Theotokos

So a lot of their, so that's an historian idea is that God wasn't born God.

That's, So that whole thing was, whether we call Mary the Theotokos or the Christotokos, do we call her the God-bearer or the Christ-bearer? Did she bear the Messiah or did she bear God? We believe, Orthodoxy believes, that she bore God.

And so Mormons and Muslims don't believe that she bore God, just that she bore God's messenger.

Interesting.

But the image is also depicted in art by seven swords that pierce the heart of Mary, showing a martyrdom, a spiritual martyrdom.

And so Our Lady of Sorrows is one of the few Orthodox icons of the Theotokos which does not depict her with the infant Jesus.

That's kind of interesting.

Most all of the Orthodox icons of the Theotokos, Mother of God, have her depicted with the baby Jesus, not this one.

And so the devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows goes back.

It was started by the Servite Order in sixteen sixty-eight and was formalized by Pius VII in eighteen fourteen.

He puts the emblem of the cross on their shields.

He puts the Theotokos as the strategos.

This is when she obtains that title of strategos, which is a champion leader.

It's a military title for the Mother of God.

So we, listener, if you're wondering, well, where are the Reformed on this? We affirm the scriptures and the ecumenical creeds on the Blessed Virgin.

We say that God graciously ordained that she should bear in her womb, God the Son, that she... would be what the definition of Chalcedon, A.D. 451, called the God-bearer, the Theotokos.

And we talked about that before.

Nevertheless, the 16th century Reformed didn't react to the elevation of the Virgin the way that a lot of American evangelicals and fundamentalists and even some Reformed people have.

But one of the reasons why the Reformed historically had a high, if reserved, view of the Blessed Virgin is because of our understanding of Scripture and the teaching of the ecumenical Catholic universal creeds that our Lord Jesus, by the mysterious operation of the Holy Spirit, took his humanity from the Blessed Virgin.

I mentioned that before.

The definition of Chalcedon captures this teaching when it uses the phrase of Mary, the Virgin, the God-bearer, the Theotokos, according to the humanity.

Half century earlier, at Constantinople, Christians confessed, as I mentioned before, that the Son took on humanity from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.

And then it shows this figure known as the holy writer, who is a figure that protects Christians from different kinds of negative demonic forces, whether the demon Gilu, who caused miscarriages and stole newborn children, or different kinds of negative forces, it is probably one of the origins for the iconography of St. George and the dragon.

And then above we have an image of the Theotokos, the Virgin Mary, who is evoked by the inscription, Theotoko, help Anna, grace.

So Anna is the name of the woman, presumably, to whom the object belonged.

She's asking the Theotokos to help her.

And there's a number of these silver armbands that exist, but they also share iconography with little individual amulets.

In one instance, there's like an early Byzantine wall painting that has the Holy Writer.

And if it's not... fall or if you simply go on vacation your life can become scattered if you don't yeah that's that's really good another for life

yeah i know in my experience i really didn't have like a strong prayer life before the valley other than liturgy and then what my family did and then when we were one of the days we were like preparing meals and stuff like that for people who don't have food and And just the relationship that I had with my friends, we were able to have conversations and I was introduced to this beautiful prayer, the Royal of the Theotokos, and I pray it all the time and I love it.

And through that prayer, I have grown so much spiritually and stuff like that.

And so even just being around people who I'm able to have conversations about faith with has led me to grow.