Since the Mother of God is a kind of icon of the Church in all her mysteries, it is fitting that the liturgical year (which in our tradition begins on September 1) is framed by her feast days. At the end of the year is Mary’s end, at least as far as her earthly sojourn is concerned—the feast of her Dormition and Assumption. At the beginning of the year is Mary’s beginning, her entry into this world as a newborn child—the feast of her nativity.
The icon of Mary’s end gives us a kind of image of Mary’s beginning. In it, Christ comes to receive 
Our Lady’s soul as she leaves this world. Her soul is symbolically depicted as an infant in swaddling clothes, since her death is really her “birth” into eternal life and happiness. But today we celebrate the flesh-and-blood infant Mary, wrapped in real swaddling clothes. The celebration of her beginning at the beginning of the liturgical year reminds us that she herself is at the beginning of our salvation, for the theological emphasis of this feast is that her birth is the proximate preparation for the incarnation of the Son of God.
This is made clear in the tropar (proper hymn) of the feast. It starts by saying that Mary’s nativity has “filled all the world with joy.” Why has the birth of a baby girl in some ancient middle-eastern backwater filled the world with joy? The hymn continues: “for from you rose the Sun of Justice, Christ our God.” Her eventual giving birth to a son is poetically described as the sun rising from her. This is not an invention of Byzantine hymnographers but is based in Scripture. We hear in the Prophet Malachi that for those who revere the name of the Lord “the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings” (4:2, or 3:20 in some translations). The father of the Forerunner prophesied that “the day shall dawn on us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Lk. 1:78-79). And Jesus Himself is twice said to have shone like the sun (Mt 17:2; Rev. 1:16).
So, the world is filled with joy at the birth of the Mother of God for precisely that reason: she is to become the Mother of the Son of God, called the Sun of Justice because He will bring the light of God into the darkness of this world’s sin, ignorance, and estrangement from God.
But the tropar says more about the mission of the Sun of Justice. “He cancelled the curse and replaced it with his blessing…” Before every Divine Liturgy, during the rite of preparation, the priest prays the tropar of Good Friday, which begins, “You have redeemed us from the curse of the law…” What is the curse of the law? If you read the law in the Old Testament, you’ll find all kinds of curses. From which curse has the Sun of Justice redeemed us? The primary and ultimate curse of the law is death, the penalty for the first sin and therefore the universal penalty for sin as such. St Paul says that because of Christ we have been set free from the law of sin and death. By death, of course, we are not referring to the mere cessation of bodily functions and subsequent decomposition. Death in the usual biblical and theological sense means the ultimate death, the second death, the death of the person as such, which entails eternal separation from the Source of life, who is God.
Therefore, after saying that the Sun of Justice cancelled the curse and granted his blessing instead, it concludes: “thus confounding death by giving us eternal life.” So the curse that was cancelled was the ultimate one, and the blessing that replaced it was likewise the ultimate one: eternal life. While it is true that the Lord does deliver us from lesser evils and grants us lesser blessings during the course of our lives, what He’s most concerned with is preventing our eternal separation from Him and doing all He can possibly do to make sure we inherit the blessing of eternal life.
So, as it is with all the feasts of the Mother of God, in one way or another, we celebrate her because of her relationship to Christ: what she has done to bring the Savior into the world, and what He has done in turn to glorify her and establish her as our Mother, Intercessor, and Protectress. Today is, in a sense, a prophetic feast, for at the time of her birth she hadn’t done anything yet! But since we know how the story turns out in the end, we celebrate the first manifestation of the one who stands at the end, as it were, of a long line of prophecies of the advent of the Christ. She is, in the words of the Prophet Micah, “the one who is to give birth” (5:3). That prophecy is read at Christmas, for it continues the one quoted by St Matthew about Bethlehem being the place of the birth of the awaited Messiah King.
Mary’s claim to fame, then, is that she is “the one who is to give birth” to the Savior of the world, and this is why her birth is a fitting occasion to celebrate.
She is also, both in a theological sense and in a very warm and human sense, an answer to prayer. Let’s look at the latter first. She was the answer to the prayer of Saints Joachim and Anne, a devout but elderly couple who were desperately wishing for a child. To be childless in that time and culture was considered a curse, so I guess the first curse to be cancelled by this feast was the barrenness of the old couple! According to the story, they each went to a different place to pray, and when they came together again, Anne conceived. She promised that she would give her child over to the service of the Lord, and here we have the prelude to another feast of Our Lady—her entrance into the temple at the age of three. This was the fulfillment of St Anne’s promise, and is an expression of the fact that Mary’s whole reason of being in her childhood and early youth was to prepare herself to be the means by which God would enter our world as a man.
On the level of the lament and subsequent joy of Joachim and Anne, we have a touching story of faith and hope, and of the benevolence of God in granting such a blessed answer to prayer. They could hardly have guessed just how great an answer it was.
On a more theological and spiritual level, however, the birth of the Mother of God is an answer to the prayer of the whole of humanity, even if that prayer in many individual cases was only implicit. But all of humanity, whether they knew or acknowledged it or not, needed the Sun of Justice to come and enlighten them, for they lived in the darkness of sin and hence in the shadow of death. The Prophet Isaiah proclaimed that the people living in darkness would see a great light, and this too is read at Christmas as a foretelling of the Christ.
So the longing of a fallen world for a Savior, whether a spoken or unspoken prayer, was given its preliminary answer in the birth of the Mother of God. It was as if God were saying: “See, your Savior is coming, because the one through whom He will come has now been born. Let it be a sign to you. If she is here now, that means that He will be here soon. I have promised, and behold, I am doing it here and now.”
Perhaps, along with the icon that depicts the actual birth of the Mother of God, a good icon for this feast would be the one known as hodegitria, “she who shows the way.” In this icon Mary holds the Child Jesus in one arm and points to Him with the other. Mary shows the way to Jesus. She appeared before Him as a sign that He was coming, and as the very means by which He would come. She showed the way to Jesus in her earthly life as well, when she showed Him to the shepherds and the magi, and to Simeon and Anna in the temple, and when she said to the stewards at Cana: “Do whatever He tells you.”
Now that she has gone to Heaven she still shows us the way to Him, through her icons, through her intercession and protection, and through, I believe, a word whispered into our souls from time to time. She is a good Mother, and like St John under the Cross, we behold her as one whom Jesus has given to us for that very reason. Since she is the one who shows us the way, I think we can find her in this prophecy of Isaiah: “And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying ‘this is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left” (30:21).
So let us rejoice today, not only recalling the joy of the once-barren but now happily-fruitful couple, but also renewing our awareness of, and gratitude for, the way God answers the deepest needs of the human heart. He has granted the world a mother, a guide to Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Indeed, the whole world ought to be filled with joy today at the commemoration of Our Lady’s nativity, for from her rose the Sun of Justice, Christ our God, who cancelled the curse and replaced it with his blessing, thus confounding death by giving us eternal life.
We may sometimes regret that certain prayers of ours seem to go unanswered, but let us still rejoice that God has provided the answer for the one prayer that matters more than all others: the prayer for our deliverance from sin and death and the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, Son of God and Son of Mary.
Making All Things New 