Holy Week

 We are in Holy Week, the week of the Christian liturgical Kalendar that leads up to the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is Pascha or Easter depending upon where you live and what language you speak.  The celebration of Pascha/Easter goes back to the very beginning of Christian history.  In the early centuries of persecution before the legalization of Christianity there were disputes as to when and how the Christian Passover – Pascha is the Latinization of Πάσχα which is the Greek transliteration of פֶסַח (Pesach), the Hebrew Passover – was to be celebrated.  The majority regarded the Christian Passover as a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and held it on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.  Some, primarily among the churches of Asia Minor to which the book of Revelation was addressed, thought that it should be a commemoration of His death to be held on the date according to the Hebrew calendar on which He died.  Since that date was the fourteenth of Nisan these were called Quartodecimans from the Latin for fourteen. A variation of this, held by a much smaller number of Christians located mostly in Gaul, celebrated on the date He died according to the Roman calendar, which was the twenty-fifth of March.[1]  Settling this controversy was the main non-doctrinal accomplishment of the First Council of Nicaea in 325.[2]  The earliest extent mention of the observance of the entire Holy Week dates to the last half of the century prior to that.[3]  Towards the end of the fourth century, just prior to the second ecumenical Council (the First Council of Constantinople, 383), the Spanish nun Egeria made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in what is actually a long letter but which also reads as an early example of a travel journal[4] provided a detailed account of the Holy Week services held by the Christians in Jerusalem whose bishop at the time was the important Church Father St. Cyril.  This was the most elaborate celebration of the Holy Week at the time and through accounts such Egeria’s Jerusalem’s practice came to influence other Churches throughout the Christian world.

 

The observation of Holy Week seems like an inevitable development.  The four Evangelists present a much clearer picture of what Jesus said and did in the week of the Crucifixion than of any other period in His earthly ministry.  The week begins with Palm Sunday, remembering Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem in fulfilment of Zechariah 9:9-12.  We might begin it with the eve of Palm Sunday, when the anointing of Jesus by Mary at the supper in Bethany took place.  SS Matthew and Mark tell of this event in the middle of their account of Judas’ pact with Jesus’ enemies to betray Him for thirty-pieces of silver.  By doing so they indicate not when the supper occurred but that Judas’ decision to betray Jesus began with this event.  It is from St. John that we learn that the anointing had taken place a few days earlier than Judas’ deal with the high priests, which took place on the Wednesday of the week of the Passion.  St. John connects the two events in a different way by identifying Judas as the one who had voiced the objection to Mary’s act.

 

St. John also tells us that Jesus had arrived at Bethany six days prior to the Passover.  This was the Saturday before Palm Sunday, six days before the Passover on the Friday on which Jesus was crucified.  Some see a conflict between St. John and the other Evangelists on the day of the Passover but the conflict disappears upon closer examination.  When St. Mark tells us that “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (Mk. 14:12) this does not mean that the Passover lambs were killed on the Thursday before the Crucifixion.  St. Mark, like St. Matthew and even the Gentile doctor St. Luke, used the Jewish method of counting days as starting with the previous evening.  This is rooted in the creation account of the book of Genesis, where of the days of creation it is repeatedly stated “And the evening and morning were the X day.”  We also use this method of reckoning days when it comes to holy days in our sacred Kalendar.  That is why the twenty-fourth of December is called “Christmas Eve” and the thirty-first of October is called “Halloween” (short for All Hallows Eve).  Clement Clark Moore was wrong.  “Christmas Eve” is not “the night before Christmas” but rather the part of Christmas that falls on the evening of the twenty-fourth.  When the Synoptic Evangelists tell us that the disciples prepared the Last Supper on the day when the Passover lambs were killed they are counting the evening of the first Maundy Thursday as part of Good Friday.  In the Hebrew calendar it was already the fourteenth of Nisan.  Jesus died at the ninth hour of daylight - three pm - on the fourteenth of Nisan.  This was the hour the sacrificial Passover lamb was slain.  By the method of reckoning days used by the Synoptic Gospels this was still the same day on which the Last Supper had taken place. 

 

This raises the question of what was going on with the Last Supper. It took place, as the Synoptic Gospels say, on the day the Passover lamb was slain, at the beginning of that day, the evening prior to the slaying.  This would seem to rule out it being a Passover meal proper, since this was eaten on the evening following the slaying of the lamb, the evening that begins the fifteenth of Nisan.  St. Luke, however, seems to clearly identify the Last Supper as a Passover meal.  He calls it such himself (Lk. 22:13).  He records Jesus’ calling it such “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15).  He includes details indicative of a Passover meal such as the first cup (the Kiddush) at the beginning of the meal (Lk. 22:17), before the institution of the Eucharist with the breaking of the bread (Lk. 22:19) and the cup after supper which if this was a Passover meal would have been the third of the cups signifying redemption and blessing.  .

 

The answer to the question is present in the Scriptural texts.  Yes, the Last Supper was a Passover meal, and yes, it was eaten before the Passover lamb was slain, a day before the Jews in general ate the Passover that year.  For the only lamb mentioned as being present at that meal was the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.”  He offered Himself to be eaten at meal in the bread and the cup.  “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” He said after breaking the bread while giving it to His disciples (Lk. 22:19) “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” He said over the cup after supper (Lk. 22:20).  Chronologically, it would not be until the following afternoon that His blood would be shed and His body given, but He offered His disciples His body and blood in the first Eucharist the evening before, just as they were eating a Passover meal the evening before the Passover was slain. 

 

There is an important lesson in this.  Although the events in which the salvation of mankind was accomplished, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, are historical events, events which occurred at a specific place and specific time in the history of the world, at the centre of these events is a Person Who is not bound or limited by space or time.  This Eternal Person Who entered the world of space and time in order to redeem and save, is declared by the Scriptures to be “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

 

The Law of Moses specified that the Paschal lamb was to be selected and separated from the rest of the flock on the tenth of Aviv (“Spring”, the original name for the month re-named Nisan in the Babylonian Captivity).  Note how St. Mark concludes his account of the Triumphal Entry: “And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.” (Mk. 11:11)  The impression that this verse gives, that after the Triumphal Entry, Jesus had a quick look around and then went back to Bethany is reinforced by His promise to the donkey colt’s owners that “straightway he will send him hither”, (Mk. 11:3) i.e., that He would return the animal immediately, which only St. Mark records. This is the only indicator in any of the Gospels of the time of day of the Triumphal Entry.  It was late on Palm Sunday, as the afternoon was turning into evening, at which time the ninth of Aviv/Nisan was ending and the tenth was beginning. 

 

In sermons the events of Palm Sunday and Good Friday are often contrasted.  The crowds that welcomed Jesus with “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” on Palm Sunday became the mob that screamed “Crucify Him!  Give us Barabbas” on Good Friday.  The contrasts are important but the underlying harmony between the two events should not be overlooked.

 

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem that Sunday He publicly presented Himself to Jerusalem, King David’s city, the capital of national Israel, as the Messiah they had been awaiting, the Christ.  He had not hidden His identify before this.  That He is the Christ was the import of His remark in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of His public ministry about the prophecy of Isaiah being fulfilled.  What He said about Himself in His sermons and parables and in His controversies with the Pharisees and scribes would be very strange, to say the least, if He did not claim to be the Christ.  He had identified Himself as Christ to individuals such as the Samaritan woman at the well from before His public ministry even started (the encounter with the woman took place prior to the arrest of John the Baptist and hence prior to His public ministry) and when St. Peter, speaking for the Apostles, confessed Him to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16:15) He praised this as having been divinely revealed (Matt. 16:17).  The Triumphal Entry, however, was His official presentation of Himself to the nation as their Messiah or Christ.  The crowds who met Him with palm branches and shouted Hosanna recognized this, of course.  What they didn’t recognize was that by presenting Himself as the Christ, He was presenting Himself as the true Paschal Lamb.  Neither did His disciples recognize this even though He had begun explaining it to them following St. Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:21) and at His anointing at Bethany, intrinsically connected with His official presentation of Himself as the Christ the following day in that it was a literal anointing of the “Anointed One”, He had again made the connection by saying that “against the day of my burying hath she kept this” (Jn. 12:7). 

 

The disciples, like the rest of Israel, were familiar with the prophecies of the Messiah, the Anointed Son of David, Who would deliver Israel, restore David’s throne, and establish it and rule it forever.  Their Scriptures also predicted that He would suffer and die and be raised from the dead.  Isaiah’s account of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah,[5] Daniel’s prophecy of the Messiah being “cut off, but not for himself”[6], the 21^st/22^nd Psalm[7], prophecies of this nature are found throughout the Old Testament, including in the words spoken to the serpent “and thou shalt bruise his heel” in God’s very first promise that He would send a Saviour.[8]  Prior to their fulfilment, of course, it was difficult to see the connection between these prophecies and those of the triumphant Son of David.  The Genesis prophecy was the key connection.  There were no nations when that promise was made.  The promised Saviour was for all mankind.  Israel, in the Messianic prophecies, is the kingdom of priests Exodus 19:6 declares her to be, performing the priestly function of representing the entire world of mankind.  The promised deliverance, is not mere deliverance of the nation from political subjection to empires such as Assyria, Babylon or Rome, but deliverance of mankind from bondage to the enemies that took mankind captive in the Garden of Eden – Satan, sin, and death.

 

The way the Messiah would defeat these enemies was by meekly submitting to their killing Him.  For the only claims Satan, sin, and death have over mankind arise out of mankind’s voluntary entrance into bondage by sinning in the Garden.  The Messiah is the eternal Son of God, Who when He took human nature to His Own eternal Person in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, became Man but without sin.[9]  He bore the sins of mankind on the Cross, because His death was the true Day of Atonement as well as the true Passover, but He had no sin of His own.  Satan and death, therefore, had no claim on Him, and when He allowed them to take Him anyway they found that they had captured Him over Whom they had no claim and could not hold.  The final day of Holy Week, Holy Saturday, remembers the day when Jesus’ body lay in the grave, the one kingdom of death, while He entered Hell[10], death’s other kingdom, not as captive but as Conqueror.  Note His promise to the repentant thief on the Cross “Today, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”[11]  While Paradise and Hell are ordinarily thought of as opposite places far removed from each other – think of the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus[12] - at the ninth hour on that fourteenth of Nisan that was the first Good Friday, Paradise invaded Hell.  When on Easter Sunday He rose again from the dead, He left behind Him a Hell the gates of which He had smashed to pieces, and whose captives He had set free.  As Conqueror, He claimed as His spoils, all those that Satan and death had taken captive in the Garden, i.e., mankind.

 

Therefore, while the difference between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the demands for crucifixion on Good Friday may illustrate the fickle nature of the whims of the mob, ultimately there is a unity between the two.  By joyously receiving their Messiah on Palm Sunday, the crowds of Jerusalem had selected and separated the true Paschal Lamb, and by demanding His death on Good Friday, they sent Him to the death for which He hand come into the world, by which He accomplished the salvation to which the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt on the original Passover pointed.

 

Have a blessed Holy Week!

 

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[1] The Crucifixion was one of several events – the first day of Creation and the testing of Abraham with regards to the sacrifice of Isaac are among the others – which ancient Christians, going back to at least the second century, believed to have taken place on the twenty-fifth of March by the Julian calendar.  That the early Christians also regarded this as the date of the Annunciation – and therefore the conception of Jesus Christ, nine months before Christmas, His birth – is believed to be derived from its having been the date of the Crucifixion.  While you won’t find the “integral age” theory spelled out in any Patristic source, that the early Christians were thinking in such terms seems to be a reasonable deduction from the coinciding of the date set for the Annunciation and the date of the Crucifixion.  That the figure through whom God established the Old Covenant, Moses, died on his 120^th birthday, seems to be the implication of Deuteronomy 31:2, and was certainly held to be the meaning of this verse by the ancient rabbis (see Sotah 12b in the Talmud) who held this to be also true of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and King David (see Rosh Hashana 11a in the Talmud) on the basis of a general principle extrapolated from Exodus 23:26 and the example of Moses.  While a direct application of the rabbinic concept to Jesus would have placed Christmas rather than the Annunciation on the twenty-fifth of March, the reason the early Christians would have been thinking in terms of the conception rather than the birth in Jesus’ case is fairly obvious.  The Annunciation and not Christmas was the date the Incarnation took place.  In the early centuries, the Church was challenged by heretics who taught that the union of the divine and human in Jesus took place at some later time.  The most common form of this heresy was to say that it took place at the baptism of Jesus.  The orthodox doctrine, however, is that Jesus’ human nature was united to His Person from the moment of conception, that it was never the human nature of anyone but the Eternal Son of God, that the Incarnation was not the fusion of a human person with a divine person or the possession of a human person by a divine person, but a Divine Person taking a complete human nature that was formed to be His own to His own Person.  Therefore it made more sense to the ancient Christians that the Son of God would die on the day He became Man rather than on His birthday like Moses.  This also lined up better with the Biblical evidence as to the time of His birth.  From the fact that when Gabriel visited Zechariah in the Temple all of Israel was assembled there (that is the significance of “and all the multitude of the people” in Luke 1:10) this had to have been Yom Kippur for no other day in the course of Abihan’s two weeks of duty involved a national assembly (its first week of duty earlier in the year fell on the week after Shavuot, the Hebrew Pentecost) therefore the Annunciation had to have taken place around Passover in March.

[2] The council ruled that Pascha or Easter was to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the twenty-first of March.  This was a translation into the solar calendar of the day when the Resurrection occurred which was the Sunday following the Jewish Passover.  The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar – a calendar in which the month’s following the lunar cycle takes precedence over the year’s following the solar cycle and so each month begins on the new moon – and Passover occurs in the middle (on what would be called the Ides of the month on the old Roman lunar calendar) of the first month, which is the spring month, ergo the full moon of the month when spring starts.  By the council’s ruling, spring is considered to start on the twenty-first of March, although astronomically the vernal equinox can occur anywhere between the nineteenth and the twenty-first (this year it fell on the twentieth).  

[3] Apostolic Constitutions, 5.13-19.

[4] Peregrinatio Egeriae. There are numerous variations of the title both in Latin and in translation. In some of these there is a “th” instead of a “g” in the nun’s name.  The 1919 SPCK translation by M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, is an example of this.  It can be read here: The Pilgrimage of Egeria

[5] Is. 53.

[6] Dan. 9:26.

[7] 22^nd by the Hebrew numbering, which our Authorized Bible uses, 21^st by the numbering of the LXX and Latin Vulgate.

[8] Gen. 3:15.

[9] Heb. 4:15.

[10] Hell, when used in this way, should be thought of as “the depository of the souls of the dead” rather than “the place to which the incurably unrepentant will ultimately be consigned” although there is a great deal of overlap between the two concepts.  This is the original meaning attached to the word, although today it is more commonly used of eternal punishment. The Bible brings the two together in Rev. 20:14 when it speaks of Hell, in the original sense of the word, being cast into the Lake of Fire which is Hell in today’s sense of the word, at the Last Judgement.

[11] Lk. 23:43.

[12] Lk. 16:19-31.

Some Belated Reflections on Lady Day

Yesterday, 25 March, was the holy day formally called The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and commonly referred to as Lady Day.  It commemorates the day that the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary in Nazareth and told her that she was “blessed… among women” and “hast found favour with God” and would conceive and give birth to the Christ, the Son of God.  The account can be found in St. Luke’s Gospel, the first chapter, verses 36-38.  St. Luke does not provide the calendar date on which Gabriel visited the Blessed Virgin but he does say that it was in the “sixth month” (v. 26), i.e., of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist.  Elizabeth conceived shortly after her husband Zacharias had received his visitation from Gabriel while serving in the Temple.  Zacharias was of the “course of Abia” the Temple service of which occurred twice in the year, once in the week of the Day of Atonement.  That this was the week in which the visitation took place can be inferred from indicators in the text that the Temple was very well attended that day.  Also, there is an ancient legend that Zacharias was serving as High Priest on Yom Kippur that is difficult to reconcile with St. Luke’s account but can be explained as an embellishment on the correct detail of it having been Yom Kippur or at least the week thereof that the event took place.  Yom Kippur falls in late September to early October, making October the month of John the Baptist’s conception, and March therefore, the sixth month of it.  Although the earliest mention of the celebration of the Annunciation goes only back to the sixth century, the fact that the Church regarded it as having occurred on 25 March since the earliest centuries is easily demonstrated.  St. Hippolytus of Rome, whose years were 170 to 235 AD, wrote that our Lord was born eight days before the Kalends of January.[1]  That is 25 December by our way of reckoning dates.[2]  Nine months to the day after 25 March.

 

There is a type of Protestant who thinks that any amount of honour and attention bestowed on our Lord’s mother takes away from that which is due to Christ Himself.  The Annunciation, the Gospel account of it, and its celebration reveal the foolishness of this way of thinking.

 

Consider the salutation of Gabriel to the Virgin: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” (Lk. 1:28)

 

The first observation to be made about these words is that the honour bestowed upon Mary here, that she is “highly favoured” or as William Tyndale rendered it “full of grace”, the Lord is with her, and she is “blessed…among women” come from the mouth of an unfallen angel speaking on behalf of God.  It could hardly, therefore, detract from the honour due to her Son.

 

The second observation is that this is the first three lines of the Ave Maria.  These are drawn directly from the inspired words of Scripture.   The next two lines of the Ave Maria, are Elizabeth’s salutation when Mary visits her immediately after the Annunciation (Lk. 1:42).  The only things added to the Scriptural text in the Ave Maria prior to the Sancta Maria portion are the names Mary and Jesus.  Remember that the next time you hear someone claim these words are idolatrous.

 

Now consider the Christological significance of the Annunciation.  Objections to honouring Mary often contribute to poor Christology.  Some Hyper-Protestants, in their zeal to throw out anything they consider to be tainted with “papist Mariolatry”, object to the title “Mother of God” or “Theotokos” and in doing so embrace the sort of thinking associated with the fifth century Nestorius of Constantinople that was condemned as heretical at the third ecumenical council.  Ironically, of course, Nestorius himself had no problem with honouring Mary.  His problem with “Theotokos” was that he thought it suggested that Mary was the source of Jesus’ divinity.  This is the same problem Hyper-Protestants have with “Mother of God.”  “Mary is not the Mother of God” they will say “She is the Mother of Jesus” just as the fifth century Nestorians called Mary the “Christokos” (Christ-bearer) rather than “Theotokos” (God-bearer).  The reason these arguments are condemned as heretical is because they introduce division into the Person of Christ.  Jesus Christ is One Person.  Mary is the Mother of that Person.  That Person is both God and Man.  Therefore Mary is the Mother of God.  This obviously does not mean that Jesus gets His deity from her.  The Person Jesus has always existed with and in His Father and the Holy Spirit as God.  That Person became Man but was always God.  In becoming Man, He gained a Mother.  This is a completely unique instance of a Person existing before His Mother, but that does not alter the fact that she is His Mother, or that Mother is her relationship to Him as a Person, and since He that Person is God as well as Man, she is the Mother of God.

 

Now before you conclude that I have gotten away from my main point think of this question: When did the Incarnation take place?  When was the Hypostatic Union formed?  When did the Eternally-Begotten Son of God add a complete but anhypostatic[3] human nature, subject to the consequences of the Fall such as mortality except for the taint of sin itself, to His Own Eternal Person and become Man?

 

The answer, of course, is Lady Day, the day of the Annunciation.  The Incarnation did not take place at Christ’s birth on Christmas.  By that time His human life had already been growing for nine months.  Jesus’ humanity was never not-united to His deity and His Person but was created already in union with Him.  Otherwise His humanity would not have been His but someone else’s that He took in a manner similar to possession.  The Incarnation, therefore, and Jesus’ conception are one and the same event.  Gabriel’s message to the Blessed Virgin was:

 

Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. (Lk. 1:30-33).

 

After inquiring as to how this was possible and receiving the answer that it would be by the power of the Holy Spirit, her response was “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” (Lk. 1:38)  In these words she in submissive obedience consented to being the God-bearer and the miracle was accomplished.

 

Mary’s response was a significant theme in the writings of the earliest Church Fathers.  St. Irenaeus wrote:

 

In accordance with this design, Mary the Virgin is found obedient, saying, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to your word. Luke 1:38 But Eve was disobedient; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin. And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin… having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and to the entire human race; so also did Mary, having a man betrothed [to her], and being nevertheless a virgin, by yielding obedience, become the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race…And thus also it was that the knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.[4]

 

This same comparison had earlier been made by Justin Martyr.[5]

 

While the Hyper-Protestants may rage against this comparison and find in it evidence that “Romanism” had begun to creep into the Church as early as the second century it rests upon Scriptural authority.  Mary and Eve are joined in the first and the last books of the Bible.

 

In the curse on the serpent in Geneses 3:15 reads “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”  Who is the woman in this verse?

 

On the one hand it is obviously Eve.  She was the only woman present at the time.  On the other hand it has to be Mary because it was Mary who gave birth to Christ, the seed that crushed the head of the serpent even as he bruised His heel on the Cross.  So which is it?  Clearly both.

Turning to the final book of the Bible, we find in the twelfth chapter of Revelation a woman spoken of again, this time at great length.  She is never named but is just called the woman.  She has an enemy, however, who is “a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.” (Rev. 12:3) In the chapter he has an army of angels and fights against St. Michael the Archangel and his angels.  St. Michael is victorious and the dragon and his angels are cast out of heaven.  When this happens the dragon is identified as “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.” (Rev. 12:9)  The same serpent upon whom the curse was pronounced in Genesis 3.  Here he is shown, just as Genesis says, to be the enemy of the woman, making war on her and her seed.  For the woman “being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered” (Rev. 12:2) and the dragon “stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.” (Rev. 12:4).  Here is the seed of the woman promised in Genesis.  To make clear that the child is Jesus Christ the next verse reads “And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.”

 

Since she gives birth to Jesus Christ, this woman is clearly the Blessed Virgin Mary.  As in Genesis 3:15, however, she is also Eve, because it is here in Revelation that the conflict between the woman and the serpent begun in Genesis 3 comes to its final close.  This is Mary as the New Eve.  Eve, of course, was the wife of Adam, whereas Mary the New Eve is the Mother of Jesus Christ, the New Adam.  Note however the first and the last verses of the chapter.  In the first she is clothed with the sun, stands on the moon, and has a crown of twelve stars.  This alludes to the visions of Joseph in the book of Genesis.  The final verse speaks of the dragon making war on the “remnant of her seed” who “keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”  Mary, the New Eve, is not merely Mary as an individual, but Mary as representative of the people of God.  The sun, moon, and stars are the symbols of Israel.  It is the Church that has the testimony of Jesus Christ.  The Church, according to St. Paul in Romans, is the “olive tree” of Israel, with some branches removed for unbelief, and “wild” branches (Gentile believers) grafted in.  The Church is described as the bride of Christ of the New Testament.  Mary is literally the Mother of Jesus Christ, but as the New Eve she figuratively represents the collective that is the bride of Christ.[6]

 

The early Fathers clearly had strong Scriptural support for their teaching that the Blessed Virgin was the New Eve, whose obedience played such an integral role in the restoration of that which had fell into ruin through the disobedience of the first Eve.  Perhaps we should pay more attention to their interpretation of the Scriptures and less to those whose determination to honour only Christ has become an obsession that would condemn even the Protestant Reformers[7] for honouring her with the honour that the Scriptures give her.

 

We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.[8]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] St. Hippolytus of Rome, Commentary on Daniel, 4.23.3.

[2] The Romans reckoned backwards from the Kalends of the next month, we reckon forwards from that of the current month.

[3] Without personal identity distinct from the Eternal Personhood of the Son of God.  Since Jesus’ human nature was created already united to His Eternal Person it never actually existed in a state of anhypostasia.  The term that denotes the actual state of Jesus’ human nature as it has existed from the moment of its creation in union with His deity in His Eternal Person is “enhypostatic.”  “Enhypostatic”, “in the person”, is the only state in which Jesus’ human nature has ever actually existed since it was created already in union with His Person. Since “enhypostatic” describes the human nature as united with the divine in Christ, “anhypostatic”, “without person”, is used to speak of the human nature by itself in contexts where it would be difficult to make sense without speaking as if His human nature had existence by itself prior to the Hypostatic Union.  The importance of these distinctions and this highly specialized, even for theology, terminology, is their usefulness in avoiding the error of Apollonaris, who taught that Jesus’ human nature was lacking a component which His divine nature made up for (the Logos, he taught, took the place of a human nous or mind), the error of thinking of the Incarnation as either a sort of possession or a fusion of two persons, one divine one human, into one, or the error of thinking of Jesus’ Person as a composition formed by the union of the divine and human natures.  In the Incarnation an Eternal Person added a second, created nature to His eternal nature and that second nature was created as His and never belonged to any other person distinct from His Eternal Person.  See Eric Mascall, Christ, the Christian and The Church: A Study of the Incarnation and its Consequences (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017).

[4] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, III.22.4.

[5] St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 100.

[6] Note that the imagery of Rev. 12:1 is also that of a queen.  The woman is seen in heaven wearing a crown of stars.  The queen of heaven.  It is significant to observe that in the books of Kings, the queens are consistently mentioned, unless they figure into the narrative in some other way, as the mothers of their sons rather than the wives of their husbands.  The queen mother rather than the queen consort was the more prominent idea of the queen in the Old Testament.  Here, and not in the worship of Astarte condemned by Jeremiah, we find the origin of the Regina Coeli title for Mary.  Let the Hyper-Protestants fume all they like, it will not change the fact.

[7] The Protestant Reformers, at least the Magisterial Reformers, especially the English and Lutheran, but not excluding the Swiss, all had a Mariology that would be considered way too High by many contemporary Protestants.

[8] Collect for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, Book of Common Prayer.

Good Riddance

On Sunday, 9 March, the Liberal Party chose a new leader.  That Mark Carney will be His Majesty’s next Prime Minister in the Dominion of Canada is no cause for celebration because he is as bad, if not worse, than his predecessor.  Mercifully, his premiership should be very short.  There is a Dominion election coming up this year.  Despite the legacy media’s treatment of the Liberal leadership campaign as if it were a Dominion election it was not.  When the next session of Parliament begins on the eve of Lady Day, it will still be the forty-fourth Parliament that sits. 

 

While some polls have been indicating a resurgence of support for the Liberals after their previous leader drove it to an all-time low those in the legacy media who have been translating this into a prediction of a Liberal victory, even a majority government, come the actual election, are being a bit premature.  Carney is in the same situation that Kim Campbell was in in 1993 and John Turner in 1984. In both of these instances a prime minister resigned and turned the leadership of his party over to someone else who briefly became prime minister before the next Dominion election in which the party suffered a major defeat.  After the first Trudeau handed over the Liberal Party to Turner in 1984, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives to a historical victory, winning 211 seats, the largest majority government in Canadian history by seat count.[1]  In 1993, Mulroney stepped down from the leadership of the Conservatives who were hemorrhaging support to the Western populist Reform Party, and Kim Campbell led the party to the humiliating defeat in which it was reduced to 2 seats, and John Chretien’s Liberals won a majority government.

 

Historical precedent, therefore, does not favour a Liberal victory in the upcoming Dominion election.  Nor does the fact that Carney lacks the charisma of his predecessor while sharing all of the points that eventually made him the most hated prime minister in the history of the Dominion.  Nevertheless, I am not going to imitate the legacy media in counting chickens before they are hatched.

 

The preceding is all by way of introduction to an essay which, as you have probably gathered from the title, is about the outgoing Liberal leader, Captain Airhead, or, as he is sometimes called, Justin Trudeau.  While I am not pleased to see Carney step into the Dominion premiership I am very happy to see Captain Airhead leave it.  He has been by far the worst prime minister in the history of Canada and probably of the entire British Commonwealth. 

 

Last week, in a farewell address, Captain Airhead said “On a personal level, I made sure that every single day in this office, I put Canadians first, and I have people’s backs, and that’s why I’m here to tell you all that we got you.”  He could not say this with a straight face, although laughter would have been more appropriate than the tears that broke his composure.  Perhaps he thought the qualifying phrase “on a personal level” made what is otherwise a bald-faced lie somehow true.  For in his public actions, he did the very opposite of put Canadians first.

 

To demonstrate this I am now going to switch to the second person and address Captain Airhead directly.

 

How exactly, Captain Airhead, were you putting Canadians first, when you raised foreign aid spending to approximately $7-8 billion annually?  Since the only money the Canadian government can spend is money that it has either a) obtained by taxing Canadians, b) borrowed and which will have to be paid back with interest by taxing Canadians in the future or c) printed, thus reducing the spending power of Canadian currency per unit and indirectly taxing Canadians now and in the future, you were taxing Canadians, either in the present or in the future, to spend in other countries.  That is not putting Canadians first.  Since you made a spectacle of tying foreign aid to spreading feminism and climate change alarmism around the world it looks more like you were putting your personal agenda first.

 

Related to the previous paragraph is the fact that in these years that you were so generous with the money of other Canadians, present and future, you never once came close to balancing a budget.  Granted, you gave us advance warning that you would be like that when you infamously said “the budget will balance itself.”  Each year you ran a deficit this added to the debt burden that Canadians will have to pay in the future.   How is that putting Canadians first?

 

Then there was your immigration policy.  Over the course of the last year you gradually admitted that immigration levels were too high.  In spring of last year you said that “Whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular, that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”  Later in the fall, after your immigration minister, Marc Miller, announced that the number of permanent immigrants to be admitted this year would be reduced by about 20% while the number of temporary immigrants admitted would be almost halved, you admitted that permanent immigration levels were also a problem.  In your typical, “everybody else is to blame but me” fashion, you said “Increasingly bad actors like fake colleges and big chain corporations have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests.”  This came after years of you dismissing those of us who pointed out that immigration was too high for the country to absorb as “racists”, an accusation you continued to shamelessly fling at others despite what the blackface scandal of 2019 revealed about yourself.  That you acknowledged this at all was only because everyone else in the country had long recognized that it is insane to be bringing in record numbers of immigrants at a time we are experiencing a major housing crisis.  Bringing in large numbers of newcomers when we are having trouble housing Canadians is not putting Canadians first. The problem is not “fake colleges” or “big chain corporations” exploiting what would otherwise be good policy.  Very early in your premiership you showed your contempt for Canadians when you said that you are “jealous” of new immigrants and addressing immigrants said “this is your country more than it is for others because we take it for granted, we default into this place.”

 

How was it putting Canadians first to constantly denigrate the founders and historical leaders of our country?  Over the last couple of months it has been heartwarming to see Canadians come forward to show their love of Canada in the face of insults and threats coming the megalomaniacal president of the United States.  That Canadian patriotism is alive today, however, is despite you, Captain Airhead, not because of you.  The way the memory of the foremost Father of Confederation, our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald has been treated during your premiership has been a disgrace.  You have made countless apologies for the acts of previous Canadian governments, acts of which you show little to no historical comprehension.  Since you were not the one who committed the acts for which you were apologizing and for the most part those to whom you were apologizing were not the ones who were on the receiving end of those acts, these were absolutely devoid of worth as apologies and would be so even if the historical incidents were as shameful as you think they are which in most cases they were not.

 On 18 May, 2016, for example, a little over halfway into the first year of your premiership, you apologized in the House of Commons for the Komagata Maru incident.  The incident took place in 1914, before your father, let alone yourself, had even been born.  Nobody alive today or in 2016 had been on board the Japanese ship when it was turned away from Vancouver.  Furthermore, we were not in the wrong to turn them away.  The man who had chartered the cargo ship to carry 376 mostly-Sikh, Punjabis to Canada, Gundit Singh, was well aware that he was defying Canadian immigration rules.  He had bragged that he would successfully challenge the rules in court and that he would bring another 25 000 Punjabis over.  Singh was a supporter of the revolutionary nationalist Ghadarite movement as were many of those on board the Komagata Maru.  The violent actions of these during the incident more than justified the decision not to allow them to disembark.  If anyone is owed an apology in connection to this incident it Canadian Sikhs who owe Canada an apology for honouring as a martyr Mewa Singh, who in the aftermath of the incident murdered Canadian immigration inspector William C. Hopkinson and was justly executed for his capital crime.

 

Moreover you have actively embraced blood libel against Canada.  In 2021 when ground disturbances were discovered by sonar on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the media dishonestly distorted this into a claim that evidence of genocide having been committed in the Indian Residential Schools had been discovered.  This claim has since been thoroughly rebutted.  It was patently absurd even at the time. You, however, lowered the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill and kept the flag at half-mast for almost half a year.  By embracing this blood libel, you encouraged that summer’s wave of statue toppling and other “Year Zero” attacks on Canadian history.  You also encouraged the biggest wave of hate crimes Canada has ever seen as 112 church buildings were burned or otherwise vandalized.  As this was going on you held conferences about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, about both of which you are known to wax eloquent in your indignant condemnation of these prejudices as un-Canadian, but were notably silent on the subject of the Christophobia that you helped stoke, directed against what is still the majority religion in Canada, until pressed to comment, at which point you gave a weak statement that the church burnings were “unacceptable and wrong” while adding that you thought the anger behind them was “fully understandable”, a qualification you have never used about bigotry against any other religion.  How exactly was this putting Canadians first?

 

Early in your premiership you cancelled the Northern Gateway pipeline and placed so many roadblocks in the way of the Energy East pipeline that the company that owned it, then called TransCanada, cancelled it themselves.  The Trans Mountain pipeline had been approved for an expansion project that would twin the pipeline but was facing protests from environmentalists and Indians, or at least from professional protesters claiming to be environmentalists and Indians.  This and the uncooperative behaviour of the BC provincial government at the time led the company that owned Trans Mountain to wash its hands of the project. You bought the pipeline from them for $4.5 billion and the TMX was finally completed last year.  Those other pipelines should have been built too.  Your Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne said in the light of the current trade war with the United States “That may mean you need pipelines that go west-east.”  In other words, precisely the pipelines you got in the way of being built.  It should not have taken threats and tariffs from an unhinged American president to realize that we need east-west pipelines.  If we had these we would not have to import oil from OPEC and would not have to sell most of our oil to the Americans at a rate far below the world market value.  If, instead of removing Sir John A. Macdonald from our currency and allowing his reputation to be besmirched you had paid attention to his example you would have realized this.  The most important infrastructure project of his premiership was the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  It was first conceived as part of Macdonald’s National Policy in 1873 and was completed in 1885.  The purpose of the project was to build national unity, political and economic, by facilitating east-west trade, and in pushing the project through to completion Macdonald had to successfully fight several attempts by American interests to defeat the purpose of the project by having the route changed so that east-west trade could be diverted in a southern direction.  The need for east-west pipelines is basically an application of the same principle.  You were hardly putting Canadians and our country first when you let your idiotic climate ideology get in the way of building such pipelines.

 

On a related note, neither were you putting Canadians or our country first, when you, again driven by your climate ideology, basically declared war on the petroleum industry.  Did you really think that when you shot your mouth off about how “We need to phase them [the oil sands] out” that this would not reignite the feelings of resentment and alienation in Alberta that your father lit with the National Energy Program in 1980?  With much more justification for these feelings, might I add, since your father’s NEP, hopelessly flawed as it was, was a form of economic nationalism aimed at limiting foreign ownership of the Canadian energy sector, expanding the energy industry, doing what I criticized you for not doing in the previous paragraph, and basically making sure the industry works for the national interest, whereas your remarks came across as a threat to eventually – the sentence preceding the one already quoted was “We can’t shut down the oil sands tomorrow.” – shut down the petroleum industry.  Since you surrounded yourself with anti-petroleum radicals like Gerald Butts and Stephen Guilbeault Alberta had every reason to feel threatened.  Bringing back the national unity crisis of the 1970s to mid-1990s was hardly acting in the interest of Canadians and our country.  Especially now that we are faced with threats of economic warfare and Anschluss from a power mad American president who is degenerating further into a deranged lunatic and despot every day.

 

Perhaps you think you were putting Canadians first, looking out for us, and having our backs, during the absurd paranoia from 2020 to 2022 over a new strain of respiratory disease that while having a slightly higher mortality rate than the seasonal flu was far more comparable to it than to MERS or even the original SARS to which it was related and basically posed a significant danger only to those to whom the seasonal flu also poses a significant danger.  If so, let me remind you of what actually happened.  You suspended all of the fundamental freedoms identified as such in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the addition of which to our constitutional law in 1982 when your father was prime minister is one of the few events of Canadian history of which you have spoken positively.  You arbitrarily declared some people’s jobs and businesses to be essential and others to be non-essential, shut down those unfortunate enough to be declared non-essential, and ordered everybody to stay home and paid them to do so.  You forced them to wear masks designed to prevent large particles from dropping into bodies opened up during surgery and entirely ineffective at preventing the transmission of respiratory disease when you did let them out.  Then you tried to require them in order to be readmitted to society to take injections of a type never before used on human beings involving the modification of mRNA (the messenger that brings your body the instructions from your genes) and which had been rushed to production with inadequate testing.  When you introduced new requirements of this nature at a time when every other country was removing restrictions, some Canadians said enough is enough, and supported a convey of long-distance truckers who drove to Ottawa and conducted a peaceful albeit noisy protest by basically holding a long block party celebrating Canada and freedom.  Your response was to unjustifiably invoke the Emergencies Act, a piece of legislation designed for use as a means of last resort in combatting terrorism, insurrection, and the like, to crush the protest.  Through this period of over two years, you refused to listen to anyone critical of what you were doing, accused those who stated the plain facts which contradicted what your Public Health Officer was saying of spreading “misinformation” and “disinformation”, said that those who disagreed with you held “unacceptable views” and bizarrely accused them all of being “racists” and “white supremacists.”  These are not the actions of someone who puts Canadians first and has our backs.  These are the actions of a narcissist who is in love with power.  You and the American president have a lot in common.

 

How is it putting Canadians first and having our backs to limit our access to information to sources of which you approve and restrict what we can say ourselves in public, both of which you have been obsessed with doing for the duration of your premiership?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to make medically assisted suicide widely available for pretty much any reason whatsoever and to encourage Canadians to choose it as an alternative to medical treatment, social assistance, or any other help that they actually need?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to condemn provincial governments that ban the prescription of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery to minors as if they were attacking the vulnerable rather than what they are obviously actually doing which is protecting them from making irreversible decisions that they are too young to make?  Or to accuse parents who object to their children being indoctrinated with radical gender identity politics and ideology in school of hatred and bigotry?  Is this not rather putting your own ridiculous ideological agenda first and Canadians last?  

 

I think I have sufficiently made my point.

 

While I do not look forward to the premiership of the man who will be replacing you as His Majesty’s prime minister, Captain Airhead, I hope that premiership will be very short.  In the meantime, I am very pleased to see you go.  It should have happened long before now.  You will not be missed.

 

 

 

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[1] John Diefenbaker’s 1958 victory of 208 seats is still the largest in terms of percentage of the House.  There were 265 total seats in 1958, 282 in 1984, and 338 today.