Retroactive Holiness

My favorite icon is called the Virgin of the Sign. In Byzantine churches, it belongs on the eastern wall behind the holy table. It depicts Mary, the Theotokos, with her arms in a posture of prayer and with the Christ child - Emmanuel - within her womb, giving us his blessing.

I am a painter. My wife and I both have degrees in art and studied iconography for a couple of years under an experienced orthodox nun. Being a painter and being deeply in love with this icon - the Virgin of the Sign – I made a painting inspired by it. I suppose I am not allowed to call it an icon per se because it is an innovation and innovation is rarely permissible in iconography. So let’s call it a painting inspired by iconography.

It depicts the Virgin of the Sign - just as you see her with Christ within her - within the womb of her mother Anna. Christ within Mary within Anna. And Anna’s arms are also in a posture of prayer. Anna did indeed pray to have a child and thank God she did. Without Anna, we have no Mary and without Mary, we have no Jesus, no incarnate God, no salvation. I called this painting Theotokotokos - the bearer of the God-Bearer. She who bears within herself the one who bears God within herself.

One day, several years after I painted this image, a friend of mine saw it for the first time. He did not care for it at all. It was one thing to venerate Mary, the Theotokos, he thought, but this veneration of Anna could too easily spark a retroactive perception of holiness upon all the ancestors of Christ many of whom were not, in his view, so holy after all.

This friend of mine had been a Protestant. Though, by the time he was looking at my painting, he had been received into the Catholic Church. He had, I'm sure, as most Protestant converts to Catholicism do, struggled with the Catholic veneration of Mary and her role in our salvation. But he’d gotten to a point of accepting her. However, now witnessing my veneration of Anna put him a bit over the edge again I think.

Well, today's feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos is an opportunity for us to remember not only the role of Mary in our salvation but even the role of her mother Anna. There is among some Native Americans a custom of observing the birthday of a child by giving gifts – not to the child – but to the mother. Maybe this makes more sense than our custom. It is the mother who has done something worthy of thanks and praise when a child is born. Today, Mary is born and we give some thanks and praise also to her mother Anna.

I am not worried about introducing retroactive holiness. I think, rather, that may be a point of the Incarnation. Not the sanctification only of a select few, but the sanctification of all created things and beings in Christ. This Feast is a wonderful opportunity for us to behold the interconnection of all created things. It is easy to see the connection between Anna and Mary and Jesus and our salvation. Each leads to the other.

But God works inside everything, even when it is not so easy to see. He is with us always. By entering into human history at one particular point in one particular woman, whose nativity we celebrate today, he becomes the result of all human history before him and the cause of all human history after him, except for our sin. He becomes like us in all things but sin. In his humanity, God is with us in every moment and in every place because every moment and every place in creation is interconnected. This reminds me of what the mathematician Edward Lorenz called the Butterfly Effect, in which he observed that a metaphorical tornado is influenced in all its details by minor perturbations – even the flapping wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Everything is interconnected.

God does not will our sin, ever. But, even when we sin, God brings good out of the evil we have done. Even his own conception he makes dependent on a whole genealogy of conceptions all the way back to Adam. And many of these conceptions were sinful or adulterous. That of Solomon, for example.

The Troparion of the Prefeast yesterday speaks of this and says that "Today is born to us, from the root of Jesse and the loins of David, Mary, the godly child. Therefore, all creation rejoices and is renewed." It is through Solomon that Jesus descends from David and Solomon is the fruit of David’s adultery with Bathsheba. Thank God, David repents and is forgiven by the Lord. And God takes the evil that he had done and through it, ultimately, becomes man so that we together with David can become one with God.

I do not fear or oppose retroactive holiness. In fact, I hope and pray for it. Today, we sing in the Kontakion that, by the holy birth of the immaculate one, even Adam and Eve are freed from the corruption of death. And the people are delivered from the guilt of their sins. So holiness has indeed spread all the way to the beginning. May it also progress all the way until the end. In Christ, it has, it is, and it will. The whole universe rejoices today.

God makes us – just as much as he makes Adam and Eve. And he makes us – who are not holy because of our sins – to become holy by his grace if we will but cooperate with him and repent like David. He make us holy by becoming one of us – through Mary, through Anna and even through Bathsheba and through Eve. 

There is one holiness

For All Saints Sunday 

Matthew 10:32-33,37-38; 19:27-30

Icon of All Saints
16-20 c.

Paul addresses most of his epistles to the saints of this or that city. And, I hope, if he were writing to us, he would say the same and would address the saints among us.

Although, when he addresses the Galatians, he does not call them saints. His letter is written to rebuke them because they have been turning to a different gospel, a perversion of the gospel of Christ.

So, if Paul were writing to our church, would he call us saints? Or, would he, as he did addressing the Galatians, leave that part out? Are we following the gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul preaches? Or are we accepting a different gospel, receiving a different spirit, or preaching another Jesus (cf. 2 Cor 11:4)?

Some in Galatia were holding up circumcision and the works of the old law over and against faith working through love in Christ, the love which in truth fulfills the whole law (cf. Gal 5:6,14). This excessive regard for externals I don’t think is the typical error of our age, but we are inclined toward other errors.

Sometimes, we excessively internalize our faith. We regard it as a private matter, not something to be discussed in public. We are sometimes cowards and we sometimes fail to acknowledge Christ before others. Today, Christ tells us that if we acknowledge him before others, he will acknowledge us before his Father. That is, he will make us his saints. Likewise, if we deny him, he will deny us before his Father (Matt 10:32-33).

If we love Jesus, we will keep his commandments (John 14:15). Among other things, He commands us to acknowledge him before others (Matt 10:32). He commands us to go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16:15). And he commands us to baptize every nation in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19).

If we keep these commandments, Christ will acknowledge us before his Father (Matt 10:32). He will remember us forever. And so we will live forever in him, our resurrected Lord. In Christ, we will know the Father, which is eternal life (John 17:3). This is holiness indeed: oneness with God. This is what it is to be a saint.  

This word “saint” is interesting. If we look at the Greek, ἅγιος, it’s the same as the word for holy. Sometimes Greek has many words for which we have only one, as in the case of “love,” but sometimes, it goes the other way and they have one word, for which we have many. And this is the case with the word ἅγιος, which means holy, which means saint, which means sanctuary (e.g Heb 8:2). At times, even Jesus is simply called the Holy – ὁ ἅγιος (e.g. Mark 1:24). This is worth keeping in mind when we think about the saints. Saint and Holy are utterly synonymous. There is no difference at all in the mind of the fathers, or in the mind of Paul. There are not two holinesses, but one holiness. If someone or something is holy, it can only be because they are partakers of the one holiness.

The single greatest teaching of the second Vatican council, in my opinion, is that there is a universal call to holiness. This is not a new teaching. Not by any stretch.  This was already the teaching revealed by the Lord God through Moses in the wilderness of Sinai 3,310 years ago – or so. The Lord our God says in all ages, “be holy, for I am holy” (Lev 11:44-45).

There’s a tall order. The holiness of the Lord our God cannot be overstated. Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord, the God of hosts. Three times holy is he. In Hebrew, this is a superlative. He is the holiest one and the source of all holiness, in whom is any holiness that is.

Yet, as the Lord, he is God of hosts, that is, as Fr. Stephen Freeman puts it, God of a huge crowd. He is in and with and surrounded by his saints. “Orthodox worship and prayer,” Fr. Stephen writes, “is simply crowded. Though we worship only the Triune God, we nevertheless do so in company with a ‘great cloud of witnesses.’” God, who alone is holy, has chosen not to be alone in his holiness, but to surround himself with those he has made holy, those he has made one with himself by his grace.

In the Divine Liturgy, after the consecration, the priest holds the holy lamb and says, “Holy gifts to holy people.” Does this mean you have to be a saint in order to come forward to receive Holy Communion? Yes, it does! There is no difference between “saint” and “holy.”

Then how do we become saints? None of us is sinless – but among the saints are sinners, every degree of sinner, and every kind of sinner – just like us. So when I say, yes, we have to be holy before we come forward, we have to be saints before we receive the holy things which are for the holy ones, I am speaking of a miracle of God’s mercy and grace with which we cooperate through prayer and humility and confession of our sins. We do not make ourselves saints, the Lord makes us saints.

Every saint he makes is unique. We honor them all. We need them all. Just as in one body, every member is different, yet every member needs the others for the whole body to thrive (cf. Rom 12:4-5). Every person that God makes, God wants and needs for his purposes. We are wanted and needed by God. We should seek God’s purpose for our own lives. As Fr. Thomas Hopko points out, if we are condemned or damned it will not be because we are not the Theotokos, or we are not John the Baptist, or we are not Isaac the Syrian. It will be because we are not truly ourselves. It is for not being who God created us to be that we could be damned. The ultimate authority on who we should be and what we should do is our author and creator.

He reveals a lot of this to us through the Church, so don’t think this means that we can go it alone. Because God gave us the Church to guide us into holiness, that is, into the person that God made each of us to be. Going it alone was never his vision for any human being. We are communal creatures. We are a community of persons, in the image of God, who is a community of persons. The Church is that community - that coming together as one with God and one another.

Abba Dorotheos of Gaza has a beautiful image of a wheel, in which the center – the axis – is God, and each of us are somewhere along the spokes of the wheel. You see, the closer we get to God, the closer we get to each other. Also, the further we get from God, the further we get from each other.

For this reason, it makes no sense to receive communion – to enter into communion with God – if we have animosity toward our brother or sister (Matt 5:23-24). There is no communion with God without communion with one another. First of all, we must “be reconciled with everyone and have no animosity toward anyone.” This is the first rubric in the Liturgikon.

Before we dare to approach with the fear of God and with faith, we pray that the holy mysteries be for our healing and not for our condemnation. We pray that the Lord make us worthy to receive. And we pray for mercy. This prayer – this Kyrie eleison – is our path to holiness. Holiness never comes from relying on the self, but rather on the one to whom we pray. To rely on the Lord, who alone is holy and who alone can make us holy.

So, when the priest holds the Eucharist in his hands and says, “Holy gifts to holy people” what can we say? We can only say, “One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father.” All holiness that is comes from the holy one.

The holy one, Jesus Christ, teaches us how to be holy in today’s gospel. We must confess Christ before others, we must love him more than all others, even more than our fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. And we must take up our cross and follow him (Matt 10:37-38). These are Jesus’ own words. This is his prescription for holiness.

When we are baptized into Christ, we are clothed with Christ and we begin to become one with him. We must thereafter imitate him, especially in his self-sacrificial love, to remain and grow toward ever greater union with the holy one, Jesus Christ, who is one in essence with the Father who is holy.