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| "Akathist to the Theotokos", Andrei Rublev Museum, Moscow. |
By Protopresbyter George Dorbarakis
"Rejoice, treasury of purity." (Canon, Ode One)
"Rejoice, treasury of purity." (Canon, Ode One)
The doxological element towards the Most Holy Theotokos is highlighted par excellence by the Service of the Salutations to our Panagia. And rightly so: she is the one through whom God descended as a man into the world and before her bow the knees not only of the faithful who are inspired by the Spirit of God – only a person in the Spirit can “see” the fullness of grace that the Theotokos has – but also the holy angels. After all, the Mother of the Lord was exalted to a height above the Cherubim and the Seraphim. A prerequisite for this unique choice of our God was of course the purity and innocence of the soul of the little daughter of Nazareth, Mary – this purity attracted our absolutely pure and immaculate God to “rely” on her existence. That is why all the troparia of both the Canon and the Kontakion of the Akathist Hymn project with unsurpassed lyricism the all-holiness of the Theotokos, with images borrowed mostly from holy Scripture, and above all the Old Testament, which constitutes the prophecy of the coming of the Lord Jesus, whose person is revealed in the New Testament.
The Most Holy Theotokos is therefore glorified and praised with hymns, because her position as the first and most excellent member of the Body of her Son and God, the Church, is a given. Without her, our faith would be lacking: “Through the intercessions of the Theotokos, Savior, save us,” the people of God sing, which means that false Mariology means false Christology, hence false Trinitarianism, false Ecclesiology - before the Theotokos we literally measure the correctness or not of our Christianity. The believer understands that the reference to her is related to the dogma of our faith. It is no coincidence that the Church, already through the Third Ecumenical Synod (Ephesus, 431), confronting the Nestorian heresy that questioned the divinity of the Lord, presented as a continuation of the correct faith about Christ the position of the Panagia. She is the Theotokos!
However, we would blaspheme and erase any form of Christianity we have if our faith not only in our God, but also in the Panagia as well as in the other saints remained on a theoretical level, as if it were a museum exhibit that we are curious about from many aspects and admire. We want to say that any projection of the greatness of our Panagia in this case is always done with the perspective of following her life, of imitating the way she stood before God and her fellow men. Without this extension, we would fall into what the Lord Himself revealed in an absolute way: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of the Father who sent me.” Christian faith, in other words, means following Christ and His saints who were “imitators” of His life. Christ came so that we too might become like Him, with His grace and help, of course, as members of His Body.
And our Church constantly comes and reminds us that in every saving action and word of the Lord, in every consequent action and word of His Saints, there must be on our part the “with”, the “together with”! Was the Lord crucified, for example? We believe in Him and are His disciples if we too are crucified "with" Him, as His great Apostle confesses: “I am crucified with Christ, (and so) I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” And behold, once again the hymns of the Church emphasize this truth to us. Speaking of the Panagia and the Purity and Cleanliness of her soul, they proclaim and exclaim: Pure is the Theotokos! We can only honor her with a pure and clean mind, that is, by moving in the same spirit as hers. We can only praise the Mother of God with our piety, which is expressed in our godly actions and behaviors. “Let us honor the Pure One with a mind that strives for purity. Let us praise the Mother of God piously, beautifying ourselves with godly deeds” (Ode Five).
And so that we do not wander astray in what purity and cleanliness of life mean, Saint John of the Ladder, the great ascetic teacher, the Saint of Lent, comes and opens our eyes: “We begin the struggle for purity when we do not consent to carnal thoughts. We have advanced and reached an intermediate state when there are natural movements in our flesh but without carnal and evil images. And when is it considered that we have reached the end? When we live as dead and indifferent according to the body, because the carnal thoughts have been deadened within us.” To define: “Pure is he who with divine love repelled the other love, the carnal, and thus extinguished the material with the immaterial fire” - a charismatic state that resembles the disembodied angels.
Therefore, the struggle of us beginners in spiritual matters must be focused there, if we want to say that we truly praise with hymns and honor the Most Holy Theotokos, that we truly are faithful members of the Lord Jesus and the Church: in not accepting the assault of carnal thoughts, turning immediately when this is about to happen to our Crucified Lord and “sticking” our mind there. If we do not do this, if our heart and soul become an “airport” of such wicked and dirty thoughts, bring to mind the words of Saint Paisios, then we must put a question mark on our Christianity and our love, since we are in the Salutations to the Panagia, for her. Perhaps we should remember very often what happened to the great newer Saint of our Church, Silouan the Athonite, when he was in the very young age of his life, as preserved by the equally great Saint Sophrony, his disciple and subordinate. Young, the Saint was somewhat careless in his life and in the so-called carnal passions. And our Mother of God appeared to him to say to him with pain and tender severity: “I do not like the way you live, sinning before my eyes.”
As long as we keep our hearts clean and pure from everything dirty and evil, as long as we therefore walk according to the holy commandments of the Lord that demarcate the godliness of our actions, so truly can we with humble frankness address and approach the Most Holy Theotokos, and consequently also her Son and God and our God. And the result? May He become incarnate within our own existence. May we also become other Panagies.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
