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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Today, we heard in the reading from the Gospel according to Saint John, the words of our Saviour who says to us : “‘For God so loved the world that He gave His Only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life’” (John 3:16). He gives us these words because He wants us to understand that our way in Him is the way of His love.
The way of His love is not the way of the world. If we are going to be identified with our Saviour, Jesus Christ, we are not going to be identified with the world. Our way is different. The way of Christ is the way of self-emptying love and humility. It is the way of the example of the Mother of God. Today is the last day of the celebration of the feast of her birth. How did she live her life ? She lived her life almost invisibly, quietly, and yet with great strength. This is the opposite of what the world understands about such things. There is not much written about the Mother of God in the Gospels because, as we see in the icon before us, she is not drawing attention to herself. Her hand is pointing to her Son. By her way of life, she says to you and to me that everything is to be focussed upon Him. Our whole life is to be centred on Him. Her whole life is centred on Him, as it always has been, and as it always will be. The Mother of God is always directing us to her Son, since that is the way of her whole life. She is directing us all, always, to her Son.
On feast-days of the Mother of God, such as the Dormition, we will notice that there are not stories or events recorded in the Gospels about her birth, her death, and other details of her life. When we are celebrating feasts concerning the Mother of God, what are we reading about in the Gospels ? We are reading about Mary and Martha (see Luke 10:38-42), which has nothing at all to do with the Mother of God. However, there follows at the end a short passage from the Gospel according to Luke, in which a woman says to Jesus : “‘Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You’” (Luke 11:27). Our Saviour replies to her that this is certainly true as He says : “‘more than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it’” (Luke 11:28). In saying this phrase, His words are referring particularly to His Mother. In other words, it is not merely because she gave birth to Him that she is blessed. Rather, it is because she hears the word of God, and she keeps it. If we want to be called blessed with her and with the other saints, then this must be characteristic of us – to hear the word of God, and to keep it.
The Mother of God is almost invisible in her life. There is very little written about her, except that we know that she spent time in Palestine, Egypt and near Ephesus, and that she was under the care of the Apostle John. She was buried in Jerusalem, and very quickly her body was gone. Because the Apostle Thomas arrived late for her funeral, he wanted to go to her tomb. When they went to her tomb, she was not there. She obviously followed her Son in the Resurrection. In the Kingdom of Heaven she is close to the throne of God as our intercessor and our protector, as the one whom we call “more honourable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim” (which are the greatest of all the angels). She is far above even them. Indeed, she is so great that she is not even comparable to these angels. This is because in her life she always says “Yes” to God’s will. Her life is flooded with His love. In fact, that is why we call her the “second Eve” because in her obedience she compensated somehow for the fall of Eve.
Here is yet another example about how our way is not the way of the world. The bishop comes into the Temple where he is greeted, and clothed in episcopal vestments in the middle of the nave. The majority of people that I have ever talked to about this understand mistakenly that dressing the bishop up like a king happens because that is how the bishop wants it to be, and that therefore it must be done this way. However, there is an historical reason for all this. Bishops appear to be kingly because of the accidents of history. The sakkos that he wears now was long ago the vestment of the eastern Roman emperor before the fall of the eastern Roman Empire. The hat which he wears, called a mitre, is very similar to the crown that the Roman emperors wore before the fall of the eastern Roman Empire. How did this happen to us ? In fact, bishops used to wear the same phelonion as the priests do today. The change to the sakkos happened during the takeover by the Turks. When the Empire fell (1453), there were many Greek-speaking and other Orthodox people in the Turkish empire, and the religious leader, the Patriarch of Constantinople, became the secular leader of the Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking people. Do not forget that the Constantinopolitans still call themselves “Romans” because Constantinople is the “new Rome”.
The patriarch, who was the spiritual leader, became the civil leader as well, by decree of the sultan. When he became the civil leader, it fell to him to wear the clothes of the man whom he replaced as the secular leader. Therefore, the patriarch had to wear this sakkos and the mitre instead of the simple things that he was wearing before. After a while, over a period of a few hundred years, the custom spread to all the bishops in the Orthodox world. That is why we now see all the Orthodox bishops dressed like this. When we see these things, we can imagine that the sakkos is in fact the phelonion of a priest. It is useful to know that the prayer that accompanies the donning of the sakkos or phelonion is exactly the same prayer (bishop or priest). Probably in those days the bishop would have served bareheaded according to how we see them in the icons. The riassa and the tall, hard hat-and-veil (klobuk) in which the bishop would be dressed outside of Temple, are already additions from the time of the Ottoman Empire. Before that, the bishop probably wore something simpler than the riassa, and a soft hat with a monastic veil over it (as one may see today amongst some Greek monks).
However, bishops were being invested in this same manner in the middle of the Temple, in the nave, before the addition of the imperial insignia. This investiture does not happen simply because the bishop wants it to be this way for his personal glorification. It is all done because of Christ. Therefore, we are always doing it everywhere, and that is how we are going to continue to do it. What does all this investiture of the bishop really mean ? I will explain it to you simply. The bishop comes to the door of the Temple, and he comes dressed as a monk. Either he is wearing his riassa and his klobuk (that black hat), or he is also wearing a monastic cape (which is called a mantya) over the riassa. Because he is a bishop, the mantiya is not the black one of a monk. Rather, it is usually one shade of purple or another with stripes and decorations. Nevertheless, it is still only a monastic cape that he is wearing. Dressed as a monk, then, the bishop is coming from the entry way into the Temple, and he says the entrance prayers in front of the iconostas. Then he is led back into the middle of the nave, and the mantya, the riassa and the klobuk are taken off him. The subdeacons (who represent the people, and are not merely the bishop’s lackeys) then invest the bishop with the vestments which we properly and correctly understand to be the vestments of the high priest. When this is happening, the people are, as it were, saying to the bishop : “You are our high priest (because a bishop is really a high priest). We are putting these things on you, and you are going to lead the celebration of the Divine Liturgy for us”.
Therefore, when the bishop is being vested in the middle of the Temple, it is not at all a matter of : “Look at me, the bishop, tra-la-la”. It is the bishop being obedient to his flock. He is doing for them what they are asking him to do, which is, to feed them. They vest the bishop as their high priest so that Christ Himself, the Great High Priest, can feed them by the bishop’s hand. Nevertheless, beyond all this, there is the seeming paradox that the bishop, himself, is nothing (except that he is the representative of Jesus Christ Himself who is the One High Priest). Bishops are simply agents of the One High Priest.
Any respect we give to a bishop is given straight to the Saviour, just as it is when we venerate icons. All this does not concern the bishop himself (whoever that happens to be). Rather, it all concerns our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Everything in our services, in our worship, in our life, is directed to and focussed only on Jesus Christ. The bishop, in himself, can be a complete wreck : fallen, broken, lost and confused, even suffering from “old-timer’s disease”. However, that does not change anything about the quality of what is required of him as a bishop. In Christ, the bishop has to come to the Holy Table, and in Christ, he has to prepare the bread and wine (which have been offered by the people to the Saviour), and he has to enable our Saviour, “that great shepherd of the sheep” (Hebrews 13:20), to feed the people, the rational sheep, by the bishop’s hand. If we pay attention to the prayers that we are saying, we can see that it is not the bishop who is distributing Holy Communion to the people ; it is the Saviour Himself, who is feeding the flock with His Body and Blood. That is precisely what the prayers say. Any bishop and any priest is only an agent of Christ. Our Saviour Himself is feeding His sheep. By Himself, through the bishop (or the priest), He is giving His rational sheep the Bread of Life.
This is how we live. We do not draw any attention to ourselves personally. We draw attention, as the Mother of God does, only to her Son. That is one of the reasons why, in Orthodox traditional cultures everywhere, when people are saying thank-you to someone, the person who is thanked says : “Glory to God”. I learned to refer all expressions of gratitude from anyone directly to the Lord. They are diverted from me to the Lord. This is the Orthodox way of living. I, myself, do not deserve thanks for anything because I am only doing what the Lord asks me to do. The Lord is to be thanked. The Lord is to be glorified. The Lord is to be praised, and not me, the bishop. I am simply the Lord’s agent.
The Lord emptied Himself. God gave His Only-begotten Son. He does this out of His self-emptying love. He gives His Only-begotten Son to us so that we may live in Him and not perish but have everlasting life. Out of love the Lord does this. Out of the same love we live our lives, offering them to the Lord. Directing everything to Him, we give thanks to Him for everything. When we do this, we are then fulfilling the exhortation of Saint Herman of Alaska who says what the Gospel says directly : “Let us from this day, from this hour, from this minute, love God above all, and do His holy will”, and in so doing, we will glorify the All-Holy Trinity : the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.