

Is it possible to specify how this synergy of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Mother of God is exercised when the Church sacramentally celebrates the mystery of the Economy, that is to say, in the Eucharist, as in the related sacraments, and in the Liturgy of the Hours? Again, we will limit ourselves to what is common to our liturgical traditions; each of us will later be able to verify it in his own tradition.
This question receives an initial response if we situate it in light of another, more fundamental, question: who celebrates the sacramental liturgy? Doubtless, it is the assembly that celebrates, each member according to his role in the Church, including that of the ordained minister. But this assembly is itself sacramental, as the Church is the sacrament of the Kingdom that comes. In this sense, our liturgies are sacramental because they participate in the heavenly liturgy that they signify and actualize. Jesus, our High Priest, inaugurated this eternal liturgy with his Ascension, and since that time, “the Economy of the Fullness” (Ephesians 1:10) is poured out sacramentally in our last times. In this liturgy, the Father “acts always,” as does the Lamb, crucified and risen, and the Holy Spirit, the “river of living water that flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1). In this celebration “without end,” as we say before uniting ourselves to it with our triple “Sanctus,” participate the myriads of celestial powers, the 144,000 marked with the sign of the Lamb and the innumerable multitude of all those who are already in the Kingdom. But the Holy Mother of God and ever-Virgin Mary? According to the book of Revelation, chapters 4-5 and 7, she is guarded “in the silence of God.”
And whatever may be the opinions of exegetes concerning chapter 12 of the book of Revelation, the faith of the Apostolic Church is clear: in her Dormition (Assumption), Mary is the first creature fully risen by the power of her Son, the victor over death. The Resurrection, end of the promises and completion of the Economy, is already consummated in the Holy Mother of God, and it is for her alone that we have of this the certainty of faith. This we intuit: the dogma of the Dormition is related to the renewal of the theology of the liturgy, although yet timidly. In effect, the mortal humanity that the Virgin of the Annunciation gave to the Son of God in faith is returned to her risen in glory. Nevertheless, the human nature that the Word assumed forever is not individual but is that of the human race in which each human person participates. Conqueror of sin and death, Christ “reconstitutes” (Ephesians 1:10) our broken humanity and becomes the Head (ana-képhalaiôsathai). If Mary, in synergy with the Holy Spirit, gave our humanity to the only Son in his kénosis, how much more from now on can she offer it to him for him to gather in his life-giving Spirit “the scattered children of God.”
To offer? We reach here the most profound point of our investigation. “Offering” as a habitual disposition of the heart and as a “holy action” (cf. the sacrifice of praise) is a fundamental expression to let us understand the mystery of the Economy, the singular mission of the Mother of God and the sacramental celebration of the holy mysteries. Qorban is one of the most beautiful names given to the Eucharistic sacrifice.1 The mystery of the offering is written, like the Lamb and his Cross, in the heart of the Holy Trinity—“if only you knew the gift of God!”—and becomes that of loving faith throughout the Economy of salvation. It is the font of the fertile virginity of the Mother of God during her life of faith on this earth. Now that she is fully alive to praise the glory of the Holy Trinity in the heavenly liturgy, with all the more reason she acts in the mystery of the offering that we celebrate sacramentally. How?
In the Eucharist, “Christ is the one who offers and the one who is offered.”2 The decisive moment of sacramental realism is the epiclesis through which we insistently ask the Father to send his Holy Spirit over the gifts there offered (qarâbîn), to transform them into the Body and Blood of Christ. During this appeal, we prostrate ourselves on the ground, participating in the kénosis of Christ in his Incarnation and in his Burial: we await everything from the power of the Father; we are in a state of virginal offering. We do not repeat the mutual offering of the Lamb and of his Bride, but it is this unique offering, completed “once and for all,” that is actualized sacramentally by the Holy Spirit, so that the Church may commune with it and live from it. If Holy Mary, ever-virgin, was so intensely in a state of offering in the decisive moments of her maternity (Annunciation and Passion-Resurrection), how can she not be in communion with her Son each time he offers himself with his suffering members to the power of the Father’s love?3
In the Eastern anaphoras, the intercession immediately follows the epiclesis, because it is its unlimited and “universal” development. In the intercession, Christ, Head and members, continues offering to the Father the needs of the entire world, so that the Holy Spirit pours out on them, transforms them into Christ and renews all of creation. However, it is noteworthy that, in this dilation of the epiclesis in the four dimensions of the Economy of the mystery,4 we name the Holy Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary “in the first place” or “singularly” or “above all.” In this moment, as in the other moments of the celebration in which we “remember” her, we pray in communion with her, we abandon ourselves in Christ our God with her and all the saints: we implore our Savior through the prayers of the Mother of God. In this great sacrament of Communion (Koinônia) that is the Eucharist, and from its heart which is the epiclesis, we understand the admirable realism of the intercession: it is the flesh5 of our humanity with all its wounds of sin and of death that Christ assumes in order to offer it to the Father. In this mystery of offering which shakes our heart, the Holy Spirit and the Holy Mother of God do not cease to hurry the consummation of the Economy of salvation.
1.4 The Théotokos, Eschatological Icon of the Church6
The Vatican II Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium (LG)) can be compared to the Church where we celebrate the sacramental liturgy. We enter through the door of the mystery (ch. 1); from there, the people of God is gathered by the Holy Spirit and takes the form of the Body of Christ (ch. 2); served by their pastors, successors of the Apostles (ch. 3), the faithful, in the diversity of their charisms (ch. 4), can walk in the vocation to the holiness of the sons of God, some testifying to the world to come from this world (ch. 6) because the Church of the last times (eschatological) is united already with that of heaven (ch. 7). And behold, in the background of the apse, as in the basilicas of the first millennium, this People on the move can contemplate without ceasing, carried by its Mother, to him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of all human beings. Contemplating the icon of the Théotokos, we see how the Light of Christ shines in the face of the Church (LG, 1)
In effect, the Church is called to be in Christ “a sacrament or sign and instrument of the intimate union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (LG, 1). However, in the time of the Church, the mission of the Théotokos is situated, not in the sacramental structure but in the mystery signified and carried by the sacrament.7 She is the personal and living place beyond all forms of death, the Ark of the Covenant where the All-Powerful has realized, once and for all, the wonders of his communion with men. Personalized Icon of the Church, she is the Sign8 that the consummation of time is already at work in our world. That is why it is interior to the last times, not beyond but within our Christian eschatological condition.
For previous instalments of Father Corbon’s reflections on Mary’s role in the Sacramental Economy, see:
About this piece:
Jean Corbon “Sainte Marie Mère de Dieu dans l’économie sacramentelle et dans la vie chrétienne:” Proche-Oriente Chrétien 45 (1995) 10-25. Conference given in the Institute of Liturgy of the University of the Holy Spirit in Kalik (Lebanon), March 14, 1994, in the liturgical conferences organized each year since 1985 by the Institute. The Arabic text is included in the ninth series of the liturgical conferences. Translated by Lucy Schemel from the Spanish as printed in Liturgia y Oracion, Jean Corbon, Ediciones Cristiandad S.A, Madrid, 2004, pp. 91-115.
Image Source: AB/Lawrence OP on Flickr. Icon of Our Lady is in the apse of the Orthodox Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Washington DC.
Footnotes
- As with anaphora and qorbono, the Arabic word qurbân signifies at the same time the action of offering and that which is offered.
- Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, prayer of the priest before the anaphora during the Chéroubikon chant (procession of the gifts).
- Concerning this synergy of the Holy Spirit and Mary, cf. St. John Damascene: “You ask how the bread is changed into the Body of Christ (…). I tell you: The Holy Spirit breaks in and accomplishes that which surpasses word and thought (…). It is enough to understand that it is through the Holy Spirit that the Lord, through Himself and in Himself, assumes flesh” (De fide ortodoxa, IV, 13).
- Cf. above the four great times of the Economy of salvation.
- Cf. above footnote 2 and §2: the Annunciation, the Cross, and the Resurrection.
- Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 972, and the citations from LG in this regard.
- It is said that, in the Eastern liturgies, the same word expresses the sacrament (the signifier) and the mystery (the meaning): musterion, rôz, sirr.
- “The Virgin of the Sign” is one of the most popular forms of Marian iconography.