Verily, Anna the barren, the fruitless, doth today clap her hands with joy. Let the terrestrial ones enwrap themselves with light, let the kings be happy and the priests rejoice with blessings; let the whole world celebrate; for behold, the Queen, the blameless Bride of the Father, hath sprouted from the stem of Jesse. (Taken from the Aposticha of the Great Vespers for the Feast)
The last great feast we celebrate in an ecclesiastical year is of the Falling Asleep of the All-Holy Theotokos, and now we begin a new year with the feast of her Nativity. The hymn above calls all to rejoice at her birth and proclaims her as a queen and the “Bride of the Father.” Perhaps there are some who wince at this title being given to a newborn baby girl, saying it pays her an honor not due to her, but we should not shy away from our chanting it with boldness.
After the disobedience our first parents, creation awaited that which the prophets foretold – the Virgin of the “stem of Jesse” who would give birth to the Messiah. The “mystery hidden from the before ages” was that the Messiah would be the Incarnate Son and Word of God, who would unite His divinity to our humanity in the “unconfused union” of His person, thereby offering us participation in divine life. Thus, Our Lord Jesus Christ can rightly be said to begotten of the Father from eternity without a mother and born in time to a mother without a father. By being the mother of the Christ, therefore, the Church must proclaim her as the Theotokos, as the one who bore the God-Man in her womb. In this way, all who hope in the salvation wrought by Our Lord Jesus Christ must profess her in this light as the “Bride of the Father” for she is truly the mother of His Son through the descent of the Holy Spirit. Saint John of Damascus expounds on this teaching in his oration on this feast:
But her head [was lifted up] to heaven—for every woman’s head is her husband (Eph 5.23)—but since this woman knew no man, God the Father served as her head, having dealings with her through the Holy Spirit and sending forth his own Son and Word, that all-powerful force, as it were, a divine, spiritual seed. For with the Father’s good will, it was not by a natural union but from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary that the Word, without change and in a manner above the laws of nature, became flesh and dwelt among us. For the union of God with humanity comes about through the Holy Spirit. Let anyone who can admit this admit it! (Cf. Matt 19.12).
Others may look at our hymnography and say that it honors her insufficiently, for we do not claim that her birth was without original sin – the inherited guilt of Adam and Eve. To those, we would answer that the ancient Christian teaching was not that we inherit the guilt of our first parents, but the ancestral corruption that came from the fall of creation. While the Church teaches her purity and sinlessness, the All-Holy Virgin had to be born subject to our corrupt state or, as Saint John Maximovitch asks: “If She, without any effort, and without having any kind of impulses to sin, remained pure, then why is She crowned more than everyone else?”
In these ways, the Orthodox Church rightly exalts this newborn baby girl as All-Holy, as Theotokos, and as Bride of the Father. In her humble and simple birth, we can look forward to the humble and simple birth of her Son in the cave of Bethlehem. We rejoice that our God truly “exalts the humble and the meek.” He can, through the uniting of His divinity to our humanity, transform all of the mundane tasks of life we will be called upon to accomplish in the course of our new ecclesiastical year into the means of our salvation and communion with Him. Let us, therefore, clap with Anna, enwrap ourselves with light, join in rejoicing with kings and priests on this day and commit to doing all things with the love, humility, purity, faithfulness, and simplicity of the All-Holy Virgin that through the Grace of Her Son all things may be for our salvation.
May Our Great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, through the prayers of His All-Holy Mother, grant to all of us a blessed feast and His great mercy. Amen.
By Fr. Nicholas Belcher Hierarchical Assistant to Metropolitan Saba
Source: Antiochian Archdiocese Website
