Mary “has found favor with God” (Luke 1:30). She was chosen and ordained to serve in the Mystery of the Incarnation. And by this eternal election or predestination she was in a sense set apart and given an unique privilege and position in the whole of mankind, nay in the whole of creation. She was given a transcendent rank, as it were. She was at once a representative of the human race, and set apart.
There is an antinomy here, implied in the divine election. She was set apart. She was put into a unique and unparalleled relation to God, to the Holy Trinity, even before the Incarnation, as the prospective Mother of the Incarnate Lord, just because it was not an ordinary historical happening, but an eventful consummation of the eternal decree of God. She has a unique position even in the divine plan of salvation. Through the Incarnation human nature was to be restored again into the fellowship with God which had been destroyed and abrogated by the Fall. The sacred Humanity of Jesus was to be the bridge over the abyss of sin. Now, this humanity was to be taken of the Virgin Mary. The Incarnation itself was a new beginning in the destiny of man, a beginning of the new humanity.
In the Incarnation the “new man” was born, the “Last Adam;” he was truly human, but he was more than a man: “The second man is the Lord from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47). As the Mother of this “Second Man,” Mary herself was participating in the mystery of the redeeming re-creation of the world. Surely, she is to be counted among the redeemed. She was most obviously in need of salvation. Her Son is her Redeemer and Saviour, just as he is the Redeemer of the world. Yet, she is the only human being for whom the Redeemer of the world is also a son, her own child whom she truly bore. Jesus indeed was born “not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13; this verse is related both to the Incarnation and to baptismal regeneration), and yet he is “the fruit of the womb” of Mary. His supernatural birth is the pattern and the font of the new existence, of the new and spiritual birth of all believers, which is nothing else than a participation in his sacred humanity, an adoption into the sonship of God — in the “second man,” in the “last Adam.”
The Mother of the “second man” necessarily had her own and peculiar way into the new life. It is not too much to say that for her the Redemption was, in a sense, anticipated in the fact of the Incarnation itself, — and anticipated in a peculiar and personal manner. “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee” (Luke 1:35). This was a true “theophanic presence” — in the fullness of grace and of the Spirit. The “shadow” is exactly a theophanic symbol.
And Mary was truly “full of grace,” gratia plena, keharitomeni. The Annunciation was for her, as it were, an anticipated Pentecost. We are compelled to risk this daring parallelism by the inscrutable logic of the divine election. For indeed we cannot regard the Incarnation merely as a metaphysical miracle which would be unrelated to the personal destiny and existence of the persons involved.
Man is never dealt with by God as if he was but a tool in the hands of a master. For man is a living person. By no means could it be merely an “instrumental” grace, when the Virgin was “overshadowed” with the power of the Highest. The unique position of the Virgin Mary is obviously not her own achievement, nor simply a “reward” for her “merits,” — nor even perhaps was the fullness of grace given to her in a “prevision” of her merits and virtue. It was supremely the free gift of God, in the strictest sense — gyatia gratis data. It was an absolute and eternal election, although not unconditional — for it was conditioned by and related to the mystery of the Incarnation.
Mary holds her unique position and has a “category of her own” not as a mere Virgin, but as the Virgin-Mother, parthenomitir, as the predestined Mother of the Lord. Her function in the Incarnation is twofold. On the one hand, she secures the continuity of the human race. Her Son is, in virtue of his “second nativity,” the Son of David, the Son of Abraham and of all the “forefathers” (this is emphasized by the genealogies of Jesus, in both versions).
In the phrase of St. Irenaeus, he “recapitulated in himself the long roll of humanity” (Adv. Haeres., 3, 18, 1: longam hominum expositionem in se ipso recapitulavit), “gathered up in himself all nations, dispersed as they were even from Adam” (3, 22, 3) and “took upon himself the old way of creation” (4, 23, 4). But, on the other hand, he “exhibited a new sort of generation” (5, 1, 3). He was the New Adam. This was the most drastic break in the continuity, the true reversal of the previous process. And this “reversal” begins precisely with the Incarnation, with the Nativity of the “Second Man.” St. Irenaeus speaks of a recirculation — from Mary to Eve (3, 22, 4). As the Mother of the New Man Mary has her anticipated share in this very newness.
Of course, Jesus the Christ is the only Lord and Saviour. But Mary is his mother. She is the morning star that announces the sunrise, the rise of the true Sol salutis: astir emfenon ton Ilion. She is “the dawn of the mystic day,” (both phrases are from the Akathist hymn). And in a certain sense even the Nativity of our Lady itself belongs to the mystery of salvation. “Thy birth, O Mother of God and Virgin, hath declared joy to all the universe — for from thee arose the Sun of Righteousness, Christ our God” (Troparion of the Feast of the Nativity of our Lady).
Christian thought moves always in the dimension of personalities, not in the realm of general ideas. It apprehends the mystery of the Incarnation as a mystery of the Mother and the Child. This is the ultimate safeguard against any abstract docetism. It is a safeguard of the evangelical concreteness. The traditional icon of the Blessed Virgin, in the Eastern tradition, is precisely an icon of the Incarnation: the Virgin is always with the Babe. And surely no icon, i.e. no image of the Incarnation, is ever possible without the Virgin Mother.
~Adapted from Archpriest George Florovsky, The Ever-Virgin Mother of God, (http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/maria_florovsky_e.htm).
