"Deathless Death"

Why should not the Mother of God, be assumed directly into Heaven as Moses and Elijah had been? If Enoch might "walk with God" and then "he was not, for God took him" (Gen 5:24), then surely the Queen of Heaven and Earth, perfectly good and completely sinless, might also receive this most high honor. But then let us expand the question: should not God, a Person of the Holy Trinity, also be assumed directly into Heaven without tasting death? What is it about the God-man Jesus and like the Most Holy Theotokos that brings them to the threshold of human life and then crosses over into death?

"The Deathless Death" — these are the words of the great Father, St. John of Damascus in describing the Dormition of the Theotokos. Yes, at the heart of this Great Feast of the Church lies a paradox — Deathless Death — a contradiction in two words, a most concise mystery. The Most Holy Mother of God, he calls "the source of life." She is "the source of resurrection." Tall words? Perhaps, yet no taller than "Mother of God," a title conferred upon Mary of Nazareth in gravest reverence and veneration by the Council of Ephesus, one of the Seven Great Councils, and, by that fact, the highest authority (standing beside Holy Scripture) for all Christian teaching and belief.

She is the Mother of God, words to which we have become accustomed, and perhaps we no longer stop to ponder this, for here we have ventured into the deepest depths of Christian mystery. Listen to the words of an ancient Orthodox Christmas hymn, the "Taladh Chriosda" (the Christ Child's Lullaby) from Scotland:

St. John of Damascus trenchantly called her source of life. We might unpack this one further layer to say that she is the source of the source of life, the Mother of the Eternal Word, the Logos and Lord of Life. We might fill-to-overflowing our meditation on this great feast day by simply listing the abundance of mysteries associated with her, where the human and the divine shade into each other until boundaries are lost.

She is the living gate through which the God-man entered our lifeworld. Yet these ineffable things had been mostly invisible throughout her life. I say "invisible," for might we gaze at her and see her perpetual sinlessness? Yes, it is true that every boy and girl is born into the world without sin, perfect and good. It is true that each of us might choose never to sin, by the grace of God. But our eyes might not see the still-perfect state of a sinless soul, not until the end of life's journey.

Fully Seven of the Twelve Great Feasts of Orthodoxy either center on the Most Holy Theotokos or feature her prominently: her Nativity (September 8), her Presentation (November 21), the Nativity of Christ (December 25), Jesus' Presentation (February 2), The Annunciation (March 25), Pentecost (Forty days after Pascha), and finally her Dormition (August 15). But it is this final feast, today's feast, in which her sinless state becomes fully visible to the world, and to us. And it is her sinlessness, which is to say, her perfect faithfulness, which we celebrate.

As the Fathers have taught, no one is born into this world fatally gored by the grievous wound of original sin, but we are born into a world that is broken by sinfulness. The Fathers understood that the sin of Adam and Eve, at bottom, was the youthful sin of impatience. Eventually, our first parents would have matured into the fullness of the divine state, sharing divine knowledge, including that of good and evil. But Eve seized what was not yet hers to have. It was her unfaithfulness, her lack of humility, her presumption and pride, that brought sin into the world, just as we bring sin into our lives through that very same presumption, pridefulness, and unfaithfulness.

St. Irenaeus wrote that the life of Jesus of Nazareth recapitulated Adam's life. Jesus of Nazareth picked up where the immature Adam had left off and completed our first father's broken life unto faithful completion. Mary of Nazareth, the God-man's Mother, completed this same course picking up where the unfaithful Eve had stumbled, perfecting what our first mother had failed in.

Life in rebellion against God — whether it is the rebellion of the fallen angels, the rebellion in Eden, or the rebellion we see all around us today — is disordered life, for only God's kind of life is life. Life proceeds from Him, and well-ordered life leads back to Him as it was from its beginning: good, right, and divine.

Rebellion, which we call sin, is a subversion of life. The tree is bent and grows back into the ground. The human figure is defaced and becomes, if unchecked, more and more grotesque over time. That is, sin is disease which causes life to rot. We call this process death.

Before the day of her "sleeping in the Lord," the faithfulness of God's Mother had been mostly invisible to us. For she is the woman wrapped in silence. She is the quiet woman. She is humility itself. By its nature well-ordered life does not stand out. It is the grotesque life which calls attention to itself. We do not marvel at her purity at the moments of her Nativity or her Presentation, for they are quietly present. At her Annunciation her virginity is also unseen. Yes, the Archangel Gabriel says that "the Power of the Highest will overshadow you" (Lu 1:35). "But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart" (Lu 2:19), for what could they mean in practice? At the Nativity, we see that she has been chosen for the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a human: to be the holy vessel for God on earth. But she is (perhaps) fifteen, and much of her life remains to be lived.

It is only at death when all things become known. Only at death will the final tally of a human life be told. We see that the end of the Blessed Mary's life is no less remarkable than its beginning. By tradition, the Archangel Gabriel appears announcing the date of her sleeping. By tradition, the Apostles, who had been preaching the Gospel to the ends of the earth, are transported to Jerusalem to be near to her. The Lord Jesus descends from Highest Heaven with ranks of angels. And, the Most Holy Mother of God falls asleep. Immediately, her soul, represented in holy icons as an infant in swaddling clothes, the image of moral perfection, is taken into Jesus' arms and thence to Heaven.

Among the Twelve St. Thomas alone arrives too late to say his goodbyes, so he is taken to Gethsemane, where three days earlier she had been laid beside her parents, Ss. Anna and Joachim. But the tomb is empty. For her body also has been assumed into Heaven.

Like that of her Son, hers is a "deathless death." She crosses the line only briefly into the brokenness and consequence of sin's corruption in order to reveal it to be null and void, having no power over her. For what claim can Satan bring against a blameless soul? And here is the tally and full meaning of her life: what claim can the House of Disease and Death make upon a spotless life?

St. Paul explains,

It was His deathless death which revealed His power over death. As St. Paul writes triumphantly at the conclusion of the great Chapter 15,

Death. Only death can be the great revelation of every human life. Only death can be the moment when all our life freezes into an unrevisable record of all our thoughts and deeds. The day is done. All possiblity of regret and repentance is behind us. The full sum of all that we are finally is known. On earth, we call it the Final Judgment. But the verdict has been shaping up long before we actually fall asleep. If our life has been one rebellion after another .... and one excuse after another, then the grotesquery of our lives is a verdict we have slowly been rendering ourselves. But if we should seek humility, quiet self-deprecation, and follow the Lord Jesus and His Most Chaste Mother in their faithfulness, then our sleeping in the Lord will be a quiet afternoon or a vigil of quiet joyfulness in the night. And our passing into Heaven will be difficult to perceive, for it will not be very different from the grace-filled life we have known day by day. Here, truly, is the peace of the Lord.

Quiet Woman, Woman Wrapped in Silence, whose sleeping and waking are not so different, "Ora pro nobis! Pray for us!" for we long to be just like you.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.