{"id":6839,"date":"2019-12-04T08:49:46","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T14:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedisciplemaker.org\/?p=6839"},"modified":"2019-12-04T08:49:46","modified_gmt":"2019-12-04T14:49:46","slug":"the-container-of-the-uncontainable-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.navpress.com\/sites\/thedisciplemaker\/2019\/12\/the-container-of-the-uncontainable-god\/","title":{"rendered":"The Container of the Uncontainable God"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

On a clear winter day a few years ago, I went with my friend Claire to visit a small chapel near the western edge of the walls that centuries ago protected the city of Constantinople. In the fourth century, the Chora church stood in the open air of a country field, but it\u2019s now lost behind a jumble of apartment buildings. The main doors were closed, so we followed a pathway through a modest garden wrapping around the back of the building. We ducked into the side entrance, stepping out of a twenty-first-century city into a fourteenth-century interior. The walls of the two entry hallways leading to a small chapel were awash with mosaics and paintings illustrating the life of Christ and of his mother, Mary.
\n\"\"
\nStanding inside the massive wooden doors that were once the main entrance, I looked up to see a painting of Mary hovering above me. The blue mantel draped over her head and shoulders flowed down over the doorway. Jesus as a young child appeared within a womb-like mandorla centered within Mary\u2019s body. The image illustrates that Mary is the passageway, gate or door through which God came to live among us. It also depicts the awe-inspiring notion that the uncontainable God was once contained within the body of a woman.<\/strong>
\nBeside the mosaic of Mary, tiny mosaic tesserae spell out three Greek words. Byzantine artists were careful about identifying figures by name in their artwork. So, I would expect to find the name Mary, or her honorary title, Theotokos, which means God-bearer, associated with the image of her. But not in this church. At Chora, Mary is called the \u201ccontainer of the uncontainable.\u201d This playfully paradoxical name for Mary reflects the reality that Byzantine Christians thought of her as the ultimate symbol of one of the central tenets of Christian orthodoxy: The holy, eternal God took on human flesh and became a man. Incarnation. By definition, it\u2019s not possible for the uncontainable to be contained; and yet, that\u2019s precisely what Christians believe happened within the fragile body of a young woman. In Mary, the impossible became possible because the uncontainable God became contained in the tiniest of spaces, a human embryo that dwelt for nine months in the body of a human woman.
\nWe saw in the first chapter of Genesis that God blessed the natural reproductive cycle with fruitfulness, but God blessed Mary uniquely by supernaturally interrupting the flow of the biological process he designed, planting life inside her in the absence of any human touch. The life within her wasn\u2019t just any life\u2014it was the life of God himself. And it is right here that I begin to understand how Mary was most blessed. She was blessed because God the Son was near to her\u2014within her\u2014in a way he never had been or would be again with anyone in the history of the world.<\/p>\n

Faith, like blessing, is oriented toward the future.<\/h4>\n

Mary\u2019s whole orientation toward God was one of trust. She believed God\u2019s word and allowed it to be accomplished in her life. We know from the hymn Mary sang when she was still young that her vision stretched beyond the immediate present moment. Then she sang, \u201cHe [God] has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever\u201d (Luke 1:54-55). Mary was looking all the way back to God\u2019s blessing of Abraham and all the way forward to eternity.<\/strong>
\n\"\"
\nWe moved out of the entry hall and into the chapel. There, over the door, I discovered an image of Mary that was new to me but would have been familiar to Orthodox Christians\u2014an image of Mary\u2019s funeral. Her lifeless body rested flat on a slab, the contour of her physical form lost altogether under the stiff, angular folds of her mantel. The disciples congregated around her, mourning her passing. Behind her body, Jesus appeared enveloped in a blaze of light. He stood cradling a baby in his arms.
\nI wondered about the baby: Who could it be? I asked Claire, who is well-versed in Byzantine iconography, about the meaning of the image. Her answer caught me off guard. She told me that the baby wrapped snug in Christ\u2019s embrace represents Mary\u2019s soul. The baby symbolizes her spiritual body truly alive in the arms of her son.[i]<\/a>
\nI have seen countless paintings of Mary holding Jesus as an infant, but in this mosaic, there is a stunning role reversal<\/strong>\u2014Son embraces mother, lifting her soul to a heavenly home. Mary\u2019s body might be spent, but her life is not at an end. Now she will live forever within Christ\u2019s glory. Her son has become her Redeemer.<\/p>\n

Mary, it turns out, was blessed because she found life in the son she welcomed into the world.<\/h4>\n

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard suggests Mary \u201chas no need of worldly admiration, any more than Abraham has need of tears, for she was not a heroine, and he was not a hero, but both of them became greater than such, not at all because they were exempted from distress and torment and paradox, but they became great through these.\u201d[ii]<\/a> Mary was most blessed because she emptied herself, allowing God to fill her with faith and stretch her with a blessing that would become the source of salvation and eternal life for the whole world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Taken from Given: The Forgotten Meaning and Practice of Blessing<\/em> by Tina Boesch<\/a>. Copyright \u00a9 2019. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
\n\"\"
\n[i]<\/a> Since first seeing this mosaic with my friend Claire, I\u2019ve read quite a bit about the dormition of the Virgin Mary. A good source for understanding the variations between the three main early Christian traditions regarding the moment when Mary\u2019s body and soul are reunited in paradise, see Shoemaker\u2014Palm traditions, 32\u201346; Bethlehem traditions, 46\u201357; Coptic traditions, 58\u201363. Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary\u2019s Dormition and Assumption (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
\n[ii]<\/a> Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Knopf, 1994), 56. Emphasis added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a clear winter day a few years ago, I went with my friend Claire to visit a small chapel near the western edge of the walls that centuries ago protected the city of Constantinople. In the fourth century, the … <\/p>\n

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