A homily for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.
(Above) The Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God, one of the great icons of Russian Orthodox tradition, exemplifies the “Directress” type of icon, pointing with care for us to her Son, Lord Jesus Christ, and authored by the Apostle Luke the Evangelist. Its historical role included miraculous intercession in the Russian Patriotic War of 1812 against the would-be world-conqueror Napoleon.
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Brothers and sisters in Christ,
Today we commemorate the Smolensk icon of the Mother of God, one of several famous Russian icons of the Theotokos that form an important part of the spiritual, historical, and artistic life of our Church tradition across centuries. They came to America in effect with the Russian diaspora and have become part of our spiritual treasure also. The Smolensk icon is in the type of the Directress icon, which according to tradition was first made by the Evangelist Luke while the Theotokos was living, and an exact copy of which was made by order of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. In the Directress icon, the Mother of God is holding the baby Jesus and pointing to Him, directing us to Him. She directs us in her care to Him Who loves us too and is God, Who in our Gospel reading today pulled Peter from the water in which he feared to drown. He reminded the busy Martha also in today’s Gospel of the good part of attending to Him who pulls us all from the stormy sea of worldly care.
In Orthodox iconography, the baby Jesus is often portrayed as a small man in effect, as in the Smolensk icon style before us on the analogion. That’s because icons are not meant to be realistic in style but to uncover spiritual truth about those depicted, and Christ is both fully God and fully man. The humanity of the Mother of God is emphasized in Orthodoxy because she is our Directress. She points to and show us the Way, for her Son is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In Orthodoxy, we emphasize the humanity of the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary. We remember how she was born in a normal human birth, unlike the Catholic heresy of the Immaculate Conception. We emphasize how she departed from earthly life in a normal human way, although we believe that her soul was taken up by Jesus Christ then at her passing, and later the Apostles found her body had vanished from the tomb. But still, she experienced death as do we all.
This is all significant especially because we are about to enter the Dormition Season, also known as Summer Lent, leading to our celebration of the Feast of the Dormition, also known as Summer Pascha. With joyful sorrow at the passing of the Mother of God like the Apostles who were there we recognize her as the directress, our intercessor and source of our hope. For who will pray for a child like a mother, who will love like a mother, and she is the source of our protection. Indeed, the original name of our parish was Holy Protection of the Mother of God, and we still honor that in the icon of that name too. Special blessings during the Dormition Season, related also to commemorations of her Son interwoven with this time, namely the feasts of the Holy Wood, the Icon of Him made without hands, and most of all the Transfiguration. The season interweaves with blessings of honey, fruit, flowers, and nuts, that all remind us of God’s providential care for us.
Providentially, God this week brought this icon on the analogion to us, which Reader Luke says could be a few centuries old. I had received a phone call from a longtime Lewisburg resident cleaning out some of her late husband’s effects at their home not far from here. She had read about our Church in the paper. Her husband’s family was German but in Russia, which had been a multi-ethnic empire before the Revolution. When the Communists took over, his immediate family became cut off from their relatives in Russia. Religious faith became a hidden thing. But when contacts were re-established, they received items from those previously separated relatives including this beautiful icon, a symbol also of how those family members had continued their Orthodox faith under demonic Communism. May we continue to ask the Mother of God fervently to protect us and to further the missionary work of our Church this coming Dormition season.
During the Dormition season there is a sweet tradition, especially in the Greek Church but also in ours, of having Paraklesis services. We have one scheduled here for Wednesday evening, Aug. 20, instead of the Akathist the week after next. A Paraklesis service is a supplicatory canon, most often to the Theotokos, for healing and comforting. I learned about this early on as an Orthodox Christian. I had come from a religious healing cult, which rejected the use of medicine, and nominally claimed to be Christian although it actually combined several ancient heresies pretty badly. But that healing emphasis was in my mind. So I was interested in healing prayer in Orthodoxy. Of course in Orthodoxy all prayer is healing, it is in a sense harmonizing us with the uncreated divine energies, to participate in God’s energy field, so to speak. As my first parish priest told me, “the Church is the hospital of the soul, and the monastery is the intensive care unit, and you need to go to the intensive care unit.” But the Paraklesis healing service during the Dormition season became especially dear to me. Because in it the Mother of God acts as the healing Directress, directing us to become attuned through Christ, through the words of the service, the prayers woven into the words, and the music.
The role of the Theotokos as our spiritual mother and Directress enters into many levels of our lives if we open ourselves to her help. When I am sick or especially stressed, I often will listen to the Paraklesis service. And often I will find comfort in an icon of the Mother of God, such as the Kazan icon or the Vladimir icon, or our ROCOR Kursk icon of the Sign, which is on the wall above our altar, and also in the hands of St. John on our parish icon by the entrance. Then there is the tenderness icon of the Mother of God at St. George’s Church in Taylor, Pennsylvania, where many of us have visited. Consider this one account of an encounter with the icon of the Mother of God at Taylor Pennsylvania, which has played a role in the lives of some in our parish.
“A man had a massive heart attack while in the church. Two nurses who were present rushed over to him and began to do CPR… As the nurses tried to revive him, he showed no pulse, stopped breathing and actually died… Fr. Mark Leisure, the priest of St. George Orthodox Church in Taylor, PA took the Kardiotisa, ‘The Tender Heart’ myrrh-flowing, miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary and held it over the man so that the fragrant myrrh would drip from the icon onto the chest of the man. Immediately, the dead man took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and began singing ‘Mary, Mother of God Save Me.’ By the time the paramedics arrived, he was sitting up and didn’t think he needed to go to the hospital, even though they insisted that he get checked.”
Of such icons of the Mother of God there are broadly four types in Russian tradition, the Directress such as the Smolensk icon, which is one we commemorate today, the Tenderness in which she shows her love for her Son as in the Vladimir Icon, the icon of the sign of the Theotokos such as the Kursk Root icon, where the Son is in her womb and she is surrounded by the ancient prophets foretelling of her giving birth to Him. And the standing icon of her such as the Holy Protection icon, in which the Mother of God is manifest in her role as nurturer and steward in effect of the Church for her Son.
I’ve mentioned before how the Seeker of the Lost icon of the Theotokos was important in my own journey to Orthodox Christianity from a life of sinful wandering. That icon of the tenderness type depicts the Mother of God with the Christ child while often a darkened doorway indicates perhaps death and the afterlife and how her care extends actively to those lost, helping us to the Good Shepeherd her Son. As the greatest of the saints she is one of us, reminding us of how He is one of us as well as fully God and fully man, her Son.
This venerable icon before us of the type of the Smolensk icon reminds us of that icon’s history, carried throughout the Russian army on the eve of the Battle of Borodino in 1812. In front of the ranks of the entire army along the battle line, molebens were served before it, one by Commander in Chief Kutuzov who had ordered it. “Clergy walked in their vestments, censers smoked, the air resounded with singing and the holy icon processed… At the impulse of the heart, the hundred thousand-strong army fell to their knees and with their foreheads to the ground….The sign of the cross was being made everywhere, sobs were heard in places. The commander-in-chief, surrounded by his staff, met the icon and bowed to the ground before it.”
We are told, “The Russian soldiers’ firm and living faith in the heavenly intercession of the Mother of God, as if personally through Her miraculous icon in the Russian army, was able to give extraordinary strength and courage.” General Kutuzov who so venerated the icon is memorialized as hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace for his patient faith in outlasting Napoleon, a tyrant who presented in attempted world conquest a type of Antichrist, emerging from the French Revolution. That would-be world ruler became entrapped by Russian winter and retreated all the way to Paris, with Russian troops at his heels emboldened by the intercession of the Mother of God in this icon. Not only was this recorded in one of the great works of literature, but in a classic of music, the 1812 overture, which includes our Russian Orthodox music of the triune prayer, Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us. And this is played across the United States on the Fourth of July to remind us of our freedom here as well. All that relates back to this icon.
The strength represented by the icon is a Mother’s strength of love. Metropolitan Luke of Zaporozhiye and Melitopol, a bishop of the persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church, was quoted recently preaching about one of the Directress icons like the Smolensk icon, the icon with three hands which we recently commemorated also. He said, “With two hands, the Virgin Mary holds the Savior, and the third hand holds all of us. Three hands – as a symbol that God can act in the world in ways we are not used to. He manifests Himself not through law, but through mercy, not through power, but through compassion. His Most Pure Mother, resembling Her Divine Son, dwells not with those who are righteous, but with those who weep, pray, love, and endure. She is with those who do not boast of their knowledge, but remain faithful to God, pray without ceasing, and do good deeds… The sign that a person is a disciple of Christ is manifested by their possession of love, not education. Knowledge without love usually leads to divisions and disputes, but not to creation and unity. God at the Last Judgment will not ask us: “What have you learned in life and how much have you known?” He will ask: “Have you learned to love?” And this is the only question we must be prepared to answer. Because our eternity depends on it.”
Glory to God for all things!