Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple

We have the blessing this year of having the great feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple fall on a Sunday. Those of you who were here during the Matins today would have heard the first (and, I would argue, the most beautiful) Christmas hymns of the year, the Katavasies of the Nativity.

Christ is born, give ye glory.
Christ cometh from heaven, meet ye Him.
Christ is on earth, be ye exalted.
O all the earth, sing unto the Lord,
and sing praises in gladness, O ye people,
for He hath been glorified.

Despite the fact that the preparations for Christmas began a week ago with the start of the Advent fast, the first liturgical reference to the birth of Christ comes today on the feast of our Lady, in order to remind us of the direct connection between the person of the ever-Virgin Mary and the Incarnation of our Lord.

Describing the Lord’s pre-existence and Incarnation, the Apostle John begins his Gospel as follows: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory” (John 1:1, 14). The Word, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, became man and tabernacled among us — pitched his tent among us. Why this word, ‘tabernacled’?

As we heard in the first prophecy of the feast read at yesterday evening’s service of Great Vespers, taken from the Book of Exodus, the first temple of God in the Old Testament was not a permanent stone structure at a particular location — that was something that came later, once God had established the Israelites in Jerusalem. The first temple (of Moses) was portable, it was a tabernacle, a tent, which the Israelites carried with them as they wandered through the desert. And this Tabernacle of Witness was thought to house the presence of God on earth, it was the meeting place between God and man.

So it is to this tabernacle that the Evangelist John is referring when he says that “the Word…tabernacled among us”. However, this tabernacle of the Old Testament was symbolic and prophetic, a type of something else. The true Tabernacle of God the Word on earth, “the most pure Temple of the Saviour; the precious Chamber and sacred Treasure of the glory of God” is our Lady. It is in the womb of the Virgin Mary that we see the true presence of God on earth, and where the true meeting and union of humanity and divinity takes place. Thus, the Entrance of the little child Mary into the Temple of God, and indeed even into the Sanctuary of the Temple, shows how the prophecy has been fulfilled, how the symbol has been replaced by the reality.

As we heard, the kontakion of the feast emphasises the purity of the Virgin Mary. And this is important. When God became man, he didn’t take on some new human nature, he didn’t just descend from heaven in human form; rather, he took on our human nature, so as to heal and save us. God therefore had to take this nature from a human being like us, and to be born like us. At the same time, however, he had to take on this human nature in a way that ensured that original sin (the consequences of the Fall of the first human beings) would not be passed on. This is why he had to be born of a Virgin, independent of the normal process of conception, without a human father. However, the purity of the Virgin Mary described in today’s hymns does not only refer to her virginity, but to her purity from all personal sin.

In two of the prophecies read at Vespers last night, which refer both to the Tabernacle in the desert and to the Jerusalem Temple, the glory of God is said to have overshadowed the Temple in a cloud, and whenever this cloud signifying God’s presence was over the temple, neither the great prophet Moses nor the priests were able to enter. Even the tiniest speck of sin will prevent a man from being capable of direct and undiluted experience of God’s glory. Therefore, the person from whom God would take his human nature, the person who would become God’s living temple and tabernacle, had to be completely pure, free from every personal sin.

In all of world history, only one human being had this purity, only one was able to become the temple of the Saviour. This person was our Lady. When this person came into the world, that was the point at which “the fullness of time came”, as St Paul says, when “God sent forth his Son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). Just as the glory of God had overshadowed the Temple in the Old Testament, so the Archangel Gabriel says to the Virgin Mary, the living temple of the New Testament, that “the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee” (Luke 1:35).

Just as the Temple constituted the physical context for the worship of God in the Old Testament, it is the person of Mary which constitutes the theological context in which we are able to worship her Son, and which gives us the ability today to sing:

Christ is born, give ye glory.
Christ cometh from heaven, meet ye Him.
Christ is on earth, be ye exalted.
O all the earth, sing unto the Lord,
and sing praises in gladness, O ye people,
for He hath been glorified.

Fr Kristian Akselberg