The Maternity of God

 On the holy mountain, Moses was commanded to make a copy of what he had seen in heaven. As God told him, “see that you make it all [exactly] according to the pattern which was shown to you on the mountain”. What he made would be the blueprints for the future temple that Solomon would build. This temple was a copy of what was seen in heaven. We are given the description of what that heavenly temple looked like in the Book of Revelation. What’s interesting is that the description of the heavenly temple is preceded by a sign, which was a woman who gave birth to a divine king. 

It should be no coincidence that Solomon as well as the other Davidic Kings considered themselves to be divine kings. As it says in Psalm 2:7  “The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you”. Obviously, their divinity is not the same as our Lord’s. What gave them their status was based on a copy of the real thing. What then is the real thing? If it was a woman in revelation who gave birth to a divine king, where is she in the OT? The answer should be in understanding how this woman is connected to the temple.

The fathers teach us that what was seen in the heavenly temple was connected to the maternity of the mother of our Lord. She is even called the Ark. I think this connection is best understood by our feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple. As our tradition teaches, Mary was led to the holy place to be nourished there by the angels in order to become herself the “holy of holies” of God, the living sanctuary and temple of the Divine child who was to be born in her. If she was the true “holy of holies” then the one that Moses must have seen in heaven was her. If this is the case, the OT temple must have also been designed after her, designed for giving birth to divine children.

You could easily argue that even in the OT temple design there are symbols that represent maternity. However, there was something that took place in the temple that empowered those symbols, which was the Shekinah. This was the glory that filled that temple, the glory that gave birth to Sons of God, and the words to describe that were feminine. Even the Hebrew word for Spirit was feminine. Unfortunately, this understanding has become scandalous for many religious people of our time despite the facts. Nevertheless, you can see this same imagery in the NT where the Spirit of God comes upon the Theotokos and she gives birth to our Lord. The temple imagery is reproduced in her. She is the temple, and the Spirit is the Glory that fills her. Again, this imagery is purely maternal.

St. Maximilian Colby as well as his contemporary the great theologian Sergius Bulgakov believed that Mary was the face or Icon of the Holy Spirit. This is helpful in understanding the maternity of God. Like the temple, Mary was the created body for God to give birth to a Son. In this understanding, we can also find the primitive image of the trinity that was in OT temple worship. God/Father would give birth to his Divine Son through the Temple\Mother (the body of the Spirit). This understanding makes a great deal of sense in how we now become children of God. The Father makes us his children through his new temple, the Church, which we also call Mother. If the Church is a mother and also the embodiment of Spirit what does that make God?