Mary and Sophia

Propers: Mary, Mother of God, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have been drawn to the figure of Mary. Hymns have been sung to her continually since at least the third century. Legend has it that the very first holy icon was an icon of her. And she’s the star of the show in the first chapters of Luke’s Gospel. After all, it’s not as though we can have Christmas, let alone Christ, without Mary.

The Third Ecumenical Council, affirmed by Lutherans, Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox alike, confesses Mary as Holy Θεοτόκος; that is, “God-Bearer,” one who gives birth to God. This is then translated as Gottesmutter in German, and “Mother of God” in English. The Church’s highest, most orthodox, most universal title for Mary is Mother of God.

This stems from a simple syllogism. Mary is the mother of Jesus, yes? And Jesus, we confess, we believe, is in fact God on this earth, God-With-Us, God in the flesh. Ergo, Mary must be the Mother of God. To deny this is to deny the Incarnation, the very basis of Christian faith. Like I said, you can’t have Christmas without Mary.

This does not set her up, mind you, as a sort of rival god or goddess, nor even as some fourth hidden hypostasis within the Holy Trinity. Rather, Mary is entirely human: a young Middle Eastern Jewish girl, born into a tumultuous time, in a backwater corner of a puppet state of the Roman Empire, and orphaned, apparently, sadly, at a rather young age.

She has no wealth nor power to speak of. She does claim descent from a king who lived a thousand years before, but then, so do I, and you can see where that’s gotten me. Mary is nothing, nobody. And so God in His Wisdom chooses her. God—the infinite, eternal Creator of everyone and everything in every moment, who is Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, Consciousness, Being, and Bliss, all-knowing, all-powerful, and everywhere present—that God, the One God, chooses Mary for His mother. Chooses to be born from her body. Chooses to be helpless in her arms.

This is to me the most tender image and most fantastic reversal imaginable. Here infinity manifests in a baby, eternity breaks into time as the most fragile creature in the world, unable to feed Himself or clean Himself or express anything but His need. This is how God comes to earth: through Mary’s womb, in Mary’s arms, at Mary’s breast. He makes Himself entirely dependent upon her, her warmth, her love.

In a time that rarely valued women, and certainly did not see them as equal to men, she is God’s whole world, His universe, His everything. She reveals to us definitively how entirely disjointed our priorities and perceptions are compared to God’s own.

It’s fair to say that I’m a mama’s boy. My dad was a mama’s boy. His dad was a mama’s boy. It’s a long and proud tradition in our family. And to think that Jesus is too! The bond between a mother and a son, a father and a daughter, is at root almost unspeakably intense. And we know now that this is the sort of love that God has for you, for us, for the entire world. It really is shocking when you think about it.

See, here’s the thing with Mary. She’s not just one special lady. She is the type, indeed the archetype, of the Church. And the Church is the type of the world. Here’s what I mean: Mary is every Christian, as well as all of us Christians together. What she has, what she is given, has been promised to each and all of us as well. Mary has perfect union with God in Jesus Christ, union not simply of body but of spirit and soul as well.

God comes to her in the flesh, in her flesh. She is held in the hands of the Father, her Creator. She is suffused by the power of the Spirit, who is the very Life and Breath of God. And within her is engendered the Son, the God-Man, the Christ. It does no good for us to say that Christ was born of Mary, if we ourselves do not birth Him, bear Him, bring Him forth from us, for our own day and age. We bear Christ. We bring Him forth into our world, from our body, breath, and blood.

Christian spirituality is always the language of exchange. God takes on all that we have, all that we are, so that we can then be given all that He has, all that He is. “God became Man,” the Church Fathers taught, “so that Man could then become God.” And the perfect, preëminent image of this glorious exchange is the pregnant Virgin Mary. God becomes Jesus in her, so that she can share perfect union in God with the world. They are, in a sense, pregnant with each other.

The Mother of God is then the type of the Church, the model and mold and symbol for us all. Mary is the Church in microcosm, and the Church is Mary in macrocosm. The love that Christ and Mary share is the love that He has for us all. What wouldn’t a Son do for His mother? That’s how far God in Christ Jesus is willing to go for you, to forgive you, to save you, and to bring you home in Him.

This isn’t the only image in Scripture of God’s love for His Church. We, as the Church, are also described as the Body of Christ, which we become through the Sacraments. In Baptism, Jesus’ Spirit and Breath become our spirit and breath. In Communion, Jesus’ Body and Blood become our Body and Blood. So then if we have Jesus’ Spirit, Jesus’ Body, Jesus’ Blood—who does that make us? It makes us Jesus, sent forth for the world.

We are also described as the Bride of Christ, His beloved for whom He will fight and die and rise again, whom He loves and for whom He cares more than He cares for Himself, more than He cares for His life. The End of the Age, in the Book of Revelation, is described as the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb. All of these are images of unbreakable union, unspeakable love.

And then we have Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom: a biblical figure who in Orthodox thought represents the divine within Creation reflecting her divine Creator. Sophia is creaturely Wisdom yearning for, loving, and mirroring the divine Wisdom who is Christ. If Mother Nature represents our world as it is, then Sophia represents the world as it ought to be and will be, in the fullness of time and the plans of God.

Sophia is the world as God sees her from eternity. She is Creation completed, clearly visible beyond time, but which for now we can only glimpse, as through a glass darkly. Sophia is what God intends for His Creation. She is the promise of all things united: as one with one another, and as one with God. And wouldn’t you know it? The favored image of Sophia is Mary, the Mother of God.

So then: what God accomplished with an individual in Mary, is the same salvation that He accomplishes with a community in the Church, and that He shall one day accomplish with all of Creation as Sophia, Holy Wisdom. And so again, Mary is the type of the Church, and the Church is the type of the world. What God accomplishes in one, He accomplishes in all. And all of them are you!

You are Mary. You are the Church. You are Sophia. God loves you as an individual; God loves you as a community; and God loves you as the whole of His Creation! It’s all the language of love, infinite, eternal, unbreakable, inexorable. God loves you, as He loves His mother, His Body, His Bride, and His Son. God loves you as though you were His whole world; and He loves His whole world as though all of it were you.

This is divine love, beyond time and space, the love that harrows hell and hallows heaven, the love that shatters the tomb and raises all the dead to life everlasting!

August 15 is the traditional date of Mary’s death, her Dormition. And tradition furthermore has it that she was Assumed body and soul into heaven, where she was crowned as Queen Mother and intercedes for all her children here below. An icon commemorating this day shows Jesus, her Son, lifting Mary as a baby into heaven, holding her as she once held Him, welcoming her to new life, to new birth, in His new world as she once had welcomed His birth into our own. It is Christmas inverted, Christmas fulfilled.

And remember, my dear Christians, that all of this love is promised to us as well. Death for us is not the end. It is only the beginning. Christ will bear us to Him as a father bears his daughter, as His mother once bore Him. And He will say to each of us, and to all of us together: “Welcome to life everlasting. Welcome to joy without end. I have loved you, as a parent loves her child, as a husband loves his wife, and as God loves the entirety of all worlds.

“And O, my beloved—we couldn’t have Christmas without you.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.