Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy
Mary, Mary We're Contrary
Essay on the Role of Mary in Eastern Orthodoxy
September 1, 2005
For many Protestants (according to what I have read) the biggest stumbling block in Eastern Orthodoxy is its emphasis on Mary. There are, of course, several other significant differences between Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Among them is the Orthodox use of Icons, the absolutely structured liturgy that is, for the most part, repeated word for word week after week, the differences in doctrines such as Original Sin and Election, and the physical nature of worship (crossing oneself, kissing, bowing, candles, incense, jewel-encrusted books and chalices, etc.). All of these other things can be dealt with on what I would call an intellectual and exegetical level. There is a “biblical logic” which can make sense to Protestants on all of these issues. But Mary is a very different sort of doctrine which is rooted almost exclusively in the Holy Tradition and not in Scripture. Accepting the Orthodox Church's teaching on Mary, therefore, requires accepting Orthodoxy's understanding of Holy Tradition and both its truthfulness and efficacy. This involves a conceptual leap that is much bigger than changing one's mind about what scripture teaches about the doctrine of election or the practice of liturgical worship and images.
My contention may be surprising to Protestants who have been paying attention because they know that Protestants have an increasingly guilty conscience over the Protestant treatment of Mary. Scripture teaches that all generations will call Mary blessed. She is unique among all humans in her humility and God's choice of her to bear the Christ-child. Over the last few decades there has been a great deal of Protestant hand-wringing over Mary and the fact that we Protestants don't really act like we believe that she is blessed.
Further complicating things is the Roman Catholic view of Mary. Her elevation to godlike status deeply offends Orthodox sensibilities (as well as Protestant sensibilities, needless to say) and the two heresies promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church as unchangeable doctrine, spoken by an infallible pope, that Mary was miraculously conceived (the Immaculate Conception) in pretty much the same manner as Jesus and that she was absolutely sinless from birth and throughout her life, make any reunion between Catholic and Orthodox absolutely impossible until the Romans rescind the teaching of papal infallibility and correct these two grievous errors.
Protestants understand instinctively that the Roman Catholic version of Mary is heretical and (in my experience) are repulsed by it. From within the context of this Western dynamic, the Orthodox emphasis on Mary in worship is so “over the top” (from the very minimalist standards of Protestantism) that it is easy to understand why Protestants assume that the Orthodox doctrine is as goofy as the Catholic version.
Because of this very complex interaction between Orthodox teaching, Roman heresy, and Protestant confusion and ignorance of Mary, there is a never-ending stream of books being written on the subject. On a personal level it seems that this never ending noise tends to muddy the water more than it does clarify things, so it is with a very real reluctance that I approach this subject. At the same time, the incarnation, which is the very heart of Christian truth, cannot be understood apart from Mary, and my experience of Orthodoxy is that it lives the incarnation whereas Protestantism only believes it. My reflections on Orthodoxy would therefore be incomplete without a reflection on my journey toward Mary. Hopefully this essay will not be mere noise.
If we are to grasp the centrality and complexity of the incarnation, we have to say that salvation is much like an onion. It is a layered thing, but at the same time salvation, in and of itself, is not hidden inside the layers, but is the layers themselves. The very core of salvation is the self-giving love of God: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That verse from John 3 is beloved by all Christians, no matter what denomination, communion, or jurisdiction, as the very heart of the matter. But this God-so-loved-the-world idea is purposeless—an empty sentiment—without the corresponding Word-became-flesh idea of John 1. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).
So the heart of the matter is God and the divine life of love. But the heart of the matter is not salvation; salvation is God's heart fleshed out. That heart of the matter is layered within the idea of God taking on human flesh, and that idea requires a real connection to humanity, so the Mary layer is necessary to make the God-as-human layer meaningful. So it is that scripture teaches that Mary bore the Son of God. Jesus is fully God and fully human and it is therefore necessary to speak of Mary as Theotokos (literally, “God-bearer”). That's generally as far as Protestants get in this process. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, recognizes that there are more layers to this onion-like layered truth of salvation. Mary didn't just pop into the equation out of the blue. Although Mary's life is not the subject of the Gospels or the Epistles, the Apostles and early Christians knew her well, and they report that she lived a holy and ascetic life prior to her call by God (as well as afterwards). Thus, outside the very human Mary layer we discover another divine layer: Mary sought after God and it was this holiness of life that God honored when he sent the angel to announce to her that she would indeed bear the Messiah.
And around this layer is the very human layer of Mary's family, that is, her parents Joachim and Anna, and outside that layer, another divine layer as we discover their holy lives and the fact that they were part of that small group of people who faithfully waited for the coming of the Messiah. As the story of salvation is filled out we discover this layering (or interweaving, if we want to use a slightly different metaphor) of the divine and human, of the heavenly and earthly, of the immortal and mortal.
This interrelationship is better caught than taught, to use a phrase from my Bible College days. It does not lend itself to intellectual proofs and discussions. But this interrelationship shows up in the prayer life of the church over and over again. The end of the Great Litany (which is then repeated in the various Little Litanies several times during the Divine Liturgy) says, “Calling to remembrance our all-holy, immaculate, most blessed and glorious Lady Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary, with all the saints, let us commend ourselves and each other, and all our life unto Christ our God.”
Before going any farther, it is probably necessary to make mention of the adjectives applied to Mary: all-holy, immaculate, most blessed, glorious, ever-virgin. The first thing that needs to be said is that Protestants and Roman Catholics alike tend to read this list through a Latin lens, assuming that these words mean the same to Western Christians as they do to Eastern Orthodox Christians. By and large they don't. Mary's holiness and sinlessness (that's the meaning of “immaculate”), for instance, are neither something she earned nor was born with, but refer to the divine gifts of the fullness of salvation that she has now and that all Christians will be given when they die, and are resurrected and glorified. The Orthodox extol these things in Mary, not because Mary is more worthy than other humans, but because she is the first to experience them as the one actually had divine life growing in human form in her womb.
In a prayer that is part of a standard collection of private evening prayers, Mary is extolled as the Champion Leader of the Church. The phrase “Champion Leader” gets to the heart of this matter, but again we tend to misunderstand the word champion and might miss the significance of the title. In contemporary usage a “champion” is someone who wins. When we use the word “champion,” we actually mean “victor.” And Christ is the only victor, for victory belongs to him who defeated sin and death.
But there's an older meaning for the term that is being referred to when Mary is called the Champion Leader of the Church. For that meaning we need to go back to David and Goliath. Both David and Goliath were the champions of their respective armies. In this sense, the word Champion means that they represent their side. If the Philistine champion won, the Philistines (as a whole) won. Conversely, if the Israelite champion won, the Israelites won. Champions, in this sense, lead the way and are representatives of a much larger group. And as the champion goes, so goes the larger group.
And so it is completely accurate to say that when we say all these nice things about Mary, we are actually saying them about the Church. Mary, as the church's Champion, fought the spiritual battle and won. She is now all-holy, immaculate, most blessed, and glorious. And because Jesus Christ was faithful to Mary and she won her spiritual battle because of Christ, we can be absolutely confident that the Church, the Body of Christ will also one day be all-holy, immaculate, most blessed, and glorious, as the Virgin Bride of Christ at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. That is the meaning of Champion, and that is why we extol Mary as our Champion.
But back to the Great Litany: my purpose in quoting the final portion of the Great Litany is not to get hung up on the adjectives, but rather to point out the interrelationship between the human and the divine: We remember Mary with all the saints, and in the context of that memory of human things, we commend ourselves and each other to Christ our God. This interrelationship is absolutely fundamental in Orthodox prayer. Jesus Christ is rarely mentioned without a reference to his Mother. It is a way of always acknowledging and emphasizing the fact that our Savior is fully God and fully human. On the flip side, Mary is always extolled in the context of Jesus Christ. She is not honored because of who she is, but rather because she bore our Savior, the God-Man. That same prayer to the Theotokos mentioned above is interrupted in the middle with the following acclamation: “My hope is the Father, my refuge is the Son, my protection is the Holy Spirit: O Holy Trinity, glory to you.” The prayer, addressed to Mary, then continues. This little acclamation in the middle of the prayer seems to have nothing to do with the subject matter of Mary, and yet honoring Mary is only done in the context of God, thus this acclamation suddenly appears, as if to bring the honor of Mary back into context.
These two examples, one from the Sunday Divine Liturgy, prayed corporately, and the other from a prayer typically prayed privately as part of personal evening prayers, show this interweaving of Mary and Jesus, of the divine and the human, of heaven and earth. Salvation is not just a God thing, it's a human thing.
This layering of divine, human, divine, and human that is so profoundly central Orthodox sensibility is also seen in how it perceives the Church year. Within Protestantism the Church year is all about Jesus Christ. There are two cycles, the smaller Christmas cycle and the larger Easter cycle. The Christmas cycle stretches from Advent to Epiphany. The Easter Cycle stretches from Lent to Pentecost. All the rest of the year is then considered Common Time, time that is outside the church year. The Orthodox Church year, on the other hand, begins and ends with Mary, and Jesus is then nested inside the Mary story. The Orthodox church year begins on Sept 1 with the week long preparation for the celebration of the birth of Mary, celebrated on Sept. 8. The Orthodox church year ends on Aug 15 at the Feast in honor of Mary's death.
Does this mean that Mary is more important that Jesus? By no means, but in this way, the incarnation is put into the context of human history. In the Orthodox church year Mary is a proxy (ie, a Champion Leader) for humanity and her history is a proxy for all of human history. The birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, as well as the coming of the Holy Spirit, is therefore seen in the broader context of human history.
But the story doesn't begin and end with Mary either. Embedded in the Feasts of the Nativity and Dormition of the Theotokos (that is, the birth and death of Mary, Jesus' mother) that begin and end the Orthodox church year, is a vision of creation and consummation as well as visions of the Trinitarian divine life beyond time and space. But nested within that story of divine timelessness is the story of creation, and specifically of the life of one created human being, Mary, the God-bearer, and nested within that story is the story of God-within-creation in the person of the God-Man Jesus Christ. This is the onion of salvation. Salvation is “for God so loved the world.” Salvation is also “and the Word became flesh.” But just as that is salvation, so is Mary's acclamation “Her am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your Word,” as she said to the angel when accepting her role as mother of our Lord. But just as that is salvation, so is the angelic announcement, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”
Many years ago (almost twenty years now), when we were seriously considering converting to Orthodoxy, we bought a set of Orthodox festal icons. They came as a set so we ended up with the Mary icons as well as the Jesus and Holy Spirit icons that I was after. We ended up putting the Mary icons in a box and hanging the rest on our wall. Eventually we gave the Mary icons to a Roman Catholic friend. It was a very Protestant thing to do. Today I'd do it differently because I finally get the whole Mary thing. (Although I have to admit I sometimes think those Orthodox folks are bit over the top.) I not only have a Victor and a Comforter, I have a Champion Leader, which means I don't have to do everything on my own. I can enter into that very same history that Jesus entered into when he became fully man. I'm not ready to throw away half the onion in search of the real onion inside.
So, Happy New Year! And may all of us overcome our contrary Protestant nature, and find it within ourselves to join in with the many generations of Christians who, along with Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, have celebrated Mary as "Blessed Among Women." After all, Jesus himself no doubt does this and more, even now in heaven.
Copyright © 2005 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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