And being with child, she cried travailing in birth: and was in pain to be delivered.
και εν γαστρι εχουσα εκραζεν ωδινουσα και βασανιζομενη τεκειν
8 Church Fathers comment on this verse
"Being with child, she cries out from the pains and pangs of birth." This means that the Church never has rest as she gives birth to the Word from the heart, while at the same time suffering persecutions in the world from unbelievers.
We affirm that the Church suffers birth pangs over each of those reborn by water and the Spirit, until, as the Apostle says, Christ is formed in them. Only those are rejected who fall away from the true light and receive the death of the soul because of their unbelief.
“She was with child, and cried out in the pains and pangs of birth.” It is evident that Isaiah speaks of her: “Before she travailed and before the distress of birth pangs came, she escaped and bore a son” (Isa 66:7). Gregory also says in the thirteenth discourse of his Commentary on the Song of Songs: “Where there is pregnancy without intercourse, there is birth without defilement and pangs without torment” (Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 13, PG 44:1053).
If in so great a prophet and in a teacher of the Church the Virgin escaped the pangs of birth, why here did She cry out in the pains and pangs of birth? What is said is not contradictory. Far from it. There can be no contradiction in what is spoken by one and the same Spirit through two men.
But you should understand the words “cries out” and “is in pain” in this way. Until the angel of God told Joseph that what had been conceived in Her was of the Holy Spirit (Mt 1:20), the Virgin, as was fitting for Her, remained in sorrow. She blushed before Her betrothed and reflected: might he not truly suspect that She was pregnant from a secret union?
Thus John, according to the laws of rhetoric, called sorrow and grief a cry and pain. This is not surprising. To the divine Moses, who spiritually conversed with God and had become despondent, God said: “Why do you cry to Me?” (Ex 14:15). For he saw Israel in the wilderness, surrounded by the sea and by enemies.
So here also the vision calls the sorrowful condition of the Virgin’s mind and heart a cry.
The Christian Church is a mother to all of us Christians, and in relation to her we are her children (see Gal 4:26). We are her children not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever (1 Pet 1:23). In every age the Church of Christ has given birth, and still gives birth, to her children not without suffering. Labors, privations, and persecutions from pagans are the sufferings the Church endured and endures in giving birth to her spiritual children.
"Being with child, she cries out in travail." The spreading of the Gospel, and especially martyrdom, is compared with the pains of birth. Among the ancient Christians, the days of a martyr's death were called birthdays.
Applied to the Lord’s Church, her pregnancy signified that from her depths, that is, from the midst of the chosen people of God, the promised Messiah Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, was to come forth when the fullness of time had arrived.
Her cries and groans in pregnancy signified the sighs of the patriarchs and the prayerful cries of the Old Testament people, with which they awaited the coming of the divine Redeemer, the Messiah.
The pangs of birth signified the great difficulties and obstacles that the Lord’s Church had to overcome at the very appearance of Christ in the world and at the establishment of His new kingdom on earth.
As is known, the most pure Mother of Christ scarcely found a poor corner in which to lay Her newborn Infant, Christ the King. Even before His birth, this King became an object of fear and hatred. At His birth, thousands of innocent infants perished because of human malice.
The third vision, described in chapters 12-14, depicts three stages in the struggle of powers hostile to God against the Kingdom of God, the Church of Christ. The Church is portrayed as a woman clothed with the sun, laboring to give birth to believers in Christ, “regenerating the soulish into the spiritual, and transforming them in form and image according to the likeness of Christ” (Methodius’s interpretation, cited by St. Andrew).
She and the believers in Christ born of her are pursued first directly by the devil himself, the great dragon and ancient serpent (chapter 12). Then they are pursued through the antichrist, the beast coming up from the sea (13:1-10), and through his helper, as it were his forerunner and false prophet, the beast coming up from the earth (13:11-18).
The Church, like a woman, suffers in childbirth. That is, with special effort she brings new members of Christ's Kingdom into spiritual life.
Passages read together with this verse.
Greek text, 10 words with lemma, transliteration and Strong’s number. Tap to expand.
THEOSIS