THE ENTRY OF THE MOST HOLY THEOTOKOS INTO THE TEMPLE

The Entry of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Temple is a feast that can easily be perceived as a fairy tale. Knowing biblical science, based on the knowledge of biblical studies available to us, we cannot imagine anyone entering the Holy of Holies, let alone living and staying there permanently. This is impossible both historically and theologically. If this were violated, it would contradict the Law of God, about which Jesus Himself said that He came not to destroy it, but to fulfill it. The Church is a Society of Believers and a Community of Interpreters. It is necessary to seek a proper spiritual, theological, and “heavenly” understanding of the feast.

Then the Feast of the Presentation unexpectedly takes on sad, mournful contours. Mary enters the Temple. The child is consecrated to God. This is a great celebration. The Church could not find the right words and images. Therefore she expressed it in a magnificent narrative about the dwelling of the Virgin Mary in the Holy of Holies. The sacred melancholy of the feast lies in the fact that it is actually a farewell to the Temple. The Mother of God enters the Sanctuary of God. The biblical Temple is a place of prayer for many, many centuries, for countless generations of believers. Great multitudes of people prayed in it, waited in it for the Messiah, who was about to enter. They wept, like the Prophet Jeremiah, when the Temple was destroyed by Babylon, and rejoiced when it was rebuilt. Before His Passion on the Cross, the Lord Himself looked at Jerusalem for the last time and wept. He loved this Temple very much.

The necessary inexorability of the divine plan of salvation predetermined that the temple would be abolished. Mary enters the Temple, signifying this great abrogation. For us, a moral application is revealed. Just as Mary entered the Temple for the first time in her life and greeted its stones, and the walls sang in response at the sight of her, so we, entering the temple, the church, and, most importantly, leaving it, must do so as if it were happening for the last time. We say goodbye to the temple as if the day were already coming, which will inevitably come for each of us in our lives, and it will be our last day.

We will no longer see the temple of God. For it is said in the Apocalypse that in the Heavenly Jerusalem, which will descend from Heaven, there is no temple and there will be no temple. God Himself and the Lamb of God will be the Temple for people. Moreover, we are already the Temple. We receive the Body and Blood of Christ. We are the Body of Christ, and His Blood flows in us. We are truly living temples. Let us be careful not to offend the divine presence. We ourselves, as the great prophet and teacher Simeon the New Theologian (949–1022) taught, become the Mother of God, because in the Eucharist, each time, God is born in us again and again through the Holy Spirit. The only way to attain immortality is to live the immortality of God, Who, “dwelling in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16), brings us all to His being.