DORMITION OF THE THEOTOKOS

Nine days after the Transfiguration, on August 28 (15), the Church celebrates the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Dormition is not death. And there is not a simple, but a prophetic analogy between Mary and her exodus, this “Great Dormition,” and the “small dormition,” the death of every person, which in the language of theology is called “prototypical.” The faith of the Church is convinced that the death of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was not ordinary. Unlike any other human death, it was not, or, better yet, did not become a parting with life for Mary. Hence the name of the Dormition, that is, a kind of mysterious completion, cover and, at the same time, sleep.

Knowledge about God consists of theology and economy. This is exactly how the Ancient Church divided the knowledge of God into theology and economy, or, in the outdated transliteration, oikonomia. Within the framework of this logic, theology is what God is in Himself: the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Even if the world had not been created, God would always have been and would always remain, Himself. He is the One and Only God. At the same time, Christianity has always been, is and will be a confession of the strictest monotheism. “I believe in One God,” says the Creed.

Oikonomia is the Divine Economy, that is, the implementation of His saving plan in relation to the world created from nothingness. And most importantly, this is God’s redemptive work, the salvation of His beloved creation, whose name is man. This is redemption and salvation, the raising of man from the abyss of destruction, deliverance from sin, curse and death. Sin is lost glory, and therefore deliverance from sin becomes for a person his introduction into the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

According to the Creed, the beginning of the revelation of the oikonomic mystery was laid by the Incarnation of God. “I believe in the One Lord Jesus… incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,” the Symbol further says. God entered History, and, according to biblical texts and their Christian exegesis, the place of contact, the topos, or the threshold of the Coming of the Lord, became the Most Holy Mother of God. During the year, poetically called in liturgical texts the “Year of the Lord,” the Church repeatedly celebrates feasts in honor of the Mother of Jesus, as Scripture calls the Mary (cf. Acts 1:14).

All of them are in one way or another connected with the divine economy of salvation: the Conception of the Virgin by Joachim and Anna, the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the Entry into the Temple, the Annunciation, the Presentation. All these holidays, one way or another, relate to the mystery of the divine economy. They are directly connected to the Earthly Life of the Lord Jesus, and are aimed at fulfilling the Work of God in the Death on the Cross and Resurrection. What about the Dormition? Paradoxically, it turns out that it is the only feast of the Mother of God that seems to have nothing to do with house-building, since the latter was already completed at the moment of the Dormition.

After all, the Cross, the Sepulcher, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Sitting at the Right Hand of the Father, the Second and Glorious Second Coming—as stated in the Eucharistic Prayer of the Church—are already, once and for all, inscribed in the history of the salvation of the world in Jesus Christ.

According to the logic of the literal static perception of dogmatic things, the Dormition is, as it were, placed “outside the brackets of the economy.” But we also can perceive it differently. After all, the mystery of the Truth about the Assumption, prepared by the Redeemer Himself, is directly related to both human existence and the dogma of the Second Coming. After all, the Parousia of the Lord Jesus is mentioned in the orthodox liturgy in the past tense, but historically it has not yet taken place.

In this sense, the exegetes of the last century were right when they said that the truth about the Second Coming is the only dogma that follows the logic of the simultaneous fulfillment of “already and not yet.” They also reproached those who forget about this truth of dogma and history and they are right. One of them, in his critical inspiration, proclaimed: “The eschatological shop of the Church has closed.” Let us remember that eschatology is the theology about the end of history, the last times and, most importantly, the Second Coming of the Lord.

Unlike all other Mother of God feasts, in the Event of the Dormition, the Church, as a Society of Believers, is primarily made a contemporary of the Blessed Virgin. To understand this, we can turn to the Eucharistic prayer of St John Chrysostom. After the Transubstantiation of the Gifts, the priest, and with him the entire Church, prays: “We also offer You this verbal, or, better yet, rational service for all those who have died in the faith: forefathers, fathers, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, preachers, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, abstinents and about every righteous spirit who has departed in faith. And especially, that is firstly—about the Most Holy, Most Pure, Most Blessed, our Glorious Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary.”

These words are pronounced by the Community through the lips of the priest after the Presentation of the Gifts. The commemoration of the liturgy unites all those who have fallen asleep in Christ, who are now alive and living before the Throne of God, with those who are alive here and now and gather before the altar of the earthly temple. They reflect the worldview of the contemporaries of the Blessed Virgin. Her contemporaries were those who were directly connected with the Apostolic Circle, with the first generations of the apostolic disciples, who all personally remembered and knew the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of Jesus, living here on earth.

For these first, holy people—Christians in the true sense of the word—there was fundamentally no difference between those who still stand before God in the prayer of the Eucharist, and those who, like the Blessed Virgin, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, and the entire Infinite Cloud of Witnesses (Heb.12:1), intercede before God in the communion of saints. These texts, in their meaning, go back to the contemporaries of the Blessed Virgin. They are worthy of being perceived with attention, contemplation and wisdom. These are the living words of the Ecclesia—the Assembly of the Church—they include us among the Contemporaries of God by the Holy Spirit.

According to Orthodox dogmatics, the Mother of God, whom the Church glorifies as the more Honest than the Cherubim and the more Glorious without comparison than the Seraphim, nevertheless had to die. And this is the great and incomprehensible mystery of the truth about the Dormition of the Mother of Jesus. Becoming contemporaries of the apostolic community, and therefore of the dying Most Holy Virgin, the Church contemplates this abolition of the Sacrament of the Life of the One who gave life to the Life of the World.

In liturgical prayer the Christian Community is given the grace of becoming a contemporary of the Apostles. This is how the Church is given an understanding of how those who saw and knew Her perceived her. She always lived in the Presence of her Son. According to Tradition, it was Mary who was the first to see the Risen Lord. Mary lived by the appearance of the Risen Glorified Messiah the Savior. The Apostolic Community waited for the Return of the Lord Jesus, it lived for His Second Coming. It directly experienced His approach as if He had already knocked on the door (cf. Rev. 3:20), inexorably moving towards the world, history and His Church. The Apostles and Mary expected the Coming of the Lord Jesus realistically and directly.

Perhaps it is precisely in this “too strong”, great and amazing expectation that lies the reason why so little was written and said in Scripture and Tradition about the circumstances of the earthly life of the Theotokos. Thus there was a great intuition that circumstances and details that are not directly related to the preaching and proclamation of the Coming of Jesus, no matter how spiritual and majestic they may be, are not really important. The Lord was approaching and the Community, together with Mary, proclaimed it. “Whoever does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be cursed, anathema, our Lord is coming, maran-atha!” Paul writes about this (cf. 1 Cor. 16:22).

In the symbolism of the Event of the Assumption, as well as in the popular piety of the feast, much becomes obvious: Mary’s child’s soul is in the hands of the Lord; the body is already resurrected by Him to the Kingdom of God and the Father. Thus, in Mary and her Assumption, the Great Mystery appears; it is the Mystery of what awaits a person in Jesus Christ. This Mystery, as if not noticed by theology, lies in the fact that the Completion of the divine economy—in a different, human perspective—is visibly contained in the Mystery of the Dormition.

This is a story about the mystery of life about those who left us and the mystery of life for all of us. The Lord resurrected the Blessed Virgin, already approaching His Second Coming. The Dormition means that after the last time of the Summer of the Lord, the Autumn of History begins. “Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to reward everyone according to his deeds,” written in the Apocalypse (Rev. 22:12). After all, Jesus is returning, He has already crossed the threshold.