After faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

St Mary Sunday is one of those days in the Orthodox year with two Gospels and two Epistles. The cross-reading of Hebrews and Galatians, Mark and Luke, creates an interesting experience, no? The life of St Mary (as it is read in our Liturgy this week) is equally interesting, important for our own edification as well as our education.

If you read it, you will discover something important. Yes, I know: it seems mythological, perhaps. But “real” or “not real”, take a look at the story that the Church tells herself every year. Notice something. Apart from Fr Zosima, who brings the Holy Mysteries to Mary once in the story, we are told only of one other “church” event in Mary’s life: her confession and communion prior to her departure for the wilderness. Mary struggles and makes her peace with her body and her God on her own without benefit of Church or Clergy, with no books or internet. Yes, she’s a Christian – this we have clear – but she’s not one like we want to be…

You know the rules of the fast, do you not? WHen to eat fish and wine and oil, when meatfare is and cheesefare? You know how to avoid these things when you are out about, right? You know how long to fast before communion, or – if you are well read – the other rules of the communion fast as well.

But you know… Mary knows none of this.

We can run down a long list of the things Mary does not know – save by divine revelation (see how well she quotes the scriptures at the end of her life). But she struggles to know God as best she can, given her life, her place, her own experience. She learns that she needs humility and the help of Our Lady to draw near o the Son of God. But her own struggles, her own journey is her own. Not that of the Church.

This is the story the Church tells herself every year, the Sunday before Palm Sunday, the Sunday before we enter into the Holiest Journey of the Year.

Why?

When I was a new convert to Orthodoxy, one of the things that Converts – especially – use to tell me was about the “infallibility” of the Church. The Romans say that the Pope is infallible in matters of faith and doctrine. The Converts like to say the Orthodox Church is likewise. Of course we have no power to make doctrinal statements about such things, so we don’t have the clarification of “matters of faith and doctrine”. We just have that “perfect church” claim. One priest even told me – several times – that the Nicene Creed posited the Church as fourth in line after Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Those same people like to pretend that things have never changed here – as if this Divine Liturgy we serve has not changed since the upper room, as if the Church calendar, the festivals, fasting rules and rites, were handed to us in toto by Jesus himself, prior to his Ascension. As if our English language prayerbook is merely a new tranlastion of a text used in the 1st century.

But Mary knows none of this. Even if she was raised until 12 in the Church, scholars from Thomas Talley to Alexander Schmemman, from Dom Gregory Dix to Hugh Wybrew will tell you that her liturgy was radically different from ours. The rites and traditions she knew would have been strange to our eyes – involving more processions, more readings at “stations”, more psalms chanted in antiphonal ways.

Mary’s church was very different from ours – as ours is different from the early church. It’s not a case of needing to go backwards to recapture the way it was before (before VAtican II, before the Great Schism, before Constantine, before Paul) but rather it is a matter of our salvation, our wholenesss

Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

What Mary knows she was taught by God. And he, alone, has drawn her to salvation. In his own ways. This is the story the Church tells herself in Lent.

We have it good here: the ways of our ancestors distilled and passed to us to maintain. The ways of the Church from 2000 years, encoded and entrenched. We have texts and the internet, we have music recordings and telecommunications. We can beam this liturgy around the world. But, ultimately, we shall have to each work our our salvation with fear and trembling. We may have it Good – but in the good, we have no easy. If we think we have it easy we are lost.

We want to take the ways of the Church and make them into the Law – another Tutor. But, instead what we have are tools. The ways of the Church are not laws but tools for us to work our our salvation, our wholeness, our communion with one another.

Hebrews 7:7-17 Epistle, Meeting
Luke 2:22-40 Gospel, Meeting

A sketch…

The Sunday of Forgiveness.
The Expulsion from the Garden.
Valentines day on the Secular calendar.*
The Eve of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple on the CHurch’s calendar.

*And the Western Church calendar: St Valentine is commemorated in the Summer on the Eastern Calendar.

You know the story: after sinning, God comes walking in the Garden in the cool of the evening…

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

And I can imagine all kinds of things… but the patristic comment I most like to see here is God weeping for loneliness.

And then there is this story:

And when the parents brought in the Child Jesus, to do for Him according to the custom of the law, Symeon took Him up in his arms and blessed God and said: Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, According to Your word; For my eyes have seen Your salvation…

And I imagine all kinds of things, including God weeping in Symeon’s arms, having come home, at last.

How is it that we reject our lover?

How is it that we stand naked before the one who knows us most intimately from age to age, and yet we try to hide. And how is it that when he returns to claim us re, finally, rejoice.

How have I sinned against you? How do I find myself hiding from you, afraid to love you, afraid to let you love me?
Like I do God.
As I do to God when I do so to you…

And we prostrate as equals before each other. But God comes as a child to be held in our arms.

This lover.
This light.

How is it that when we were in paradise, we did not want it. And without it we want nothing more?

We are so used to seeing Lent as reparation for our sins, fasting as a chance to drive away lust and greet and gluttony. But what if it is, instead, the long stretch in the gym before the prom night or the spa treatments before the big interview. What if lent is like the diet we take before the wedding…

When our lover will take us in his arms
And kiss us with the kisses of his mouth
and lead us into the bridal chamber
and close the door gently
and ravish us for eternity in love.

let us begin by so loving each other…