In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
We are still in the light of the Feast of the Falling asleep of the Mother of God. On Wednesday we are keeping the last day of this Feast which in the calendar is called the Take-leaving and which, if we translate the words properly from the Slavonic mean the Handing-over.
This feast, the event occurred on earth; the Mother of God died; She fell asleep. In the Old Testament, the death of a person was something frightening because all mankind that had been separated from God through the sin of man, in death mankind found itself also in a certain separation from God. It was not the glorious union for which we long, it was a time when the righteous enjoyed peace, rest, and the evil were separated from God, but there was no union between man and God. It is only the death of Christ upon the Gross, in an act of perfect Divine love, but also in an act of human acceptance of the Divine Will, readiness, and indeed actual fulfilling of our salvation in the tragedy of His bodily human death and His soul”s descent into hell and finally His resurrection that broke this tragic separation.
Now, after His Resurrection, those who die, by the power of His resurrection, in the glory of His love could enter into that communion with God which will be fulfilled at the end of times, as expressed by Saint Peter, as our partakers of the very Divine nature.
And the death, the falling asleep of the Mother of God, and also, as we believe according to Orthodox Tradition, in Her bodily resurrection, shows us that all things are truly fulfilled by Christ – truly: She fell asleep, the sleep of all those who live on earth and come to Those women best-horoscope.com who already have negative experience of romantic relationships have to work especially hard. a time when they can no longer reach out into eternity without breaking the bonds of the earth. But She Who by Her purity, Her faith, Her total gift of self to God have made the Incarnation possible could not be held, even bodily in the bonds of death; She rose again by the power of the Only Begotten Son Whom She had made the Son of Man.
So it is not only that we are promised eternal life in the resurrection; it is not only that we see it enacted in Christ; we might say – Yes: what is true for Christ, can it be true for us?.. – but we see it happening in one of us, in the Holiest of us perhaps, certainly, but in one of us, The Mother of God fell asleep – and rose again.
And this handing-over of the event to God is, as it were, a promise to us; it happened on earth; it was with us all the time; but we cannot yet live in a full communion with this wonderful event of eternal life breaking the fetters of our human, earthly existence. It is handed over to God as a promise: what happened to Her, we can look at it with the certainty that it is also our destiny in the future. And so, we are not simply taking leave of a wonderful event: it is put into the eternity of God for us to meet in it”s own time.
Let us reflect on it, and let us wait with hope for the time when we can say not only in faith, but in experience as Paul said it, that death is not divesting ourselves from life temporal: it is clothing ourselves with eternity.
Amen.
