By Fr. Daniel Sysoev
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!
I congratulate you all on the great feast of the Nativity of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary! On the very day of the Nativity of the Theotokos, we both rejoice and exult, because she is born who, according to the flesh, gave birth to the Son of God for us. The best of all the daughters of mankind has been born. We can say that the birth of the Theotokos is the greatest of all human births. This, of course, is not the birth according to the flesh of the Son of God, whose vessel the Most Pure Mother of God became, but it is the culmination of all the births that took place in ancient times. We know that the Holy Scripture of the Old Testament and the very practice of the people of ancient times taught that the greatest blessing that can be bestowed upon a person is the birth of a son or daughter, and not simply the birth of a human being, but the birth of a righteous person. This was considered the greatest blessing in ancient times.
The Lord said: “And if you will listen to these ordinances and keep and observe them, then the Lord your God will keep the covenant and mercy with you, as He swore to your fathers, and He will love you and bless you and multiply you, and He will bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your land” (Deut. 7:13–14).
To many emancipated young women of today, and to worldly men, this may seem abnormal. But God is the source of life, and it is His will that there be more living beings. And the perception of childbearing as a great blessing from God is precisely connected with the perception of God as the Living God.
One of the favorite expressions of the Bible, an oath by which people swore at that time, is: “As the Lord lives, and as your soul lives, I will not leave you” (4 Kings 2:6).
Today’s feast is the day of the manifestation of life, and not simply life, but life in its fullest sense. For in the newly born maiden Mary were joined together the prophecy of the prophets, the righteousness of the righteous, the struggles of the patriarchs, and the courage of the ancient Maccabean martyrs. And the whole river of human history comes together so that the life of God might fashion something new. What is the mystery of birth? Indeed, it is something strangely incomprehensible. On the one hand, we know that conception partakes of defilement. Corruption is transmitted to us, the original sin that enters into a person at the moment of conception; therefore no one is born pure. We know that even the Most Pure Mother of God was in need of salvation, as she herself said: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46–47).
Even the Mother of God was not free from this corruption of original sin. But at the same time, birth is the moment when God Himself touches a human being. And in birth is contained the whole subsequent destiny of a person, who is torn between Divine life—the life of man—and sin, which corrupts this life. Sin first ruins it through false pleasures, and then it simply destroys it. In the birth of the Theotokos, life triumphs! It is not without reason that her birth was accompanied by a miracle similar to the miracle of the birth of Abraham’s son Isaac when Abraham was one hundred years old. So also the Theotokos was born of parents who were barren and already very old. Thus she became a child of prayers.
Saint Luke of Simferopol and Saint Theophan the Recluse ask themselves one and the same question: “Why do children have different faces from birth?” And they answer that the human spirit forms its body according to its own inclinations. We know that God fashions our bodies, but He fashions them through our soul, which, by its evil orientation, can spoil the action of the hand of God. Sometimes a person is marked from the beginning with the seal of sin; sometimes a person is marked from birth with the seal of holiness. When the newborn, very frail, three-day-old girl who would later become the well-known occultist Helena Blavatsky was baptized, a girl who was playing nearby—the daughter of a priest—set his vestment on fire, and he was badly burned. This was a kind of sign from God that in the future this newborn girl would become a great evildoer. There was a great persecutor of Christians, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine V Copronymos (718–775), who destroyed the holy icons. The Greek word kopronymos means “named after excrement” or “dung-named.” This nickname was given to him because he defecated during his baptism, at the time of his immersion in the baptismal font. This moment indicates that the seal of evil is already at work in the child; this, of course, is connected with the inheritance imparted by the parents.
On the other hand, there is also an inclination toward righteousness that manifests itself in a person even in infancy. The Theotokos, who was the fruit of her parents’ prayers, is a typical example of this. The birth of the Theotokos, like our own birth, was prepared through many generations. For us to appear, an enormous number of people had to meet and enter into physical relations. The Mother of God was especially foreknown by God the Father before creation, appointed to become a Mother to the Son of God. She was prepared through seventy-seven generations, beginning with Adam, so that in her, as in a focal point, all righteousness might converge. Righteousness itself, of course, is not inherited. If a righteous man has a sinful son, neither the father nor the mother is to blame, because here the free choice of the human being is at work. But there is a certain given disposition; for example, among Russians this is manifested in the fact that we belong to the white race, and that we possess certain talents characteristic of it, but not talents characteristic of other races. God has endowed different races with different talents.
Apart from genetic inheritance, there is also a given disposition toward righteousness. This is manifested in the fact that the righteousness of parents nourishes the spirit of their child and makes his choice in the direction of God easier. A person who has grown up in a righteous family possesses a stronger spirit than one who was born into an ungodly family. The problem of the present generations in Russia is that many of us have parents, grandfathers, and grandmothers who come not from Christians but from atheists and communists who engaged in militant opposition to God, and this weakens the spirit of a person. Although we can compensate for this deficiency by calling upon God, just as our ancestors compensated for it by embracing Christianity, because the power of God is capable of raising a person up. But when many generations concern themselves with a certain goal, that goal is achieved. And the birth of the Theotokos is the attainment of the goal toward which all humanity in general, and the Jewish people in particular, had been striving for many centuries. Indeed, Mary would not have existed if Abraham had refused to undertake that fearful sacrifice—to offer his son as a sacrifice to God. Mary would not have existed if it had not been for the nobility of David, the manliness and meekness of Moses, the heroism of Joshua, the wisdom of Daniel, and the holiness of the ancient kings of Israel.
All this righteousness did not pass in vain. Mary appeared as the realization of that toward which many prophets had striven. Her spirit, created at the moment of the miraculous conception of Joachim and Anna, from the beginning burned with the desire for communion with God, which permeated Mary from the moment of conception. And the justice of the matter is that the Lord heard the prayers of the ancients and answered them with the birth of the Most Pure Virgin. The purpose for which the world exists is manifested here today: a human being is born who embodies the accumulated holiness of all the many millennia of humanity’s existence and who desired to realize this holiness in its fullness. The human being is born who desired completely to become God-bearing, despite the sin corroding him and the mark of mortality lying upon him. This is the wondrous and marvelous event that we celebrate today, and it reminds us that all our actions, whether good or evil, never affect only ourselves. Our life is like a stone thrown into a pond: the stone is already at the bottom, but the ripples continue to move across the water. In the same way, our deeds, both evil and good, act upon the whole world to varying degrees.
Therefore the Apostle Paul says that “if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Cor. 12:26).
Therefore, if one Christian sins, the whole Church is pained; and if he does a good deed, that too spreads throughout the Church. This happens because good and evil deeds concern everyone and are reflected upon everyone. Prayer can change all people, and I know many examples of this; and each of you has probably encountered situations in which prayer changed the most unimaginable circumstances. Not only prayer, but also a good word is capable of changing a person. How many people have been saved from suicide through an ordinary kind word, ordinary support! This is what we see, but there are deeper dimensions of the reality of the spiritual worlds, to which a person also relates by his soul, and which are likewise influenced by our good and evil deeds.
For example, consciously committed evil increases the power of Satan, just as consciously committed good diminishes the power of Satan. A person must therefore understand that everything depends upon his choice!
Today, on the day of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, glorifying God, who has given us our great intercessor and protectress, let us pray to the Most Pure Mother of God that, just as she became the fruit of the prayers and righteousness of all the generations of old, so through her prayers we too may bring forth the blessing of God for our descendants, friends, relatives, and loved ones, so that we too may become a source of blessing at least for our own family lineage, to say nothing of all the nations of the earth, as the Most Pure Mother of God became, in whom we have all received blessing and in whom the ancient prophecy of God was fulfilled, the prophecy in which He said (Gen. 3:15).
May God help us through the prayers of the Most Pure Mother of God, the Ever-Virgin!
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
