On Sunday, the 4th of December 2022, the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple was celebrated by the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
During this feast, the Church remembers that the Theotokos, as a gift to her former barren parents Joachim and Anna, was presented/offered by them, in accordance with their promise to the priests of Solomon’s Temple and was kept by them in the Holy of Holies, when alone the High Priest entered once a year. There, she was nourished by the angels and prepared for the great mystery of the incarnation of God the Word, until she was handed over for safekeeping to Joseph her minister.
This feast was celebrated
1. At the Patriarchal and Monastic Church of Saints Constantine and Helen with Vespers on Saturday afternoon and with the Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning, which was presided over by Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem, with the participation in prayer of the Hagiotaphite High Priests, Hieromonks and monks.
After the Divine Liturgy, Patriarch Theophilos visited the Holy Monastery of Megali Panagia, where he was received by the Abbess Nun Melani, who renovated the Church and preserved its ancient icons.
2. At the Holy Monastery of Megali Panagia, adjacent to the Central Monastery of the Hagiotaphite Brotherhood with Vespers on Saturday afternoon and the Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning. The services were presided over by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Isychios of Kapitolias, with the co-celebration of the Elder Kamarasis Archimandrite Nectarios, the ministering Priest of the Monastery Archimandrite Makarios, Archimandrite Leontios from the Russian MISSIA, Archimandrite Dionysios and Hierodeacon Dositheos.
The chanting was delivered by Hierodeacon Simeon with the help of the Patriarchal School of Zion students and the services were attended by the Nuns of the Holy Monastery, the Consul General of Greece in Jerusalem Mr Evangelos Vlioras and many faithful Christians from Jerusalem and pilgrims.
Before the Holy Communion His Eminence delivered the following Sermon:
“Today is the prelude of God’s goodwill and the heralding of the salvation of mankind. In the temple of God, the Virgin is presented openly, and she proclaimeth Christ unto all. To her, then, with a great voice let us cry aloud: Rejoice, O thou fulfilment of the Creator’s dispensation.”
Reverend Christians, dear children of the Lord,
The pious Anna, Joachim’s wife, spent her life without being able to bear children, as she was barren. Together with Joachim, she fervently prayed to God to enable her to give birth to a child, with the promise that she would dedicate her child to Him. Indeed, the All-Good God not only blessed her with a child but also qualified her to give birth to the woman who would give birth to the Messiah, our Saviour Jesus Christ. The fact of the entry of the Daughter of Nazareth into the Temple is not mentioned in the New Testament. Of course, it is not the only case, because neither the Nativity of the Theotokos Mary is mentioned, nor is her Dormition. The fact that the entry of the Theotokos into the Temple was preserved in one of the apocryphal texts, which is called the “First Gospel of James”, and which of course has nothing to do with James the Brother of God, does not mean that the Church embraced the ideas of a cryptic text. Simply, this apocryphal text saved the information about the entry of the Virgin into the Temple, but this does not mean that the aforementioned text also suggests her feast day.
What is important, however, is that the Feast of the Theotokos’ Entry into the Temple is based on a real event, and this feast begins to be established in the life of our Church in the 6th century AD. References are found in St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, St. Andrew of Crete and Fathers of the Church deliver solemn speeches in the 8th century during the Feast of the Theotokos’ Entry into the Temple.
Therefore, the feast of the Entry of the Theotokos is an act of the Church, which not only does not contradict the work of the New Providence but on the contrary is consistent and synergistic with it.
Thus, the deeper meaning of the entry of the three-year-old child of Joachim and Anna into the Temple was not the fulfilment of a promise of the solution to the shame of childlessness. Still, it inaugurated the great chapter of the salvation of people. The childlessness of the parents of the Theotokos was part of God’s plan so that Mary would be the fruit of her parents’ gift to God.
Moreover, her entrance into the temple, due to the dubious calculations that it may cause many people, who think earthly and “foreign things”, is the “prelude of the future divine grace that would overshadow her “, as the Patriarch of Constantinople Germanos declares. And he adds: “Who has ever heard of such a thing? ” Who has seen or heard of this, now or in the past? A woman being brought inside the Holy Altar?”
Certainly, according to the Fathers of the Church, the three-year-old Daughter comes to be dedicated to the Temple, to become “the new immaculate and undefiled volume, “not written by hand, but gilded by the spirit”. And this had to precede, according to the divine order, because one thing is possible to stand as an impossible event in the almighty God, “to be in union with anyone unclean”, says Saint Gregory Palamas.
Therefore, if God, not from weakness, but because of His nature is unable to communicate with the impure, how much more must the Virgin Mary be immaculate and undefiled, in order for the Son and Word of God to borrow her pure blood and regenerate “by the Holy Spirit he for Himself” His human nature?
So, the Virgin stayed there for twelve years nourished by the Archangel Gabriel with heavenly food, until the time of the divine Annunciation approached. Then the Theotokos, emerging from the Holy of Holies, was given to Joseph the betrothed, that he might be the guardian and witness of her virginity and that he might serve as much in her seedless pregnancy as in her flight to Egypt and her return to the land of Israel.
May the intercessions of the Theotokos give you health, mental and physical strength. Many Happy returns”.
Source: Patriarchate of Jerusalem
