“Today, the living Temple of the great King enters into the temple, to be prepared as a Divine Dwelling place for Him. O ye people, rejoice exceedingly!”
We hear this beautiful poetry in the Matins service of the feast for the Entrance of the Theotokos. In the feast we remember how a simple three-year old girl was dedicated by her parents, Joachim and Anna, to a life of purity ,virginity, and service to God in His Holy House.
When we look at the services for this feast day, we cannot help but notice an important image the keeps popping up in reference to Mary. Many of the verses from Matins, as well as the Old Testament readings, all speak about the Ark of the Covenant. The structure that held the tablets of the law that Moses had brought down from Sinai.
If I were to ask John Smith on the street what he knows about the Ark of the Covenant, I imagine he would tell me the story of how monumental the Ark was in helping Indiana Jones defeat the Nazis who were using it to win World War II. This story comes from the mind of Stephen Spielberg in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the unfortunate reality is, there are many people who will view the ark like they view the movie…as fiction.
For our spiritual ancestors, the power and significance of the true Ark of the Covenant was definitely not a fairy tale. The presence of the Ark had tremendous significance for the nation of Israel because it represented the physical presence and power of God in their midst. When King Solomon built the first Temple, the Ark had a special place of honor behind a large curtain called the Holy of Holies. When the priests placed it there for the first time, we read in scripture how the presence of God filled the entire space in the form of a cloud (which by the way is one of the reasons we use incense in the church). The Holy of Holies was off limits for everyone, but with one exception. On Yom Kippur, or The Day of Atonement, the High Priest would go into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the blood of a sacrifice on the Ark to atone for the sins of the people.
The Ark remained in King Solomon’s temple until the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. At that point in history, the Ark of the Covenant was lost. That connection to the Almighty, that physical presence and power of God that was in their midst, was gone. This left a tremendous void in the spiritual life of Israel. When they rebuilt the Temple they had no Ark of the Covenant to place in the Holy of Holies. The presence of God was missing in the second Temple. All of this brings us to the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos. Today, for the first time in centuries, the Living Ark is returned to the Temple of God.
We learn from the 1st century text written by St. James about the Life of the Virgin Mary, how her parents Joachim and Anna vowed, after years of bareness, that if they were granted a child, they would dedicate them to complete service to God. When Mary was three years old, her parents fulfilled that vow. They dressed her up in the finest clothes and brought her to the temple where she was to live out the remainder of her childhood. She was greeted by the future father of St. John the Baptist, the High Priest Zacharias, who led her into the nave of the Temple. It was there that he did the unthinkable. Being inspired from above, Zacharias allowed Mary to go up the steps and enter into that sacred place that no one was permitted to enter—the Holy of Holies.
This is a tremendous event in Christian History. It was the return of the true Ark of God! The first Ark of the Covenant, which was made of wood and gold and held the tablets of the Law, was now replaced by the Living Ark—she who would bear in her womb the Word of God Himself! The temple that was left desolate and without the Glory of God, was now restored to its former glory.
This Feast Day is filled with many wonderful images for our own spiritual life, but perhaps the best one is that image of the Temple. Our spiritual lives at times tends to mirror that “desolate temple of Jerusalem,” especially around this time of year, when society demands that we fill ourselves up with material wants and desires. Black Friday ads sometimes become our Gospel. Christmas parties and celebrations take precedent over Church Services and the Sacraments. When things of the world become more important to us than being in the presence of God, then our own personal temples become like that of the second Jewish Temple—desolate. When we fill ourselves up with the things of this world, we become like the inns at Bethlehem where “there is no place for the Christ Child to lay his head.”
The Entrance of the Theotokos into the temple is a wonderful reminder of the “one thing that is needed” for all of us as we approach the Incarnation of Christ. She leads us all with a lighted taper on a journey through the desert of our souls towards Bethlehem, showing us what a life of obedience, purity, and service to God is all about. She reminds us all by her example that we too can become living arks who bear the image and likeness of God in our hearts—paving the way for Him to restore that life of peace, purity, and love that we were all given in the beginning.