With the Fall from Grace and the advent of disease and death (defining marks of life following Eden), the only path towards future was children. Before then, disease and death were unknown. Human development and maturity might proceed without interruption. The Ancient Father St. Irenaeus speculated that Adam and Eve were created as all humans are: as infants who grew into children. The fullness of Divine life and knowledge lay yet before them, but, you see, Eve was impatient to receive it. After her disobedience, and then Adam's, they would not live to see the fullness of time. Only their descendants could do that.
In the material world, this concept is not unfamiliar to us. We know this process of collective, generational maturity: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and so forth, with one age learning from and building upon another. Time is required for development. The iPhone of today exceeds the computing power of the Cray supercomputer only two generations ago.
It is the Fall from Eden, with its interruption of human development, which calls our attention to to spiritual maturity. God had created Adam and Eve to begin a process of maturity, which would have completed in unity with Him, the fulfillment of the Divine Image with which they were created. Failing that, the entire idea of the Twelve Tribes of Israel was to complete this same process generationally — to bring about a people, a nation, acceptable to God, united with God, fulfilled in the Image of God. In this sense, the Land of Promise is the future age, the fullness of time in a nutshell .... or perhaps I should say, in an acorn which would unfold into a mature and fulsome oak.
We have good reason to believe that the focus of Solomon's Temple was upon spiritual development, as opposed to the quid pro quo animal sacrifice, which practiced in the Second Temple, which the Jews learned during the Babylonian Captivity, and which was practiced throughout the Middle East before idols like Marduk, Baal, Dagon, and Moloch during the Iron Age.
Is this not the backdrop for God's exhortations in the Shemah?
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"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. "And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." (Deut 6:4-8) |
Humans would not live to reach full spiritual maturity, for the span of their life would not be commensurate with the time required. So they are exhorted to create a lifeworld in which the training up of children would be certain and secure. This was the path ahead.
In this light, the difference between a couple bearing children, on one hand, and a fruitful household, on the other is the difference between a barren land and a Promised Land overflowing with milk and honey.
The Book of Isaiah equates these two in a vision of the future age:
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"Sing, O barren,
You who have not borne! Break forth into singing, and cry aloud, You who have not labored with child! .... "Enlarge the place of your tent, And let them stretch out the curtains of your dwellings; Do not spare; Lengthen your cords, And strengthen your stakes. For you shall expand to the right and to the left, And your descendants will inherit the nations, And make the desolate cities inhabited. (Isa 54:1-3) |
These words proceed directly from those most important chapters of Isaiah for the Christian, the chapters describing the Suffering Servant. And they point ahead to the acceptable season of the Lord, the kairos, which Jesus announces in the synagogue. They repeat the Abrahamic promise which is the foundation of Israel:
| Then He brought him outside and said, "Look now toward Heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them." And He said to him, "So shall your descendants be." (Gen 15:5) |
The fullness of time, you see, is numbered, not in years, but in descendants. The cosmic dimensions of atonement with God are not measured in light years but in plenary communion, when and where all peoples are restored to God's embrace in the future Eden. Jesus says to the Father, "Of those whom You gave Me I have lost none" (Jn 18:9).
The barrenness of a married couple, then, is personal,
and
it is much more than personal, even universal and eschatological.
For children are nothing less than a participation in the fullness of a redeemed world.
According to the Protoevangelion of St. James
(which the early Church treated as Holy Scripture),
Ss. Anna and Joachim,
the parents of the Most Holy Theotokos,
had come to be defined by their barrenness.
It dominated their thoughts towards each other,
who had become a byword in the community.
And it went to the heart of their
understanding of themselves.
St. Anna prayed alone in a garden:
| And gazing towards the Heaven, she saw a sparrow's nest in the laurel, and made a lamentation in herself, saying: "I have become a curse in the presence of the sons of Israel, and I have been reproached, and they have driven me in derision out of the temple of the Lord. .... Alas! To what have I been likened? I am not like the fowls of the heaven, because even the fowls of the heaven are productive before You, .... I am not like these waters, because even these waters are productive before You, O Lord. Alas! .... I am not like this earth, because even the earth brings forth its fruits in season, and blesses You, O Lord." |
God's merciful answer to her prayers would be, not merely one most-holy birth, but three, opening the future age and its fullness to mankind: a gate opening unto a gate opening unto a gate. First, the marriage of Anna and Joachim would be crowned with the most blessed female birth ever seen on earth: the Second Eve, the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God. The fruit of Anna's womb would be the turning point in human history.
Second, the barren Zachariah and Elizabeth, Anna's sister, would receive for their son "the man of Eden", St. John the Baptist, who would point the way to Paradise. "No man born of woman was greater," said the Lord Jesus of this birth.
The third birth, of course, would be "the Conception without seed," "conceived by the Holy Spirit," the Only-begotten Son of God.
With these three gates the fullness of Eden is restored. With these three gates each of us may attain to individual spiritual maturity unto unity with the Father. For in Jesus we are offered the fullest dimensions of adoption. In Jesus, the Eternal Word of the Creation, we see the greatest scale and scope of generative power. Jesus is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. He is our Creator and our Final Judge. In Jesus, the future age is fulfilled in us, in each of us. We may begin from here in complete trust and in saintly patience as our first parents began, attaining in the end to the full stature of Christ.
The parents of the Forerunner call to us.
The parents of Most Holy Theotokos call to us.
The Holy Spirit calls to us ....
that we step through these gates,
that we become children of the future age:
the Eight Day,
the New Creation.
As it was in Eden,
so it is now.
The choice is entirely ours.
What will we choose for?
Which way will be go?
Ours is the Kingdom of Heaven,
but will we choose it?
The architecture of history and of all time
has been
so prepared
that we will.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.