The Unsleeping Glory of the Theotokos

Unsleeping Glory: A Homily for the Dormition

The feast of the repose of the Mother of God is celebrated with great solemnity by all the pious sons and daughters of the Church. How could it be otherwise? For we rejoice with the mother of us all at her transition from life, to death, into life again. In all ways the Blessed Virgin follows her Son, and in all ways she proves for us the model of things to come and the fulfillment of things hoped for. Her death sets the seal for the Church year, for it completes the story of salvation with a final note; an epilogue of great joy. Here we have the culmination of the restoration of paradise, the sign of the establishment of the order of the Kingdom which is to come. For in our Lady, and in her repose, we receive the end of that story which started in Eden, and we see in outline that glory which is to come for us through the Son whom she bore.

In the beginning, when Eve was deceived, she gave the fruit of death to all her generations, and she was placed in subjection to her husband for having led him astray, while Adam is set to toil in the earth from which he came. Such is what we have received in the inspired book of Genesis. But in our new Eve, we have the fulfillment of that which our fore-mother was meant to be. Mary the Theotokos has become truly the "mother of all the living."  In his first homily on the Dormition, St. Germanos of Constantinople, himself a tireless devotee of the Queen of Heaven and the defender of her sacred images and temples against the fury of the iconoclasts, we hear him describe beautifully this parallelism, calling out to the Queen; "You are the mother of the life that is real and true. You are the yeast of Adam's remaking; you are the one who liberates Eve from all shame. She was the mother of dust, and you of light; her womb harbored corruption, but yours incorruption. She became death's dwelling-place, but you release us from death. She made our eyes downcast, weighted towards the earth, but you are the unsleeping glory of eyes awake. Her children are grief, but your Son is joy for all ages. She who was earth came back to earth in the end; but you have given birth to life for us, and you have ascended to life, you are powerful enough to offer life, even after death, to your fellow men and women."

How wonderful are the words of the saint! and how beautifully he illustrates that deep reality in which the Mother of God becomes the Mother of our Life, for our "life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3)." The Lord who was born of her has become the new Adam. Where the old Adam sought to avoid censure and responsibility, the New Adam has taken every responsibility for our salvation on his own mighty shoulders. Greater than any Atlas, or any Hercules, or any Thor, greater than any feat of the myth-born heroes was the bearing on those mighty shoulders of the Cross. Mightier still was the bearing of the sins of the whole wretched earth, that earth which beneath his immaculate feet he could in his divinity hear groaning and in travail that the sons of God might be born (Romans 8). In this mighty feat, the Mother of Our Lord plays her part. Where the first Eve rebelled, our New Eve has been obedient. Where the first cried out in lamentation for Able, who has no generations, and was comforted by Seth, our New Eve has gained all the generations of the earth through her son. What was in the beginning, the generation of life without seed has been restored. For before Seth there came Adam, from whom Eve proceeded from the rib, and before Adam was God alone. Such a miraculous multiplication of the generations has come about for the Mother of the Word, for by her son she has gained the Church, gathered from all the nations of the earth and sanctified in the blood of her own lamb, for her inheritance. In her son the promise to Abraham is being fulfilled, for through her son Abraham's seed "is more than the stars of heaven." (Gen 15) Motherhood and virginity have come together in her own person, and her own life, her own blood, has been that which formed the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, and so nourishes and redeems the whole of the Christian race. In her offspring the curse has ceased, and the enmity of the children of the first Eve with the vile serpent, who by his evil words caused all the evils which have befallen man and the cosmos, has ceased also. For the serpent who deceived by a word has been trampled under heel by the Word, and his dominion over our race was broken like the gates of brass. For the gates of Hades shall not prevail against the onrushing Body of Christ, and the victory has already been won by the King of Glory.

Yet the Lord's grace did not stop there for her. The Church's memory, kept alive by the breath of the Holy Spirit, has preserved for us the feast of the repose of the Mother of God, and of her translation into life. For like all mortal flesh our Lady had to taste death, and she did not spurn the very medicine her Son had won for us; that death should no longer be terrible but should be the passage into life. St. Germanos, that God bearing confessor, again teaches us the wisdom of the Divine will, "You," O Queen, "have moved on from our earthly life, in order that the awful mystery of God's becoming human might be confirmed in more than mere appearance: in order that, as you are separated in this way from temporal things, we might come to believe that the God who was born of you came forth as a complete human being, the son of a real mother who was subject to the laws of natural necessity... in the same way, your Son, even though he is the God of all things, himself "tasted death" (Heb 2:9), as we do, in his flesh, because of the dying human being, if I may put it this way, formed by the whole of our race." So our Lady's own death witnesses to us the great and terrible mystery of the humanity of the God-man, Jesus Christ. 

Still further though our Lady's repose offers us a glimpse things to come. Again St. Germanos tells us, "Surely [our Lord] has performed miracles both in his own life-giving tomb and in the life-giving sepulchre where you were laid to rest: both tombs really received bodies, yet neither of them was a workshop of decay. For it was impossible that you [our Lady], the vessel which bore God, should be dissolved and decomposed into the dust of death. Since he who emptied himself into you was God from the beginning, and life eternal, the Mother of Life had to become a companion of life..." St. Germanos again shows us by his preaching (much greater than my own, and testified to by his sufferings) the wonders that are held for us in approaching the tomb of the Queen of Angels and Men. She is not allowed to taste corruption, because in her the principle of Life has been restored to the center. The life we know, that life where death is the ordinary fact and the procession of life to death is a painful struggle, full of blood and conflict, of which the birth pangs are only the beginning; that life is passing. For it was not so in the beginning. When we see the Mother of the Word taken up, transferred from our place to the heavenly places, we see the continuation of that process begun by Christ on the day of Pascha. This day of the Dormition of the Mother of God is our summer Pascha, when we relive the glories of that day in the mystery of this one. The miraculous is woven in this feast as to be inseparable from it, and we receive the tradition with joy. We like the Apostles are gathered from afar to be with our Mother and Queen this day. We like the Apostles rejoice at seeing her glorified. We like the Apostles have the assurance that she is still with us, our fervent advocate before the maker of all. With a mother's boldness she pleads for us before the throne of glory, and by her intercession our salvation is made the surer. For Christ our God honored her above all the creatures of the earth. Of all beings she is the one highly favored. For she became the means of the restoration of life to all creation. She became the means for the cessation of this life of manifold death. She is the mother of all the living in Christ, and she is for us the sign of our glory which is to come. The psalmist sings with us today, "The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is wrought of gold," and he sings on the Lord's behalf to the Queen, "instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth. I will make thy name to be remembered in all generations: therefore shall the people praise thee for ever and ever." (Psalm 44:13,16, and 17) Amen.

May the Panaghia accept these words of praise from a sinner.

Scriptural quotations are from the King James Version

All quotes from St. Germanos may be found in On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies, translated by Brian Daley, S.J. and published by Saint Vladimir Seminary Press, "Homily 1 On the Dormition by St. Germanus of Constantinople" pages 153-166.