In the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit!
I congratulate you all on the great holiday – the Nativity of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary! On the very day of the Nativity of the Mother of God we both rejoice and exult, because She is born who gave birth to the Son of God in the flesh for us.The best of all the daughters of men was born. We can say that the birth of the Virgin is the greatest of human births.
Of course,this is not the birth of the Son of God in the flesh, whose vessel became the Most Pure Mother of God, but this is the completion of all childbirths that were in antiquity. You and I know that the Holy Scripture of the Old Testament and the very practice of ancient people said that the greatest blessing that can be for a person is the birth of a son or daughter, and the birth of not just a person, but the birth of a righteous man. This was the greatest blessing in antiquity.
God said:”…if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the LORD thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers:And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land…”(Deut.7:12-13).
For many modern emancipated young ladies, for worldly men this seems abnormal. But God is the source of life, and He wants more people to be living. And the perception of childbearing as a great blessing of God is connected precisely with the perception of God as the Living God.
One of the favorite expressions of the Bible, the oath that people swore then, is:”As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee”(2Kin.2:6).
Today’s holiday is the day of the manifestation of life, and not just life, but life par excellence. Because in the newborn maiden Mary the prophecy of the prophets, the righteousness of the righteous, the deeds of the patriarchs, the courage of the ancient martyrs of Maccabees were united together. And the whole river of human history comes together so that the life of God can mold something new for itself. What is the sacrament of birth? Indeed, this is something strange and incomprehensible. On the one hand, we know that conception is implicated in filth. We are given corruption, original sin, which enters a person at the moment of conception, so no one is born clean. We know that even the Most Pure Mother of God needed salvation, as she herself said:”…My soul doth magnify the Lord,And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour”(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 person. And in the very birth lies the whole future fate of a person who is torn between the Divine life – the life of a person and sin, which corrupts this life. Sin first spoils it with false pleasures, and then it simply destroys it. In the birth of the Mother of God, life triumphs! No wonder that Her birth was accompanied by a miracle, similar to the miracle of the birth of Abraham, who gave birth to a son, Isaac, at a hundred years old. Also, the Mother of God was born from barren parents who were already in extreme old age. Thus she became a child of prayers.
Saint Luke Voino-Yasenetsky and Saint Theophan the Recluse ask the same question: “Why do children have different faces from birth?” And they answer that the human spirit forms a body for itself according to its own inclinations. We know that God molds our bodies, but He molds them through our soul, which can spoil the action of the hand of God with its evil orientation. It happens that a person from the beginning is marked with the seal of sin, it happens that a person from birth is marked with the seal of holiness. When a newborn, very weak girl of three days old, the future famous sorceress Helena Blavatsky, was baptized, the girl who was naughty nearby – the daughter of a priest, set fire to his phelonion, and he was badly burned. It was some kind of a sign from God that in the future this newborn girl would turn out to be a great villainess. There was a great persecutor of Christians, the Byzantine emperor Constantine Copronymus (718-775), who destroyed holy icons. The Greek word “copronym” means “shit-named”, “dung”. This nickname was given to him because he defecated during baptism, while immersing himself in the font. This moment suggests that the seal of evil is already affecting the child, of course, it is due to the reserve that the parents gave.
On the other hand, there is also a direction to righteousness, which manifests itself in a person even in infancy. A typical example of this is the Mother of God, who was the fruit of the prayers of Her parents. The birth of the Mother of God, like our birth, was prepared by many generations. To make it possible that we appear, a huge number of people had to meet and enter into carnal relationships. The Mother of God was especially foreknown by God the Father before creation, She was intended to become the Mother of the Son of God. She was prepared for seventy-seven generations, beginning with Adam, so that all righteousness would converge on Her as a focus. Righteousness, of course, is not inherited by itself. If a sinner son is born to a righteous man, then neither the father nor the mother is to blame for this, because the free choice of a person works here. But there is a certain predestination, for instance, among Russians it manifests itself in the fact that we belong to the white race, and we have certain talents inherent in it, but there are no talents typical for other races. God gave different talents to different races.
In addition to genetic, there is a predetermined righteousness. This is manifested in the fact that the righteousness of the parents feeds the spirit of their child, facilitates his choice towards God. A person raised in a righteous family has a stronger spirit than one born in a godless family. The problem of the current Russian generations is that many of us have parents, grandfathers, and grandmothers not from Christians, but from atheists, communists who were engaged in theomachism, and this weakens the human spirit. Although we, calling on God, can compensate for this shortcoming, as our ancestors compensated for it by accepting Christianity, because the power of God is able to lift a person. But when many generations take care of a certain goal, then it is achieved. And the birth of the Mother of God is the achievement of the goal that all mankind in general and the Jewish people in particular have been striving for for many centuries. Indeed, Mary would not exist if Abraham refused to make a terrible sacrifice (to sacrifice his son to God). Mary would not exist if not for the nobility of David, if not for the courage and meekness of Moses, if not for the heroism of Jesus Joshua, if not for the wisdom of Daniel, and if not for the holiness of the ancient kings of Israel.
All this righteousness was not in vain, Mary was the realization of what many prophets aspired to. Her spirit, created at the moment of the miraculous conception of Joachim and Anna, initially burned in the desire for communion with God, which permeated Mary from the moment of conception. And justice here 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 here today, a person of accumulated holiness is born over all the millennia of human existence, She wanted to realize this holiness in its entirety. A person is born Who wants to become completely God-bearing, despite the sin that corrodes Her and the seal of mortality that lies on Her. This is an amazing and wonderful event that we celebrate today, and it reminds us that all our actions, good or evil, never concern only you and me. Our life is like a stone thrown into a pond: the stone is already at the bottom, but the circles are still moving on the water. It is the same with our actions, both evil and good, in varying degrees, but they affect the whole world.
That is why the apostle Paul says that “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it”(1Cor.12:26).
Therefore, if one Christian sinned, then the whole Church becomes sick, and if he did a good deed, then it also spreads to the whole Church. This is because good and evil deeds affect everyone and are reflected in everyone. Prayer can change all people, and I know many examples of this, and each of you probably faced when prayer changed the most unthinkable situations. Not only prayer, but also a kind word can change a person. How many people have been saved from suicide by a simple kind word, a simple support!
This is what we see, but there are deeper types of the reality of the spiritual worlds, to which a person also relates according to his soul, which is also influenced by his good and evil deeds. For instance, with consciously done evil the power of Satan increases, just as with consciously done good the power of Satan decreases. Therefore, a person must understand that everything depends on his choice!
Today, on the day of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, glorifying God, who gave us our great Intercessor and Protector, let us pray to the Most Pure Theotokos so that we could give birth to the blessing of God for our descendants, friends, relatives and friends, so that you and I become a source of blessing at least for our generation, I’m not talking about all the people of the earth, Who was the Most Pure Mother of God, in Whom we all received a blessing and in Whom the ancient prophecy of God was fulfilled who said: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel”(Gen.3:15).
May God help us through the prayers of the Most Pure Theotokos Ever-Virgin!