WHAT DOES ST. LUKE SAY ABOUT
JESUS'S MOTHER?

© 1998-2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 20020502, 20060604]

     My all-holy Lady, Birth-Giver of God:  By your holy and all-powerful prayers, take despair, forgetfulness, lack of understanding, and negligence away from me, your humble and burdened servant; and rid my smitten heart and darkened mind of all unclean, unstraightforward, and blameworthy thoughts.  Quench the flame of my cravings; for I am poor and lost.   Deliver me from many cruel recollectioins and undertakings; and set me free of all evil actions.  For you are blessëd throughout all generations, and your most-honorable name is glorified throughout the ages.  Ameen.
     It is very right and proper, ever-blessëd and all-pure and Mother of our God, to call you blessëd who gave birth to God:  More honorable than the Cherubim, more glorious the the Seraphim, who without blemish bore the Eternal LOGOS.   You we laud and glorify as  true Theotokos.   Ameen.

    Let's look at the first chapter of St. Luke's Gospel.   In verse 43, St. Elizabeth, the mother of St. John the Forerunner, refers to Jesus' mother as  "the Mother of my Lord"; you may know that Jewish people have for centuries been required to pronounce God's name, YHWH, in most contexts as "my Lord" (ha Shem "the Name" is more usual today).   Note that Jesus applied YHWH's words in Exod. 3:14 to Himself in John 8:58.  When St. Elizabeth called Jesus' Mother "mother of YHWH," it was the same as our "mother of God."  Verse 28 says the Angel Gabriël told Jesus' mother that she is "highly graced" and "blessed"; the latter is repeated in verse 42; and in verse 48--in her song, the Megalini (Megalýnei)--our Savior's mother herself says that all generations will call her "blessed."  The Orthodox have always felt bidden to refer to the most holy Virgin as the "Theotókos"—where the last word means Birth-giver of God, i.e. Birth-giver of the One Who was God as well as human.    (Note our familiar name for her is Panayía "All-holy.")  Leaving aside  other references to Jesus' mother in the New Testament, except to note her being at His side at His Crucifixion and present at His tomb after His burial and one of the first witnesses of His rising from the dead, let's briefly comment on what the verses already quoted mean for the Christian faithful.

    Rejoice, Mother of God, virgin, Mary, full of Grace:  The Lord is with you.  Blessed you are among women; and blessed is the fruit of your womb.   For you have given birth to the Savior of our souls.
    Gracious Mother of our gracious King; all-pure and most blessed Mother of God, Mary, pour out the mercy of your Son and our God on my soul, riven by cravings,, and by your prayers establish me in works of righteousness, that I may pass the remaining time of my life without fault and by your guidance find paradise, Mother of God and virgin, alone pure and blessed.   Ameen.

Children are taught this is Russia:

    Joy of all that sorrow are you and of the oppressed a guardian.  You are the nurture of all of the poor, comfort to the estranged.  You are a support to the blind, visitation of all of the sick, a shelter and succor to those brought down by pain, helper of the orphaned.  You are Theotókos in the Highest, unblemised Maiden.  Hasten, we beseech thee, to rescue your servants.

Tropary for promoting love and eradicating anger

    Christ, Who bonded Your Apostles in a union of love and have bound us, Your believing servants, to Yourself with the same bond:   At the instance of  the prayers of the Theotókos,  grant us without dissimulation to follow Your commandments and love one another, Christ, You Who alone cherish the human race.

.xx.

The Falling-Asleep of the All-holy Theotókos
on the third day of her repose [death]     

     The most holy Theotokos is the model of responding to the divine call (or vocation).   Her icon reminds us to obey the divine will to a devout life--a responsibility that she responded to with perfection.  The Fathers often spoke of the reversal of what Eve did by what the all-pure Theotokos did--just as they spoke of Christ's Cross being on the same spot as the tree that Adam and Eve partook of, contrary to the divine injunction.  The last has been sublimely expressed by the greatest religious poet ever of the English language (and, with the exception of Dante in his Paradiso, of any language known to the writer)--John Donne, in his "Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse":  "We think that Paradise and Calvarie, Christs Crosse and Adams tree, stood in one place; looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me."  Rhe one we call the Theotokos, he wrote:   

    "Loe, faithfull Virgin, [that All, which cannot sinne] yeelds Himself to lye . . . in thy wombe; and though he there can take no sinne, nor thou give, yet he'will weare, taken from thence, flesh, which deaths force may trie.  Ere the spheares time was created, thou wast in His minde, who is thy Sonne and Brother;  Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now thy Makers maker, and thy Father's mother; Thouh'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome Immensity cloysterd in thy dear wombe."  

        

     Icons of the all-holy Theotokos are almost always accompanied by the infant Jesus; her icons stand on the left of your icon shelf or niche, while His are on the right.

      Certain things follow from the fact that the m.-h. Theotokos, the closest of all human beings to Christ, is more prominent than other human Saints for the Christian.  As a Virgin, she (according to St. Maximos the Confessor) bore Jesus the way all humans would have been born, had the world remained free of sin.   Above all, she was the essential gateway for Jesus' entering incarnate (fleshly), human existence:  Had God foreseen that she would not have agreed to become Jesus' Mother, God would (humanly speaking) "have had to" opt for a different plan of human Salvation and cosmic renewal.  The logical consequences of all the words of St. Luke eventuated in the most holy Theotokos's being venerated more highly than the Martyrs, Confessors, and other Saints.  Prayers to her produced so many miraculous healings, such firm defences (against all odds) when barbarians were attacking, and so on that the Church came more and more to see just what being the ever-virgin Mother of God actually means.  The truth unfolded somewhat gradually.  Temples were named for and dedicated to the m.h. Theotókos, the most famous being the splendid Paravleptos ("admired on all sides") Mother of God Temple in Constantinople.  Litanies were prayed to her.  She of course has not been the only Saint to receive such honors; but she has proved more able to help the faithful  in many ways, more loving, and more auspicious than  all other Saints--a consequence of her being closer to our Savior than any other human.   Indeed she is extolled by the Orthodox as being higher than the Angels and Archangels, "greater in honor than the Cherubim, and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim"--because she, unlike any of them, gave birth to the One Who is God as well as human.  If we would ask a living friend for help in our Salvation, would we not ask a departed Saint for the same--and above all, Jesus' mother?  The logic is clear for the Orthodox believer.

     What do we say, then, to those who reject religious veneration for humans--Saints or not?   Many of these reject the value of the material body (the resurrection of the bodies of the faithful), matter (the material Mysteries [Sacraments]), and of course time and tradition.  (This is called Gnosticism in the history of religions [SEE HERE];  Gnostics speak of our "sinful nature" or "depraved nature"--though humans cannot sin; only individual persons can!--and translate sárx "flesh" in the New Testament as "[our] sinful nature.")  They will not allow any temporal development (except, illogically for them, the doctrine of the m. h. Trinity), but rather freeze everything in its most primitive form.   There can be for them no "working out" of the implications of basic biblical beliefs.    We say that their presup- positions and premises about the world are wrong, being inconsistent with the last verse of Genesis 1.  If humanity lost the Assimilation to God¹ (His Energy or Grace to live according to His will) in the sinning of our first ancestors, it is also true that human beings have not did not lose the Icon (Image) of God (reason or lógos and freewill--without which humans would be animals) as our indefeasible human nature--what sets us apart from the natures of other living beings.  We sin individually; our corporate nature does not, and we cannot inherit other's guilt or merits--though the members of Christ's Body of course share His merits, because they are one with Him, sharing with Him the Energies of His Life.   For us, this is clear in the New Testament.  If no one is born a sinner, all  who reach the age of reason  sin, failing to have, or make full use of, Grace, endowed with the uncreated Energies of the Assimilation to God;  the m.-h. Theotokos has been the only exception to this:  She was, we hold, never without the Assimilation to God (which the rest of us can receive through saving Grace).   Like us, she was never without  the Icon (Image) of God that all humans are created in as the hallmark of human nature.   We recognize the Theotokos as the "all-pure" gateway of Salvation in the cosmos, the way of joining earth with heaven "throughout all generations" in OLGS Jesus Christ--in His Body--through the power of the most Holy Spirit.  She was never without the Holy Spirit.  Radicals may do despite to her; the Orthodox will not.
     Given a Gnostic framework of presuppositions about time and matter, God dirtied Himself up by becoming incarnate, by suffering bodily on the Cross, and by having His body resurrected:  The logic is inexorable.  Sacraments (material vehicles of spiritual Grace--the uncreated Energies of God) make no sense as essential to Salvation, and even the Incarnation is not a Sacrament--as the God-bearing Fathers claimed.  All of this is logically ruled out in a Gnostic framework.  
      What is the logical development of St. Luke's characterization of the m. h. Theotokos in a framework that does not begin with a rejection of the religious value of time (and tradition) and the rejection of materiality or corporeality--that is, more positively, in a tradition that sees certain material things, including Jesus Christ Himself, as Mysteries or sacramental vehicles of spiritual reality?  For such, Jesus is a Mystery or Sacrament That validates other Mysteries and enables the bodies of His members to rise again at last to the true glory.  Certainly, the one who gave birth to the Savior of humanity in an appropriately miraculous manner is a Mystery too.  Membership in Christ's BODY is a Mystery, for we are material-spiritual beings whose Salvation depends on the resurrection of our bodies and the divinization (2 Pet. 1:4) of our whole being in the miraculous Vision of the uncreated Light or Energy of God. 
       Speaking of icons and their veneration--which many who called themselves Christian in his time (especially those living in Muslim Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc.) rejected--St. John of Damaskos (grand vizier to the leader of the Muslims) asserted, in his famous treatise on icons, that he didn't worship matter but the Creator of matter and the One Who saved him through matter.  St. John remains a preëminent theologian of Orthodox belief.  His view is the Orthodox view, a view whose victory is celebrated on the first Lordsday of holy Great Lent--a time that culminates in the Festival of Festivals--the Resurrection of Jesus' human Body, the most important event in human history.

     Obviously, different logical conclusions follow from St. Luke's characterization of Jesus' mother for those who set out from (a) premises that reject and (b) premises that uphold the religious value of matter (or body) and tradition or temporal development.   Those who reject the religious value of matter and time freeze St. Luke's words in such a way as to allow no further logical developments or conclusions from them in the course of time--certainly no conclusions that would allow St. Mary the Virgin to receive superveneration along with the Worship that God is given!    Semitic monotheism, which is by definition is both anti-Trinitarian and anti-incarnational, disallows any religious veneration of any human--other than the prophet who founded their religion:  Moses, Muhammad, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Campbell, etc.  Denominationists can name their denomination or house of prayer for the inventor of the faith they profess; but they have proved more than a little reluctant to name their denomination or place of prayer for St. Luke's "Mother of God"--or for any Saint--not to speak of their rejection of  beseeching the Theotokos or any other Saint through prayer to invoke help--the way they would ask a living friend for help.    For the Orthodox, this radical position seems to make the Body of Christ, living and dead vacuous.  St. Luke's "Mother of God" cannot mean very much when you begin with Gnostic premises about reality and an individualistic (non-communal) attitude toward authority--in belief, Worship, and other piety--when religious reality is purely spiritual and lacking in any this-worldly or incarnational component.  The Orthodox think that we do no depsite to the (more important) spiritual side of our holy religion by giving its due place to the material vehicles that bring spiritual Grace to the faithful. 
     All of this is reversed if you set out from the non-Gnostic idea that basic truths can be brought to their logical conclusions through time in a tradition that calls the Savior Logos ("Reason, Rationale, Rational Principle") and "holy Wisdom."   Instead of calling God the Son a "Word" in the manner of Gnostically oriented believers (even though in Hebrew "word" and "thing" are the same word!), this other, traditional framework allows reasoning in matters religious, while at the same time avoiding rationalism by insisting that God's Essence is wholly unknowable.  (We can be rather more confident concerning what God is not.)  Alone knowable  are God's uncreated Energies operating in the cosmos,  above all in the human and partly material Incarnation of God the Son.  For those of this traditional, Orthodox persuasion,  St. Mary the Theotokos was the gateway of Salvation, the gateway through which Jesus entered our kind of existence.  She therefore plays, mediately if not causally, an indispensible rôle in human Salvation.   There is thus a sense in which the Theotokos, as birth-giver of our Savior, is a mediatress (middle-person) of Salvation to humans--including, paradoxically herself--since, like other humans, she was in need of being saved, of receiving the Assimilation to God, and of being divinized by the Grace of the uncreated Light.  It does not detract from 1 Tim. 2:5 says, "One is God, One also the Mediator of God and humanity--the human Jesus Christ," to speak of the all-holy Theotokos as having in some sense mediated between the human Jesus Christ and other human beings.  While her rôle is not His rôle in being the sole Mediator between God and humanity (ánthropos), there has grown in the Christian consciousness an understanding that the all-pure Theotokos was the only creature to play a necessary instrumental rôle in the Logos's becoming human.
      As the mother of God, the help of the all-holy Theotokos can logically and without irreverence be invoked in prayer to save us, without infringing in any way--but rather augmenting--our love of Jesus' causal role in saving those humans who believe in Him, sacramentally becoming members of His Body, worshiping Him, and living according to His precepts.   Christ is the sole Mediator between God and humanity; but other humans--chiefly the Saints mediate between Christ and us.  Preëminently mediating between us and  Christ of all the Saints is the most holy Theotokos, who is closest to Christ:  For Jesus did not enter the world directly--like Aphrodite--but through a human mother.  In a framework that does not rule out humanity, materiality, or the rôle of time in human Salvation, Jesus' mother has an essential rôle as Queen of the cosmos.  In a framework that accepts time and such developments as are consistent with the original deposit of the Faith,  the implications of every fundamental belief are ferreted out through time under the guidance of the most holy Spirt--through controversies between the heretical and the Orthodox:   The Church tests every view concerning the fundamental beliefs, sifting out those inconsistent with the fundamental truths of the religion and retaining the one view on each that is not inconsistent with them--developments that can stand the test of centuries and in fact millenniums of temporal development.  An individual's whims cannot overrule this consensus for the Orthodox.  If one's framework takes the position of St. John of Damaskos and accepts the Incarnation as a Mystery (Sacrament), then the gateway of the Incarnation is essential and important; the Incarnation is a Mystery or Sacrament, and the human body is sufficiently sacramental that its resurrection is as essential to Salvation as the Apostles in fact preached.   At all events, the human mother of Jesus retains the special patina that St. Luke ascribes to that her--a human being--"throughout all generations." 
     For those wishing to know how, at the level of dogma, the Orthodox differ from the Latins on the m. h. Theotokos:    (1) The fact that the Orthodox do not believe in inherited guilt means that an "immaculate conception" would be superfluous and without point:  The Mother of God  is "all-pure" for the Orthodox.   (CLICK HERE & HERE to see more on this point.)  Further, as Protopresbyter John Romanides observes, if God had bestowed a special Beatification or Divinization on the Theotokos (as the papal theologians maintain) before or at her birth, it would have been without her consent--whereas God does not force Salvation on anyone.  (2) Her transfer or metastasis to Heaven, found in early non-canonical documents, is a belief deeply embedded in Orthodox prayers; but it differs from the Latin "dogma" in that she is not believed to have undergone a resurrection of her body the way Jesus did:   Rather, her body is said to have been "metastatized" to Heaven after her dormition or repose.   

A canticle in the First Canon of the night service for the Falling Asleep of our all-holy Lady says: ". . . like Your Son and Creator, you have submitted to the laws of nature in a manner above nature; therefore, dying, you have risen to live eternally with your Son."   Since the Orthodox do not accept the punitive cause of the Incarnation and Crucifixion, there is no reason why the all-holy Theotokos should not undergo the same death resulting from the Fall that other humans are prone to.
     We render the Theotokos "hyperduly," that is a higher degree of veneration than accorded to any other Saint, theotized very early in her life when she consented (to the Archangel Gabriël) to be the Birth-Giver of God.  While the all-holy Theotokos is not the only Saint to have been divinized during the period of a human life, she has a special status--higher than the Cherubim, more honored than the Seraphim, as the hymn says--because no one but her has "housed" God--an august idea that is frightening when you think about it.  But she had special graces lacking to other Saints.    As already observed, the Theotokos is the model of Orthodox vocations because of her readiness to accept her calling.  She represents a place for women higher than for any males (or heavenly beings of whatever rank) other than Jesus--who was fully God as well as fully human.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE BACKGROUND

ON ICONS OF THE M. H. THEOTOKOS CLICK HERE

______________________________

     ^{1The Orthodox concept of losing the Assimilation to God ([h]omoíosis Theõ) at the Fall and regaining it when one receives Salvation is not wholly unlike the Rabbinic Jewish concept of humanity's losing the Shekhinah at the Fall, etc.}

REPLY TO A LETTER FROM A VIEWER
CONFUSED BY THE FOREGOING

Dear Orchid Land Pubs:

     Concerning the Theotoqkos, I read:

 "She was, we hold, never without the Assimilation to God (which the rest of us can receive only through saving Grace)--i.e. the Grace to avoid sinning..."

and

"...she was in need of being saved, of receiving the Assimilation to God, and of being divinized by the Grace of the uncreated Light. "

 

I'm a convert to Orthodox Christianity and have been studying about the Dormition of the Theotokos.  I read the above-mentioned article, which as you can see has caused some confusion.  The first statement seems to exempt Mary from the effects of the Fall,

 

That would be true only if we believed newborns are guilty of Adam’s sin or HAD perhaps lost the Icon of God at the Fall; we believe neither.

 

and while not having the exact same legalistic connotations as the Roman Catholic Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception it seems to be very similar if not the same.  The second passage is more in line with what I've been told before.

 

Aren’t all newborns “immaculate” and born without having previously sinned . . . but also born into a state of hamartia—ontological separation from God, His Life, the uncreated Energies of Grace?  They are of course unable to please him in ways that would forward one’s Salvation; St. John says that we can do nothing [to promote our Salvation or even to perform the higher job of worshiping Him properly] apart from Him.  As I understand the loss at the fall to have been the Grace of Assimilation to God—it couldn’t have been the loss of the Icon, for without reason and freechoice, humans would be animals—I assume that the all-holy Theotokos received the Assimilation at her birth. . . whereas the rest of us receive it from Baptism (which includes Chrismation, which is not a seprate Mystery).

 

Now the Orthodox have never (except under Western influence) held that babies inherit Adam’s guilt—what we inherit it hamartia--a condition of ontological separation from (the uncreated Energies of God)--not sin (hamartema) or guilt.   Without the Grace of the Assimilation to ENERGIZE (that’s the Greek word) the reason and freewill of the Icon of God, we are prone to sin.  But since Mary received this

 

Can you please resolve for me the apparent contradiction in these two passages? 

 

Well, I don’t see how Mary was exempted from effects of the Fall any more than others—e.g. we believe that she died.  She differed from the other Saints in receiving back the Assimilation to God by the time of her birth—and in such a complete form that she was able to live without sinning.  But being born into the world of separation from God, she had, like all humans, been in need of the restoration of the Assimilation to God that all humans had lost.  Unlike most Saints, she had it from the outset—and in its fulness. But being human, she needed it, just like everyone else.  Since the Orthodox do not believe that death is a punishment imposed by God on people for sins, there is no problem in a sinless person's dying.  After all Christ Himself died.

 

The West believes in inherited guilt and therefore has got to exempt Mary from it; we don’t, so we don’t have to.  The West believes death is a punishment for sins, so they cannot have her die; since we don’t believe death is penal (but due to an ontological loss and the state of hamartía), there is no problem in her dying, despite her all-purity.  A state of privation can be inherited physically (death and decay are so inherited); even if they result from sin on the moral dimension, that sin cannot be physically inherited.  The Latins are all confused.  The Protestants do better to just say God imputes guilt to all and then predestinates some to be freed from it by His imputation of Christ’s “merits” to them—as if merits could be transferred among separate individuals any more than guilt.  (Of course, if we become part of Christ by sharing His Life—the uncreated energies of Grace—there is no transfer; we are one.)  The defect of the Protestant theory is to say why God should be wrathful at the sins he Himself has imputed to newborns.  Doesn’t seem very rational—any more than does arbitrary predestination. 

 

If there is any contradiction in the two statements, I still need to have them pointed out to me.  But “Likeness” ('omoíoma) is wrong; Gen. 1:26 has 'omoíosis “Assimilation.”

 

Additionally, we refer to Christ in our prayers as the only sinless One.  In what sense is Mary sinless when compared to Christ?  Was she relatively sinless prior to the Annunciation and sanctified at the time of the Annunciation? 

 

I don’t grasp what relatively sinless could mean, unless it means “relatively to the human state.”  Christ is the only sinless one in the divine realm; remember that his nature was human but his Person (that which would sin if sin were committed) is divine, and Mary is the only sinless adult of sound mind that has ever lived in the human realm.  You will find prayers in which she is called “alone sinless”:  She was sinless in nature like everyone but also in terms of her human person and will.  A prayer can hardly state all of that.

 

If this grace was given at birth to the Theotokos, doesn't this comport more with the Roman Catholic doctrine? 

 

No, since they believe infants are not immaculate but inheritors of Eve’s and Adam’s sinning/guilt—not just death and decay (which is ontological, not moral).

 

Doesn't she become "the Great Exception" to humanity, and wouldn't this reduce the significance of her saying "yes" to God since she already had the grace not to sin?  Please help.  Thank you.

 

Grace did not compel Mary to say either yes or no.  It made it POSSIBLE for her to say “Yes”—it enabled her will to respond positively to God--IF she should wil to do so, as she did.  Without Grace, other humans can do nothing to please God.  But having a freewill and reason, they can accomplish other things not relevant to Salvation.

 

This is written in haste; but if you find anything unconvincing in it, write back.  But one cannot think Orthodoxly without making the paradigm-shift of getting rid of Western premises and going back to the original ones.  One premise:  The Assmimilaton energizes the potential of the Icon of God in humans; it was lost at the Fall, and is restored in Baptism, presumably on a vector ending up with full Divinization (Glorification), usually after death.  Mary avoid that time-lag; her “vector” was zero in length.

 

You have got to get rid, I suggest, of the juridical (and in case of Protestants, will-first) premises about Salvation and switch over to ONTOLOGY.  (CLICK HERE or HERE.)  Salvation is more ontological than moral in Orthodoxy, though one must give the will’s assent to it all.  Salvation is ontological unity with Christ’s Life—not the moral juggling of Latin Mariology and Soteriology, and certainly not the virtual reality of Reformation Grace and justification.  Unlike Western Grace, the NT views Grace as uncreated energy (there is an old page on the Orlapubs website about this), but I should perhaps add some more passages where energy comes in in a more oblique manner—like an additional verse in Eph. 4.   If you don’t read Greek, you might wish to order the Orthodox New Testament from the Holy Apostles Monastery (it’s a nunnery); it’s the only Bible that translates the energy words correct, call Christ a LOGOS (“Reason of God”)—not a Word . . . etc.  There’s a link to order it on my /opR26.html.  On “Word,” see /opR103.html.

 

In Christ,

 

---

    

Search this site    powered by FreeFind

Hits on this website since 11-22-98