St. John of Shanghai Orthodox Church

The feast of the Presentation of the Virgin in the temple (November 21st) was first celebrated in Syria towards the end of the 6th century, inspired by the even-then-ancient stories that told of how the parents of the Virgin Mary took her to the Temple when she was three years old, and how she remained there until she was betrothed to Joseph.

While there have long been questions as to how closely the Presentation story reflects what actually happened, the Church continues to celebrate the feast for its profound eternal significance. By entering the Temple so that she might become ‘the living temple’ in which Jesus comes to dwell, the Theotokos embodies a profound shift from the way of old temple to the way of the new.

In the ancient world, a temple was a physical place in which a deity was said to live. People did not actually worship inside ancient temples; rather, a statue of the god or goddess occupied most of the space, while the worshippers gathered outside, and the consecrated religious professionals brought and offered sacrifices within. Thus the human and the divine did not interact directly in the ancient temple; a permanent wall of separation divided them. Human beings came to the temple not so much to relate to their deity in any personal sense as to perform public rituals that affirmed their sense of community. What they believed in private was irrelevant as long as they continued to practice their ‘beliefs’ for the sake of the public good.

This brings us to Judaism. Like the ancient people who surrounded them, the Jews did not enter inside their temple to encounter God; they worshiped in the outer courts, while the consecrated priests offered animal sacrifices and burned incense within. Thus Judaism continued to uphold the wall of separation between an inaccessible divinity and the human race.

There was, however, one fundamantally important difference between the Jewish temple and the temples of other ancient religions: the Jewish deity did not actually live in that building. Even as he dedicated the temple for the first time, King Solomon asked, “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27)

In the Jewish understanding, God could not be limited to a place; as the God of all, He was everywhere present and filled all things. Instead of placing a statue of Yahweh in their temple, they invoked His presence by enshrining tokens of His mighty works: the inscriptions on the tablets of stone He gave to Moses, Aaron’s rod that He made to flower, the manna with which He fed Israel in the wilderness, all contained in the Ark He had commissioned. In this way, the Jewish people proclaimed that their God, unlike all the other gods, was transcendent and all-powerful and could not be subjected to the human will, ‘the work of men’s hands.’

Additionally, the Jewish temple arrangement expressed their hope that this all-powerful, omipresent God would one day come to dwell, not in an isolated, distinct building made of stone and wood, but in the midst of His people, inseparable from them and united to them forever. As the prophet Jeremiah himself said, speaking for God, “In those days, says the LORD, they shall no more say, “The ark of the covenant of the LORD.” It shall not come to mind, or be remembered, or missed; it shall not be made again.” (Jeremiah 3:16)

The Feast of the Presentation is nothing less than the fulfilment of this prophecy. By entering the temple, the Virgin shows that the time in which human beings dwelt outside of the divine presence, separate and isolated, is past. She has expanded and softened those walls of impenetrable, immovable stone, so that through her womb God might be born in each and every human person, and make every human body His dwelling place. In essence, the Presentation commemorates the consecration of a new arena in the divine-human conversation—no longer merely external, public and formal, but intimate, personal and inwardly transformative.

The implications of this Feast for us are life-changing and revolutionary. Like the religious men and women of old, we may be tempted to restrict our encounter with God to the physical walls of a building. The phrase “go to church” connotates for us a place called “the church” where we go to meet God. Within the Church temple, we can suppose that the area of the altar—which we call the “sanctuary” or even “the holy of holies”—is a place where God makes His presence more clearly, if not exclusively. Those who accomplish liturgical tasks within the altar area—the ordained clergy—we can easily come to regard as religious professionals akin to the Levitical priests, people who are of a different caste from ordinary folk. In short, we are too easily inclined to apply the ways of the old temples to our experience of Christian worship.

The Presentation challenges us to see otherwise. It reminds us that the Church is less a place where Christians go than a reality that we become by gathering in the Name of Christ. St. Paul says, “When you assemble as Church” (1 Cor. 11:18) not “when you go to Church.” The Presentation reminds us that the building where we gather is not an end in itself, a discrete geographical entity where God exists apart from His people; rather, the ‘Church temple’ is an iconographic mirror of the temple that we—the people of God—are called to embody (see 2 Cor. 6:16). By extension, everything that happens within the Church temple—the hierarchy and ritual and order—exists solely to build up the real dwelling place of God: the human person in the image and likeness of Christ. To put it simply, the Presentation tells us that Church temple itself is not a dwelling place for God; it is the temple for the people of God and they are the living temple of God.

If this is indeed the case, then the Mother of God calls us through her feast to expand the walls of the new temple in our daily lives. Our Eucharistic assemblies on Sundays and feast days such as this one renew our sacred calling to bear God continually, as the Virgin did. Our challenge then is to carry that vision beyond the physical place where we received the revelation. Whatever our tasks and responsibilities in this world, whatever the architecture of our routines and responsibilities, the Virgin calls us to annex those spaces and make them extensions of the living temple that we are, to make them as beautiful and well-adorned and graceful as any man-made building, as replete with peace and joy and dignity as any Divine Liturgy.

In this task we do not require great wealth or abundance of fine materials and skills. All we need is a humble human heart that says, “Be it to me according to Your word.” Then, however small and ordinary our lives may be, God Himself, the great Craftsman, will come to build a temple that Solomon himself would wonder at, a place more spacious than the heavens, where God in the flesh has come to dwell in all the glory of His love for us.

Fr. Richard René

We will be celebrating the Presentation of the Theotokos with a Vesperal Liturgy on the eve of the feast (Tuesday, November 20th) at 6:30pm.

In 326 A.D., the Emperor Constantine sought to recover the Cross by whose sign he had conquered and claimed the Roman Empire for Christ. To this end, he commissioned his mother Helen to travel to the Holy Land and find the relic of the wood upon which our Lord was crucified. After some investigation, Helen located the true Cross buried under a temple dedicated to Venus. According to the traditional story, the authenticity of the relic was confirmed when it was touched to a corpse and the dead man sprung back to life, after which the Patriarch of Jerusalem raised the Cross up in the Church temple, and everyone bowed before it.

Celebrated at what was the beginning of the Roman civil new year (and what is still the beginning of the school year), the Exaltation of the Cross celebrates a constitutional moment in the life of the Roman Empire. The hymn for the feast—“O Lord, save Your people”—may well be described as the “Imperial Anthem” of the Byzantine world—a proclamation that a new people had been gathered into unity under the authority of the crucified One. Though corrupted sometimes beyond recognition, we can find a core truth of the idea of a “Christian nation” in the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which shows us what it means to be a people gathered into one not just under God, but within God through the Person of the Crucified and Resurrected Jesus Christ.

For the past eleven years, we have commemorated another event, three days before the Exaltation of the Cross. I am speaking, of course, about September 11th, and unless you have been living in another solar system until now, I need not recount the details of that day: the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by suicidal religious extremists, and the death of thousands of civilians at their hands. The question is, can the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross shine a light back on that terrible event? Can we come to see September 11th as an echo of the Cross, and September 14th as an echo of the Resurrection on the third day?

Much has been said about the significance of September 11th. One of the preparatory readings for the Exaltation offers some additional insight, a meaning that we perhaps too easily overlook. The reading is taken from the Gospel of Saint John the Theologian, chapter eleven:

So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they made plans to put him to death.

The historian, literary critic and social philosopher Rene Girard has spoken profoundly about how societies, nations and cultures are founded and maintained. Basically, Girard suggests that human beings are naturally inclined tear each other apart and annihilate each other over their desires for land, resources, women, beliefs and so on. As we fight over these objects, we soon lose sight of why we are fighting, and the violence takes on a life of its own. All that prevents us from total annihilation of ourselves and each other is a collective decision to turn all of our violence on a scapegoat: an individual or a group whom we blame for our conflict. In uniting against the other, Girard says, we unite and make peace among ourselves, and culture and society is born. Our religious systems then continue to reenact the initial event through ritual sacrifices and regulations, so maintaining the social unity we first established through violence.

I mention all this because Caiaphas’ proposal—that it is better for one man should die for the people rather than the whole nation should perish—is simply one more example of what Girard would call “the scapegoating mechanism.” Like so many before him, the high priest believed that the divisions and conflicts threatening to divide and destroy Israel, can only be healed if everyone unites against Jesus as a scapegoat. He was wrong in this belief, of course, terribly, joyfully wrong. Rather than staying dead, like a good scapegoat, Jesus sprang back to life! Instead of binding together the nation, the sacrificial mechanism fell apart when it met the Son of God whom death could not contain. The Crucified One who rose from the dead finally dismantled the process by which we found nations and establish peoples. Since the Cross, we can no longer use violence against others to bind up our societies, no matter how hard we try.

What has all this got to do with September 11th? Simply that what the hijackers did that day was yet another desperate attempt to enact Caiaphas’ plan. Where Caiaphas proposed that one man should die for the people, the extremists hoped that by sacrificing themselves and thousands of innocent lives in one single violent act, they could unite the Islamic peoples and rise up together against those they call the “western crusaders.” And as it did before, the plan went wrong. Once again, the Gospel exposed what was supposed to be glorious and righteous act, and revealed it to be nothing less than bloodthirsty, callous, destructive violence. On September 11th, the hijackers tried to establish yet another nation through violence, blood and death, but today, on third day, the Cross is lifted up, empty of its prize, proclaiming to the whole universe that Christ has trampled down death by death, has undone it, dismantled it, and deprived it of its power. Death can no longer hold men captive, and kingdoms founded on death can no longer stand.

Our challenge today is to answer the death of September 11th with the resurrection of September 14th. The Exaltation of the Cross challenges us to build one Christian nation—a people united in God through Christ—but on a different foundation than the kingdoms of this world. While they establish peace by silencing their victims, we must confront our own temptation to blame others for our sufferings and struggles. This feast of the Cross challenges us to hear their voices crying out, like the blood of that first scapegoat, Abel, but unlike Cain, who ran away from his scapegoat and built the first worldly civilization to conceal his murderous act, we must repent. We must strive to identify daily with the sufferings of those whom we would treat as rivals and scapegoats; to see them in the compassionate light of our shared humanity; and ultimately, to meet in them the One who identified with us and died with us, so that He might draw all of us to Himself, uniting all of us into one nation, the one glorious inheritance of the Most High God.

Fr. Richard René

We will be celebrating the Exaltation of the Cross with a Vesperal Liturgy on the eve of the feast (Thursday, September 13th) at 6:30pm.

My dear friend and brother in Christ, Fr. Richard René, has agreed to gift us with what I hope will be a series of reflections on the great feasts we celebrate throughout the year. Today, on the great feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos, I share his first reflection with you all…

We are all aware that the school year began this past week. What may not be so clear to us is that the liturgical year also began a week ago, on September 1st, and that the first Great Feast of the Church liturgical year is the birth of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.

According to the traditional account, the Virgin Mary was born of a woman named Anna, who was barren in her old age. The story itself echoes a number similar stories throughout the Old Testament. The most well-known is that of Sarah, who bore Isaac in her old age by God’s word. Jacob and Esau were born to Isaac and Rebekah as an answer to prayer, because she was barren. And then there was Hannah, who bore the prophet Samuel in her barrenness, and Elizabeth, who bore the prophet and forerunner John in her old age by a similar miracle.

In the world of the Old Testament Scriptures, one of the main signs of God’s blessing was the provision of children. The Psalmist reflects this basic understanding when he says, Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Lo, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the LORD… May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life! May you see your children’s children! Peace be upon Israel!

If obedience to God’s commandments resulted in the blessing of children, barrenness was the sign that God was withholding His blessing, usually because His people were not keeping His law. And what if the barren women were themselves righteous and obedient, as Sarah, Rebekah, Hannah and Elizabeth undoubtedly were? In the symbolism of the Scriptures, the message is profound: their failure have children was a sign that humanity is fundamentally unable to keep the Law by its own initiative; we need something more than mere righteousness. The miraculous births from these barren women prophesy that God Himself would have to extend His grace—through His own Son—to fulfill the law and pour out His blessings on His people.

In this sense, the birth of the Theotokos is not just another Old Testament story in the line of Sarai, Rebecca, Hannah and even Elizabeth. Unlike those other women, Mary is the one who gave birth to God the Word. She does not so much represent the old Israel, waiting for God to have favor and redeem humanity, so much as she represents the new Israel—the people of God who have received the fullness of God’s Word in Christ. As such she embodies not so much the human need for God’s grace as much as the human willingness to receive God’s grace—by hearing His Word and accepting it. That the Virgin was herself born of a barren woman, then, tells us in the poetry and symbolism of the Church that not only do human beings need God’s grace in order to fulfill their destiny as His children, but even more than that, the human willingness to receive God’s grace is itself something God gives!

As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are continuing striving to accept and accomplish God’s will. Finding this willingness is often our greatest struggle. We know the right thing to do, but we cannot bring ourselves to do it. Ours is the anguish of the Apostle Paul who said, I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Today’s feast tells us that willingness itself is a gift. Our task is not primarily to obey God’s Word by a sheer act of will—we cannot do this because of our spiritual barrenness. Nor can we even force ourselves to be willing to obey Him, for in that too our wills are drought-stricken and dry. Rather, our first and foremost task as Christians, laid out for us at the beginning of this Church year, is simply to be open—simply to cry out for the willingness to do what is right.

In that cry we make a space within ourselves, a womb for God’s mercy to come and fill us with the willingness to bear Christ in our bodies, and in bearing Him who alone fulfilled the commandments of God, to find the righteousness for which we were created as children of the Most High.

The Source has just published its article on “Orthodox Easter”, which incorporates some of my answers to Hayden’s questions that I shared with you. It’s pretty good, though I might want to put a bit more of transcendent spin on Hayden’s conclusion that “Ultimately, for Orthodox Christians, Pascha comes down to basic humble needs.” The context of Hayden’s statement seems to imply that those “basic humble needs” are for food and family. That is ultimately true, as our most basic needs are for food – hence our focus on the “spiritual food” God has given us, the Eucharist – and family – hence our coming together as the family of God, the Church, in celebration of our adoption as sons of God, accomplished through Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection!

For reference, I include the full text of my interview with Hayden Case below: