What then is this sacramental union of marriage? The Holy Gospel states, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding for his son’ (Matthew 22:2). Who does our Lord Jesus Christ identify as King in this passage? It is none other than God the Father Himself. For whom did the Father establish marriage if not for His only begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ? Which daughter of a king did the Sovereign of all choose to be the bride for His Son? When an earthly father seeks a bride for his son, he typically chooses someone of nobility or wealth greater than his own. Yet, who could possibly be found who is even remotely equal to God to take as His Son’s bride? The prophets proclaim this King as the One who encompasses the earth and sees its inhabitants as mere shadows (Is. 40:22), the eternal God who directs the ends of the earth (Is. 40:28) and sets its foundations in emptiness (Job 38:6), who gazes upon the earth and causes it to tremble (Ps. 103:32). Whose daughter, then, did such a King choose to marry His Son? It is a revelation that stirs my soul. I want to speak with reverence and humility. Yet, inspired again by His boundless grace, I find the courage to say that He chose as His bride the daughter of one who sinned against Him, who committed adultery and murder; He embraced the daughter of a sinner. Can you see the unspeakable and incomparable kindness, the overwhelming love for humanity? Can you witness the immeasurable ocean of love and grace? Anyone who considers themselves to be important should learn from this to remain humble and never disdain another, regardless of whether they may be a king or the wealthiest noble. Let them look to the Lord and Sovereign of all, the Holy One, the blessed God who dwells in the unfathomable light, and behold His great condescension, whereby He chose the daughter of a fornicating and murderous man to be the spouse of His only begotten Son, the invisible and ineffable Creator of all, for your sake and salvation. And who is this fornicator and murderer whose daughter God selected to be His bride? It is David, son of Jesse, who plotted Uriah’s death and took his wife. His daughter, Mary the virgin, who is pure and immaculate, was chosen to be His bride. I refer to her as blameless and holy in contrast to us, her servants; yet compared to her Bridegroom and His Father, I recognize her as a woman, one who is holy and exalted above all others, faultless in her generation. Thus, He chose the Virgin Mary to be betrothed to His Son. How was this accomplished? Pay close attention. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ dispatched one of His messengers, the Archangel Gabriel, from the heights of heaven to the Virgin, proclaiming, ‘Rejoice.’ He descended to earth to serve the sacrament, saying, ‘Rejoice, O favored one, the Lord is with you.’ In that moment, the entire hypostatic Word of God, who is of one essence with the Father, entered the womb of the Virgin, and through the workings of the Spirit, who shares in His essence, He took on flesh from her pure blood and became a complete human being, body and soul. Behold this incomprehensible union! Witness the divine marriage of God! This is how the New Covenant union of God with humanity was realized: He took on flesh and bestowed the Divine. The eternal God Himself became indissolubly joined to our fallen and humble human nature. The Virgin conceived and bore a Son, perfect God and perfect man, our Lord Jesus Christ, who preserved His mother’s virginity intact and yet remained eternally within the bosom of the Father. Guided by the Holy Gospel, we can perceive and declare something else, which mysteriously transpires for all the children of light. Why is it not phrased, ‘You shall not marry your Son,’ but rather, ‘You shall not marry,’ indicating marriages? What is the reason for this? This precise marriage occurs with every faithful child of the light. God also unifies with us in a pure and chaste marriage and engenders a certain sacrament in us, transcending human capability. What is produced within us? Listen attentively to understand. After the Son of God, having entered into the womb of the Blessed Virgin and having taken on human nature, was born of her as we discussed—the perfect union of God and man, retaining His divine identity—those of us who believe, receiving Him faithfully within our hearts, confess this verbally, repenting sincerely of all our sins. In that instant, the divine Word of the Father enters into us just as He did into the womb of the Most Holy Virgin. We receive Him, and He exists within us as a seed. When you ponder this sacred sacrament, be awestruck, yet embrace its truth with devotion and belief. We also conceive Him, but not physically as the Virgin Mary did—rather, spiritually, yet fundamentally. We possess within our souls the One whom the Virgin conceived, as the apostle Paul articulates: ‘For God, who commanded light to shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Corinthians 4:6). This confirms the meaning of the Apostle's statement, evident in the subsequent verse: ‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels’ (7). Here, he refers to the Son of God as the treasure, in whom we are clothed by the grace of the Holy Spirit residing in our hearts. Thus, when we wholeheartedly believe and repent, we conceive the Word of God within our hearts, akin to the Virgin’s experience, and in doing so, ensure our souls remain chaste and pure. Just as the divine flame did not scorch the Blessed Virgin due to her purity, it does not consume us when our hearts are clean, but instead becomes a heavenly dew, a Source of living water and a stream of eternal life. In this manner, we receive the unveiled fire of the Godhead, as the Lord Himself declares: ‘I came to cast fire upon the earth’ (Luke 12:49). What other fire could this be but the Spirit, who is consubstantial with the Godhead, through whom the Son and the Father also enter into us and are deeply united? Yet, since the Son of God has already been incarnate from the Virgin and was born of her physically, it is impossible for Him to incarnate again and be born bodily within each of us. What does He do instead? He gives us the very Immaculate Flesh He took from the Most Pure Mary, wherein He was born, through the sacrament, so that when we partake of it, every worthy communicant possesses within them the entire Incarnate God, our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God and of the Virgin Mary, who sits at the right hand of the Father, as He said: ‘He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him’ (John 6:56). When He inhabits us, He is not perceived as existing within us in a physical sense, as He was in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, but incorporeally, uniting with our nature in a manner that transcends expression, so that we become co-heirs with Him, sharing in His flesh and bones. This is the profound result of our Lord’s unimaginable building and His grace towards us! This is a sacred mystery, about which I write with trepidation! Yet, since God wishes for His love for us to be openly demonstrated, enabling us to contemplate His immense goodness and long to reciprocate that love, I feel compelled to convey this sacred mystery to you in writing. This is not to imply that any human being resembles the Blessed Virgin who bore the Lord in the manner of her miraculous birth—such a comparison cannot be made. The incarnation of God the Word from the Blessed Virgin is distinct from what occurs spiritually within us. In that holy birth, where the Most Holy Theotokos gave birth to the Son of God and Incarnate God, the sacrament of re-creation for humanity and redemption for the whole world was fulfilled in our Lord and God Jesus Christ, who unified the disparate natures of God and man and bore the sins of the world. This spiritual birth enacts within us the sacrament of renewal of our souls, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, which unites us with the Incarnate Son of God, through whom we receive healing and are reborn with the spirit of salvation (Isaiah 26:18). I declare these truths so that the incomprehensible love of God for us may be evident, and that we, if willing, may also become in the aforementioned manner the mother of Jesus Christ the Lord, His brethren, and like His disciples and apostles—not because of their worthiness or their labor in preaching the Gospel, but by the grace of God, generously bestowed upon those who believe in Him and follow Him without looking back. Christ Himself expresses this clearly: ‘My mother and my brethren are these who hear the word of God and do it’ (Luke 8:21). Do you comprehend how He elevates all who genuinely hear and obey His word to the status of His mother, calling them His brothers and relatives? Yet, His Mother remains the Blessed Virgin Mary, who incomprehensibly bore Him incarnate, and all saints conceive and possess Him in their souls through grace. From His Immaculate Mother, He borrowed pure flesh, and to her, He imparted divinity instead of the flesh she provided. What a marvelous exchange! He does not take flesh from the saints, but instead offers them His deified flesh. Consider the profound nature of this sacrament! The divine fire of our Savior and God originates from the very substance of the Father, while His flesh originates from the pure and blessed flesh of the Theotokos and her holy blood. He took flesh from her, made it His own, and deified it, as the Gospel states, ‘And the Word was made flesh’ (John 1:14). He now offers this deified flesh to His saints—He, the Son of God, the Son of the Father, and the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary. From the essence of His Father, He bestows the grace of the Spirit, the Godhead, as prophesied by Joel: ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh’ (Joel 2:28), meaning believers. From the nature and essence of His Mother, He provides the flesh He received from her. Just as from His fullness, we all receive grace (John 1:16), so we also partake of the pure flesh He received from His Mother. As Christ became her Son and our Brother, inexpressible love for mankind, we have become sons of the Theotokos and brothers of Christ our God. From her and in her, the Son of God was incomprehensibly born, and from Him, all the saints were and are born. The Mother of God received the Word of God, conceived and bore Him alone, born of the Father before all ages and incarnate from her in the latter days. He alone was born of her, and He, her Son, gives birth daily to all who believe in Him and keep His commandments. The seed of a mortal and corruptible husband begets from his wife the sons of the corruptible and mortal, but the immortal and incorruptible incarnate Word of the immortal and incorruptible God perpetually begets sons of the immortal and incorruptible. Just as He was the firstborn in the Holy Spirit from the Most Holy Theotokos, all saints share in this and the Mother of God is the Mother of all saints, the Lady, the Queen, and the Sovereign, with all the saints as her servants, for she is the Mother of God. They are her children by virtue of partaking of her Son's pure flesh. This statement holds true since the flesh of the Lord is indeed the flesh of the Theotokos. When we partake of this Lord’s deified flesh, we affirm and believe that we participate in eternal life, unless we do so unworthily, which leads to our own condemnation. Thus, the saints are counted as relatives of the Mother of God for three reasons: first, they share the same earthly body and the same breath from God’s spirit; second, they have fellowship with the flesh which Christ received from her; and third, each of them, through sanctification and the grace of the Spirit descending upon them, receives and possesses the God of all, just as the Most Holy Mother of God received and possessed Him. Although She gave birth to Him physically, it is certain that She contained Him spiritually in all things and continues to do so, always inseparably.
THEOSIS