Tag Archives: Mother of God

Moses = Burning Bushes and Building Bridges

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Moses encounters the Logos, the Word of God, at the Burning Bush in the icon of Our Lady of the Burning Bush in the upper right corner of the icon; see the detail from a contemporary icon as well.


Moses was the lynchpin between God and Israel; as the Serbian proverb goes, he was the neck that turned the head (connecting the head—God—to the body, which was Israel). His encounter at the bush, as he was tending Jethro’s flocks, becomes an image of the Incarnation as the bush that burned but was not consumed is a foreshadowing of the Virgin who gave birth to God without loss of her virginity.

According to Wikipedia (so it MUST be true!), the Hebrew word in the story that is translated into English as bush is seneh(סנה‎) which refers in particular to brambles; seneh is a biblical dis legomenon, only appearing in two places, both of which describe the burning bush. The use of seneh may be a deliberate pun on Sinai (סיני‎), a feature common in Hebrew texts. (That the burning bush is a bramble bush also associates it with the bramble bush which is an important part of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.)

At the bush, Moses is commissioned to act as God’s mouthpiece, telling Pharaoh to “Let my people go” and telling the people of Israel what God wants from them. He is commissioned to build a bridge between God and the world—both the fallen world (Egypt) and the world being redeemed and healed (Israel). This role as the bridge builder between God and the world is essentially the role of a priest; one Latin word for priest is pontifex, which is literally “bridge builder.”

Even before Aaron is ordained as priest, Moses offers sacrifices to God on behalf of Israel. Moses builds the bridge between eternity and the world by his words and by sacrifice. In the Middle Ages, it was an especially meritorious act to leave money in your will to build a public bridge that did not charge a toll across a river. Building a toll free bridge was a priestly act, uniting two sides of the river as a priest unites worlds in the liturgical sacrifice and preaching. (Without a bridge, people might have to travel several miles—hours—out of their way to find a place to cross the river. A toll bridge, built by someone who wanted to make a profit on their construction investment, limited river crossing to the well-to-do; a toll free bridge was an image of Christ’s sacrifice freely available to all.)

Moses built a bridge between God and Israel. Israel, the priestly people commissioned at Mt. Sinai, built a bridge between God and the world. The Word-made-flesh, who spoke to Moses at the bush, built the ultimate bridge that brought together everything he was not with everything that he is. The Church, the Body of the Word-made-flesh, continues that ministry of bridge building.

Presentation of the Blessed Virgin

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In this Georgian icon, we see the Blessed Virgin presented to the priests in the Temple by her parents SS. Joachim and Anna with the young girls who also marched with her in procession; above, we see the archangel Gabriel bringing the Virgin bread from heaven. The Presentation of the Virgin is celebrated in East and West on November 21.

We read of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple when she was three years old in the Protoevangelium of James. SS. Joachim and Anna bring their daughter Mary to the Temple, as they promised to do before she was born, and give her to the service of God. Seven pairs of young girls march in procession with Mary. The priests meet this procession and take Mary into the Temple–into the Holy of Holies!–to live; she joins a community of women who care for the Temple fabrics and vestments. The archangel Gabriel brought the Blessed Virgin bread from heaven each day. When she was older, she was chosen to assist in weaving a new veil to hang before the Holy of Holies; it was while she was working with the purple thread to be used in the weaving that Gabriel appeared to her one last time, asking her to become the mother of Jesus (the Annunciation).

The two things in the story that usually strike people as outlandish or impossible is the assertion that the Blessed Virgin enters the Holy of Holies itself and that she grows up at the Temple, cared for a community of woman in the Temple compound.

The Virgin is said to enter the Holy of Holies because she herself becomes the Holy of Holies–the innermost sanctuary where God dwells. Clearly, it would have been impossible for a three-year old to “accidently” enter the Holy of Holies as it was heavily guarded and protected; the Holy of Holies here stands for the Temple itself in its entirety as well as its being synonymous with the Virgin herself.

The community of women who live at the Temple is alluded to by St. Luke in his Gospel by the Prophetess Anna (in Luke 2), an elderly woman who meets Christ in the Temple when he is forty days old. But the story in the Protoevangelium still strikes many as unlikely. Throughout the Old Testament we read of women who waited at the door of the Temple or the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness (Exodus 38:8; Numbers 4:23, 8:24; 1 Sam. 2; as well as 2 Maccabees 3).

We have also recently made archeological discoveries that reveal the presence of a 3-story women’s dormitory alongside the Temple and we read in Josephus (an important 1st century historian) that the young women and their chaperones made a Nazarite vow and who lived in this dormitory; he also tells us that these young women (virgins) jumped out of the windows into fires below to avoid being attacked, raped, and killed by the Roman soldiers who pulled down the Temple in AD 70. Jewish sources–such as the Mishnah and the Talmud–tell us that a community of women were, in fact, responsible for the care of Temple linens as well as baking the showbread and mixing the incense to be used.

That the Virgin is presented when she is three-years old relates to the expectation that children were weaned at that age and the prophet Samuel was given to the priest Eli when the boy was three-years old. Heifers and other animals to be sacrificed were also three-years old when given as offerings to God. The archangel Gabriel is said to bring her bread from heaven because she eventually gives birth to the Living Bread, the True Bread come down from heaven. In the meanwhile, she is sustained by a rich life of prayer and devotion to God.

The story of the Presentation of the Virgin makes the point that the two most important signs of the Old Covenant become flesh in the New Covenant: the Torah–the living Word of God–is made flesh in Jesus and the Temple–the place where God dwells and where people can meet him–becomes a woman. The Protoevangelium recalls many details of 1st century Jewish life that were otherwise forgotten for centuries and is more reliable as a source than many people realize.

Woman Clothed With the Sun

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The woman clothed with the sun attacked by the seven-headed red dragon depicted in a 17th-century fresco in a Mt. Athos monastery.

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman robed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth …. Then a second sign appeared in heaven: a great red dragon with seven heads …. (Apocalypse 12:1-6)

The woman clothed with the sun is one of my favorite characters or episodes in the New Testament. In the earliest commentaries, she is understood to be the Church, the New Israel, and the baby she gives birth to is the new Christian–at this period, typically an adult–who emerges newborn from the baptismal font. The red dragon with seven heads is the Roman imperial system who attacks the Church and slays the martyrs. The woman and her baby–the Church and the newly baptized–escape to safety in the wilderness, which is where the early ascetics and first monastics fled to pray and fast.

One of my favorite patristic texts–one of the first I ever read in its totality, as a freshman in the Sterling Library at Yale–is The Banquet by St. Methodius of Olympus. The Banquet is the one of the first and is the most extensive of the early Christian discussions of the woman clothed with the sun.

In the third century, commentators begin to see the woman clothed with the sun as the ever-virgin Mother of God who gives birth to Christ. They are attacked by Herod and flee to safety in Egypt. The importance of this interpretation of the Mother of God grows in importance as she becomes a model for the ascetics and monastics in the desert-wilderness, usually in Egypt but also near the Jordan River.

The image of the woman clothed with the sun becomes associated with the “falling asleep” (the Dormition or Assumption) of the Mother of God. She is taken into eternal glory in the Kingdom of God because she is the Mother of God who gives her flesh to the Word. Everything human about the Word-made-flesh came from her; his DNA is her DNA. She is the first believer to be taken into glory as a pledge of what all members of the Body of Christ will experience.

The woman clothed with the sun is one of the most frequently depicted figures in the New Testament. If the Apocalypse is a multi-valent and many layered text, the woman clothed with the sun is one of the most multi-valent and many layered figures in the New Testament.

The woman clothed with the sun in an illumination from the Beatus manuscript of the Apocalypse.
Another medieval manuscript illumination depicting the woman clothed with the sun escaping from the great dragon.