-35
We are in the Feast of the Falling Asleep, the death, of the All-Holy Mother of God. Lovers of Christ God love Her with all their heart. Words cannot express how completely we love Her. Through Her, because of Her, we are saved; we become one with God because through Her and in Her, we are able to unite ourselves to Christ in Holy Baptism and to become communicants of the divine nature [2 Pt 1.4] in the partaking of the most pure Body and most precious Blood of Her Son and our God, Our LORD Jesus Christ, in Holy Eucharist. He became a partaker of our flesh and blood through Her. Through Her, He became our “brother” in the flesh, bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh. In Her, He became our “kinsman.” This is what the Bridegroom is called in the Song of Solomon. We therefore love Her in Christ as our Mother. Through Her, we become children of God because, through Her, we become one with Christ, Her Son and our God, and we receive His Heavenly Spirit as did She. Like us, She also fulfilled the law of death; but if we have united ourselves to Her Son, Christ our God in Holy Baptism, then She is now our Mother and we die in Her. Dying in Her, we die in Her Son, and our death is taken up into Her Pascha, and in Her Pascha, our death is taken up into the Pascha of Her Son. She, the loving Mother of the merciful God, is our Mother, and as our Mother, She takes us up in Her arms, and in Her arms, we are translated from death to life in the arms of Her Son and our God, our beloved LORD Jesus Christ.
Dear faithful, the Church’s doctrine of the Holy Virgin Theotokos is the heart of the Church’s apostolic doctrine from the beginning. It is one with the doctrine of the Incarnation. It uncovers the root of human nature and destiny and penetrates all the way down to that opening in our heart where we are deep, beyond all things and where we open beyond ourselves into Christ, the Icon of God in whom we were created as male and female in the image/icon and likeness of God. In an “Ancient Homily” by an unknown preacher, dating from the last part of the first century, included in the corpus of the Apostolic fathers, we read: “The Living Church is the body of Christ; for the Scripture says, “God made man, male and female. The male is Christ; the female is the Church.”
In this light of the Son of God’s Incarnation of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary to become the Son of Man, we turn to Moses’ account of woman’s creation by God from the rib of Adam – perhaps the mightiest of all God’s mighty acts that was revealed to Moses by the LORD on Mt Sinai. We see that woman, because she is the last of all that God creates, even after the creation of the man, is the crown of God’s creation. For, the woman is the Mother of all life. She is the root of all life. Apart from her, there is no life and the world created by God in life and goodness dies on the vine to become nothing.
This explains the tragedy of the first woman. She received into her womb the seed of the serpent and the root of our life was corrupted with death. Instead of the mother of life, woman became the mother of death, and in the woman, the whole of creation was rooted in death. But we see also in this the power of God the Father and His steadfast faithfulness. He did not abandon the woman or the purpose for which He built her from Adam’s rib. As He says to Isaiah, “My WORD that proceeds from My Mouth shall not return until everything I have willed is accomplished” [Isa 55.11]. And, as He says in Ezekiel, ‘I do not will the death of a sinner but that he turn from his sin and live.” For, as it says in Wisdom: “God did not create death. He created all things that they might ‘come into being.’ He created the generations of the world for salvation” [Wisd 1.13-14].
Going back now to Moses. When the LORD “builds” woman from the rib of Adam as He would build the sanctuary of His living Temple, He says: “It is not good that man should be alone. I will create for him a helpmate “in accordance” with him, it says, a grammatical construction that mirrors exactly the creation of man as male and female “in accordance” with the Image and Likeness of God [Gn 2.18, Gn 1.26]. Woman was “built” by God from out of man’s inward being, from the region of his heart, in an intimacy of personal communion that cannot get any more intimate, an intimate communion that is “like” – i.e., that “participates in – the personal communion of the Holy Trinity. She was built as man’s helper. This does not mean she was built to be his slave. This must be read Christologically. As woman, it is she in whom Man is able to receive the Seed of God, not just the “idea” of God, and bring forth the Son of God in the flesh as the Son of Man. This is why she is the crown of creation. It is the woman who enables God to become fully man, to become bone of our bones, flesh of our flesh, so that it is through the woman that man, as male and female, can realize his natural destiny to become God by grace. In biblical terms, the Son of God becomes, through the woman, the Son of Man so that man, as male and female, is able, through the Church, through the “female”, as it says in our ancient homily of the apostolic Church, to be born from above in the Church’s baptismal Font – the uterus of the Church – as the child of God.
In the Virgin Theotokos, the purpose for which God “built” woman from the rib of Adam is accomplished. Through her, God becomes man by nature, and man, as male and female, becomes God by grace by partaking of Christ, the Son of the Virgin, in the Church’s Holy Eucharist to become a communicant of the divine nature in the loving, personal communion of the Holy Trinity.
One sees in the sacred beauty of the Holy Virgin’s conception, birth and Falling Asleep two worlds, two histories: on the one hand, the world of the Church, the world of the “female” created by God, a world of loving, personal communion that embraces male and female in a relationship, a communion of mutual submission in mutual self-emptying humility and love; and on the other hand, the world of human civilization created by man, a world governed by self-interest and driven by carnal desire in which male and female exist in a mutual power struggle, the one seeking to subjugate the other. It is a world not of love but of power, a world not of loving communion in humility and love but of self-love that produces individualism, fragmentation and isolation, anger and hatred, and finally destruction.
Against this backdrop, we reflect on our Gospel this morning. It concludes with the LORD saying to us: “So my heavenly Father will do to you if you do not forgive your brother his trespasses from your heart.” St Silouan, the Monk of Mt Athos in the early 20th cent., explained to his disciple and biographer, Archimandrite now St Sophrony, that the “proof” that the Spirit indwelling one’s soul is the Holy Spirit and not some alien spirit is love for one’s enemy, i.e., it is the power to forgive our brother his trespasses.
The Holy Spirit of God alone has the power to forgive sins because the Holy Spirit of God alone has power of love that destroys death. We therefore understand that what the LORD is saying to us in our Gospel this morning is this: “If you wish to be saved, you must forgive your brother his trespasses. But you cannot forgive your brother by your own strength, as though you were God on your own, apart from God. To forgive your brother his trespasses, you must become like God, and to become like God, you must receive My Heavenly Spirit. But to receive My Spirit, you must live in Me.” But how can we live in Christ if we do not love and honor His Holy Mother, for it is through Her that God became man, and it is through Her that we become God. Apart from Her, there is no Christ, there is no Incarnation, there is no salvation because we are not able to forgive our brother his trespasses.
Truly to celebrate the Dormition of the Theotokos, then, is to repent in the confessing of our sins that we may live in the world of the female, i.e., in the world of the Virgin, the world of the Church. This is the world whose life is rooted in the Son of God who became the Son of Man in the woman, in the Holy Virgin Theotokos. In this world alone, we receive the LORD’s Heavenly Spirit and in the Holy Spirit alone, we receive the power of God’s love that enables us to love our enemy as we have been loved by God even when we were His enemies; and to forgive even as we have been forgiven. It is in the world of the female, in the world of the Church, that we become one flesh and one Spirit with the Male, with Christ our God, to be raised up in the arms of the Theotokos in the arms of Her Son, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, we receive the power of Christ’s Resurrection that destroys death by forgiving our brother his trespasses as we have been forgiven ours. Amen!
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Matthew 21.18-43
Shortly, we will venerate the Icon and sing the beautiful Hymn of Light: ‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; and I have no wedding garment that I may enter! O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’ What is the Bridal Chamber? What is the wedding garment?
Do you know that your Holy Baptism, when you were united to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection, is the Spiritual Marriage of the Church? Raised from the Font, the heavens were opened to you. You were clothed in the Robe of Light, which was Christ Himself. This is the ‘wedding garment.’ When you drew near the Chalice in the fear of God, with faith and love, you partook of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.
From the moment of your baptism, when heaven was opened to you, have there not been moments in the worship of the Church when the beauty of the Church’s hymns and prayers, the fragrance of her incense, the serene countenance of the holy icons gazing down on you, the spiritual nobility and majesty of the Divine Liturgy, seized your soul and opened to you, if only for an instant, a spiritual Beauty not of this world, and there stirred within you, as it did in Solomon, a visceral love for that Beauty and a longing to make the Wisdom of God your spouse? (Wisd 8.2)
Might this be a vision of the bridal chamber that was opened to you at your baptism?
‘Thy Bridal Chamber I see adorned, O my Savior! And I have no wedding garment that I may enter!’ As Lazarus was clothed in grave clothes, soiled and stinking from his being four days in the tomb, do we not see, if ever a vision of the bridal chamber is opened to us, that we have no wedding garment? Our garments are soiled and stinking grave clothes.
The wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism is Christ the LORD. The LORD, says the Psalmist, is my life and my salvation. And St Paul says, Christ is my life. Christ Himself says to Mary and Martha: I am the Resurrection and the Life.
From this, we can see that the garment is an image of the life we are living; and there are two garments, two lives we may choose to live or choose to put on as we choose to put on a garment. There is the garment of the life of this world that is passing away, sewn with threads of corruption spun from the passions, from the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, from covetousness, which is idolatry. Its patterns and designs are cut out from the lustful thoughts and impure images, the fantasies and desires that occupy the mind.
Then there is the life of Christ, the wedding garment that clothed us in our baptism. If I have no wedding garment that I may enter the sacred bridal chamber of the Heavenly Bridegroom, can you see that it’s because I have given my soul to many husbands; I have chosen Caesar to be my king; I have given myself to the idols of the passions—gluttony, lust, greed, anger and the rest—and that the garments I have chosen to wear are the grave clothes of the corruption that is in the world through lust and covetousness?
‘Despising the divine commands, my soul,’ Mother Church calls out to us at Friday Matins of last week, ‘by thine own choice, thou hast surrendered thyself to corruption. Sunk in slumber through thy many trespasses, thou hast covered with filth the garment that God wove for thee, and made thyself unfit for the wedding of the King. Therefore, cry to the Savior: Tear in pieces my sackcloth and clothe me with gladness.’ (LTS 306)
You have chosen to come to this Bridegroom Matins service. You have chosen to come into the presence of the Bridegroom. You have chosen to draw near the Bridal Chamber; and the Bridegroom comes to us in our filthy grave clothes as He came to Lazarus in Bethany. I think we may say that in the beauty of these Bridegroom Matins, we hear Him crying to each one of us: ‘Come forth!’ Rouse yourself in the tomb of your heart. Hear, feel, the Bridegroom’s voice calling to you. Leave the grave clothes, the garment of this worldly life behind you. What keeps us from putting on the garment of the Savior’s divine commandments? Is it not our own choice to keep wearing the grave clothes of this life? I love those who love me, says the Bridegroom. Those who seek me diligently will find me! Nothing prevents us from choosing to heed the Bridegroom’s call, to rise up and come forth in the repentance of a broken and contrite heart, that the Bridegroom may illumine the vesture of our soul and save us and receive us, clothed again in the wedding garment of our baptism, into the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Resurrection. Amen!
Behold the Bridegroom comes at Midnight!’ Midnight is that ‘instant’ when, ‘in the twinkling of an eye,’ (1 Cor 15.52) the old passes away and the ‘dead are raised incorruptible, and we are changed.’ This change doesn’t just happen. It happens because the Bridegroom comes at Midnight and consummates His union with us, the children of flesh and blood, in the ‘bridal chamber.’ But the Church shows the Bridegroom consummating His union with us in the tomb. For there, having shared in our conception and birth through His Virgin Mother (Gal 4.4), He now shares in our death (Heb 2.14) in the flesh He received from Her, and it is in that instant that ‘we are changed.’
We find the divine mystery of Midnight, then, in the bridal chamber; and we find the bridal chamber in that ‘point’ in our inner man where we are dead. The bridal chamber, that is to say, is found in our heart, ‘for the real death is within, in the heart, and is concealed, and it is the inner man that perishes.’ [Macarius Hom XV.39, 125]
If the bridal chamber is in the heart, then it is in our true ‘self’; for ‘the heart is deep, beyond all things, and it is the man.’ [Jer 17.9] In the bridal chamber, then, we come upon our true self as the image of God. In this image, we yearn to attain to the likeness of God. And this character of the imago Dei which, as Origen wrote, constitutes our very essence, itself reveals that, by nature, we yearn to be one with the Bridegroom in the bridal chamber of our heart; but if Christ is Himself the Image of God in whom we came to be and in whom we move and have our being, then we are given to see that the bridal chamber of our heart comes to be and has its essence and movement from outside itself, in ekstasis, in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD Jesus Christ our God and Savior.
Illumined by the light of this doctrine of the Church, we begin to know ourselves. We see that the essential movement of our heart is the erotic yearning to belong not to ourselves but to the Bridegroom who comes at Midnight.
And so, when the mind that has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom in its heart learns that the Bridegroom is coming at Midnight, it rouses itself. It hastens to descend into the bridal chamber of the heart to cry out: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God! Through the Theotokos, have mercy on me!’ For the soul, if she only knows about God in her head, she is still dead and her heart is still stone. The soul who longs to live is the soul who longs to know God directly; but ‘there is no direct knowledge of God without an exceedingly great love, and such love does not come from the head. It must come from the heart.’ [Art of Prayer 20] And so the soul hastens to descend with her mind into the bridal chamber of her heart, for she longs to receive Him and to cleave to Him, to become bone of His bones and flesh of His flesh, so that it is no longer she who lives but the Bridegroom who lives in her.
And the Bridegroom comes. He comes to us in our own flesh and blood through the woman [Gal 4.4]. He comes to us in the Bridal Chamber of the All-Holy Virgin’s sacred womb, in the inmost sanctuary of His Living Temple. Knitting Her pure blood into the ‘schema,’ the ‘garment’ of man [Phil 2.8], He clothed Himself in our flesh and blood and was no more ashamed to call us ‘brethren.’ [Heb 2.11]
And when the soul darkened and weighed down by her many sins, learns that He has come into the ‘house’ [Lk 7.37ff.] of her own flesh and blood [Heb 2.14], she comes to Him with an alabaster jar of perfume, and she stands behind Him weeping. She wets His pure feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. She kisses them, she pours perfume on them, and through her tears, she prays to Him softly: ‘Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior; but I have no wedding garment that I may enter. O Giver of Light, enlighten the vesture of my soul and save me!’
And the Savior, ‘spellbound as it were by goodness, love and longing, relinquishes His utter transcendence’ [St Maximos Philo 281] to the point of death on the Cross. Partaking of our death, the Bridegroom breathes out His Spirit on the Cross [exepneusen, Lk 23.46] and destroys the death that separated us from His love in the bridal chamber of our heart;’ [Heb 2.14-15, Rom 8.39]. His Body was ‘placed in the tomb,’ the Tomb was ‘changed’ into the Bridal Chamber, ‘and the Sabbath dawned,’ says St Luke [epephosken, Lk 23.54]. And in the Bridal Chamber of the LORD’s Tomb, the soul was enlightened, and the heart that before was a tomb sealed off by a stone was ‘changed’ in that instant into a bridal chamber and into a heart of flesh, a living heart!
The wedding garment? It is Christ Himself, whose Light we put on when we were raised from the Font, having united ourselves to Christ in the likeness of His death and resurrection. Can you see, then, that the Baptismal Font is the bridal chamber? And can you see that the Bridal Chamber is the Church? For the Church is Christ’s Body that He received from the pure blood of the Virgin, and in this Body, we are fashioned anew as children of God in the mystery of His Sabbath Rest, in the Tomb of our death that has received the Body of Him Who Is the Resurrection and the Life. When we pursue the Bridegroom in the baptismal Font, we receive His Seed into our dead, stony heart, and in that instant, our heart is ‘changed’ into a heart of flesh, a living heart; and we are ‘changed’ from children of blood born of the desires of the flesh into children of God born from above in the Love of the Holy Spirit.
From an ancient Christian text, we come upon this ancient biblical rubric of the Church: ‘By striving in the visible Church, we enter the invisible Church of the heart and the invisible Church of Heaven.’ (Liber Graduum XII) In the coming week, on the loom of this biblical rubric, we will weave the sights, sounds, movements, smells, all the elements of creation, both visible and invisible, into a wedding garment that can be seen, heard, smelled, and touched with the bodily senses. Who would not want to be clothed in this wedding garment who has caught the fragrance of the Bridegroom? For ‘He is the Beautiful and the Good whom all things seek at every opportunity, and there is no being who does not participate in Him, and He attracts the [erotic] desire of all who are drawn towards Him, and He thirsts to be thirsted for, He longs to be longed for, and He loves to be loved!’ [Philo II 280-81]
And if we would clothe the hidden man of the heart with the death of Christ made visible for us in the rites of Holy Week, then would we come invisibly into that ‘Midnight’ when the Bridegroom comes, and we are changed. We become like the children with the palms of victory. They are the emblems of the Cross of Christ our King. And on Pascha Night, we follow, mystically, our King who goes forth from the Tomb like a Bridegroom in procession. He is raising us from our graves and bringing us to our own land into the Jerusalem on high as His prophets foretold. [Eze 37.13-14]
For, if we have received into the bridal chamber of our heart, in the sacramental mysteries of the Church, the Seed of the ‘heavenly man,’ then we carry the Bridegroom’s death in our mortal body. [2 Cor 4.10] That is, we carry the Bridegroom’s love in our body—for His death is the supreme manifestation, the final Incarnation of His extreme humility and compassion in which He created the world, and in which He recreated it when we had fallen. And if we tend that Seed and cultivate it through the ascetical disciplines of the Church, the Cross of Christ the Church gives us to take up if we want to follow Him—for they are the ‘flower of abstinence that grows from the wood of His Cross’ [LT 231]—then yearning for the Bridegroom begins to grow in us into a tree of life, and love for the Bridegroom begins to reign in our mortal bodies. We tend that Seed by taking up the ascetical disciplines of the Church, our cross, our ‘palm of victory.’ By the Grace of the Holy Spirit that shines in them, we strive to be obedient to sin and its carnal desires no more. We strive to lose our life for His sake; that is, in our love for the Bridegroom, we now present our bodies to Him as instruments of righteousness and no more to sin as instruments of unrighteousness. [Rm 6.12-13] Now the Bridegroom’s death is swallowing our death; now our mortal and perishable bodies are putting on the immortal and imperishable ‘wedding garment’ of the Bridal Chamber; now the Life of the Bridegroom begins to manifest itself even now in our mortal bodies [2 Cor 4.10]. It manifests itself in the hope that begins to form in us from the Seed of God’s love poured out into our hearts in the Bridal Chamber of His Holy Church. This is a real and living hope; and it is the pledge of our inheritance, which is our own land that is not of this world. It is the kingdom of heaven with all its glorious riches, found through the doors of Midnight in the deep, beyond all things, in our deep heart, in the mystery of the bridal chamber. Amen!
