Damnatio Memoriae

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Advent, AD 2021 C

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.

Hatshepsut, fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, is recognized today as one of the most accomplished rulers in the long and storied history of ancient Egypt—a reign made all the more impressive given that Hatshepsut was, in fact, a woman. She was daughter to Thutmose I, wife to Thutmose II, and stepmother to Thutmose III: pharaohs to the left of her, pharaohs to the right. And after serving briefly as regent over her stepson the prince, Hatshepsut decided to eliminate the middleman and simply declare herself to be pharaoh. Hers was the better claim.

As pharaoh, mind you, she was fully king of Egypt: not queen, not consort to the king, not queen mother over the young king, but king in her own right. And she was good at it too, a prosperous ruler, much to her stepson’s humiliation. When eventually he took the throne as Thutmose III, he decreed damnatio memoriae—that is, that Hatshepsut should be expunged from all memory, all public record, and that her very name be chiseled off of all her monuments and public works.

Of course this left literal holes in the historical record, a negative space conspicuous in its silence. Everyone could tell that somebody had been there, someone important; thus setting the stage for Hatshepsut’s eventual rediscovery by later generations. In trying to erase her, Thutmose had immortalized her. There’s some irony for you.

Theologian Margaret Barker argues—rather intriguingly, I must say—that something similar occurred within the pages of the Old Testament; that there was a holy Lady, indeed a divine Virgin, important to the worship of Israel, whom later chroniclers attempted to expunge from the record of the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet she remained conspicuous in her absence, invisible but consequential, thus to be rediscovered by people of faith in later generations. And this same divine Lady, according to Barker, is known to us today as none other than God the Holy Spirit.

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory are yours”—we say that a lot, don’t we? It’s the doxology to the Lord’s Prayer. And Kingdom, Power, and Glory all refer to God.

God is King: Yahweh in the Old Testament, Yeshua in the New. And the earthly kings of old represented His reign on earth; the Bible calls them the adoptive sons of God. Yet the true King of Creation is the Word of God, the Λόγος. Λόγος means the reason, the logic, God’s purpose in everything, in creating, redeeming, and sanctifying. The Λόγος is, in fact, the Mind of God, whom we call God the Son, God’s Image.

Glory refers to God as the Most High, the transcendent, the infinite and eternal, ultimately unknowable except of course though His Son. To speak of God’s glory is to speak of God as always and ever infinitely more than we could ever hope to imagine: infinite Goodness, infinite Beauty, infinite Truth.

And then there’s the Power: the generative, creative, life-giving power of the divine which upholds everything and everyone in every moment of existence. This is God as fire and water and breath and life. This is God under and within all things: the Wild God, the Mother God. And I’m not talking about some separate deity, am I? I’m not talking about a goddess to rival God the Father. I’m talking about God as Holy Spirit, whom Jesus calls, extracanonically, His own heavenly Mother.

Now of course God is not our Mother in the way that human beings are mothers. We mustn’t take this too literally. But then, God is not our Father in the way that human beings are fathers. We are using words to express the inexpressible. The Glory, the Kingdom, and the Power—or, as we would call them, Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit—these are ancient ideas, ancient understandings of the God who can be many things at once while still remaining one God.

The Father is God in Heaven; the Spirit is God in the world; and the Son is God in human beings, who sit somewhere in between. One God in Three Underlying Realities.

In the Temple of Solomon, at Jerusalem, a thick and massive curtain separated the sanctuary, the holy place, from the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies. In the holy of holies was God in His glory, His heavenly transcendence. But the other side of the veil, the sanctuary, represented the Garden of Eden, a microcosm for all of Creation. The holy of holies held the invisible, the spiritual; while the sanctuary held the world which we can touch and see.

In that sanctuary sat three things: a many-branched golden lamp, representing the Tree of Life; a table of showbread, dedicated to God and fit only for priestly consumption; and an altar of incense, which lifted the prayers of the faithful over the veil and into Heaven, both literally and symbolically. And all three of these—the tree, the bread, and the incense—were associated with God the Holy Spirit, God coming out from Heaven into the world to sustain the world.

The High Priest of the Temple, and in earlier times the King of Israel as well, would come into the sanctuary, pass through the Shekinah, the cloud of incense representing the presence of the Spirit, into the holy of holies; that is, into Heaven. There they would be clothed in white, anointed with sacred oil—again, associated with the Spirit and Her tree of light—adopted thereby as sons of God like unto the angels of Heaven, and sent out again to represent God’s rule for humankind.

These kings reborn as sons of God were said to be born of the Spirit, born of the Virgin. And why on earth would one call the Holy Spirit a Virgin? Well, that much at least is obvious: because the Holy Spirit has no consort, no husband, no equal. She is God, the One and only, the Queen of Heaven and Mother of Angels. Let us be perfectly clear: the Holy Spirit is not the daughter of God, not the wife of God, not the mother of God, but God in Her own right. The Lord, the Giver of Life!

But these subtleties, these profundities, were lost on some, who dismissed the Spirit as a rival mother goddess, unbefitting a strict and a stalwart monotheism. And so, under the reforms of Josiah, Her trees were cut down, Her priests driven out, and the memory of the Lady expunged—damnatio memoriae—or so they’d thought.

Still crop up in the Scriptures these references to the Daughter of Zion, the Queen of Heaven. Still people were drawn to the Lady and to Her sacred tree. Still was Holy Wisdom understood to be a woman who was both God and from God. Some of the old priesthood, exiled to Egypt, even blamed the Fall of Jerusalem on those who had forgotten the Holy Spirit and driven Her from Her sanctuary. All of this, again, is Margaret Barker’s interpretation, yet the clues are there for us to see.

I tell you all this not simply because I find it interesting, and a fascinating bit of biblical interpretation, but also because it adds layers and depths of meaning to the story of the Virgin Mary. Why is it important, after all, that she’s a virgin? Why did Isaiah prophesy that the Virgin—the Virgin, mind you, not simply a virgin—would give birth to a Son? This is to show us that Christ is the true King, the Son of the Virgin, and not like the kings of old who visited Heaven to be adopted. No.

Christ is the true King from Heaven come down, come out from the holy of holies; come into our world as the real Christ of whom all the others had been but shadows of prophecy; not as a man made like unto a god but as the true God made true Man. His Mother is the Virgin, the Holy Spirit: the Mother of Heaven, of angels and kings. It is the Spirit who fills Mary, who overshadows her, who impregnates her with power, that Mary might truly be the Mother of God on this earth.

It is the Spirit who sings Mary’s Magnificat, the Spirit who moves Elizabeth to prophesy, the Spirit who causes John the Baptist to leap within his mother’s womb at the arrival of the unborn Son of God. Yes, God is above and beyond us as Father. But God is also within us, among us, between us: the breath in our lungs, the fire in our veins, the Almighty Power of generation, of creation, of universal resurrection.

God the Holy Spirit fills Mary, and she becomes the Mother of God. God the Holy Spirit fills the Church, and she becomes the Bride of Christ. God the Holy Spirit fills the entirety of Creation with sanctifying wisdom until the cosmos itself shall become an image and incarnation of God, at the great Restoration of all things! And these three women—Μαρία, Εκκλησία, Σοφία—who together represent the individual, the community, and the totality of creation—they are all three images of God the Holy Spirit, the Creator within and under and through Her Creation.

That is how Christ is born of Mary in Bethlehem of Judea. That is how Christ comes to us today, in the Sacraments of His Church. And that is how Christ shall one day appear at the End of the Age when God at the last shall be All in All.

Praise be to God the Holy Spirit, the Mother of all of Creation. May She abide in us, and we abide in Her, that we may all be born again, born of the Virgin, born of the Spirit, and sent out as Her children to be Jesus for this world.

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