Pentecostal Spirituality and the Sorrows of Mary
Pentecostal Spirituality and the Sorrows of Mary
a reflection for All Saints' Day
In a sermon delivered in Nazi-occupied Paris on the Feast of the Dormition, 1941, Sergii Bulgakov suggested to his hearers that Mary’s sorrow, prophesied by Simeon, was, at heart, the rejection she had to suffer at the hands of her family and friends. In this way, she—Bulgakov calls her the Silent One—shared as a daughter of Abraham and a mother in Israel the sufferings of the servant of God.
Joseph, her betrothed, belonged to the house of David. They worshipped together in the Temple, going up each year for the Passover. They loved the Law. (Bulgakov notes that, according to tradition, when Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation, first came to Mary, he found her reading the prophet Isaiah.) So, Bulgakov says, as she witnessed so many turn against her child, her heart was rent in two. “This is the cross of the Mother of God, who is inseparable from her people not only in blessing, but also in rejection…”
Nearly twenty years earlier, not long after he had been exiled by the Soviets, he had reflected in his diary on The Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, one of the Great Feasts in the Orthodox liturgical year:
For Her, who already at that time was three years of age, this consecration was—as it always is and always should be—a death for the soul, a self-immolation for God. She was already separated from her family, torn from her parents’ embrace, and Her ascent of the steps of the Jerusalem temple led immediately and without interruption, through sorrows and ascetic feats, to Golgotha, to standing at the foot of the cross, to the sword in Her heart, to a life consisting of an unending series of sacrifices. And all those who follow Her path She calls to this consecration.
While Bulgakov writes in the second person, he’s clearly speaking to himself. Bulgakov must have recognized his own pain in her’s. “Our life constitutes, or rather should constitute, a series of lesser or greater sacrifices for the Lord, and only in this does it have meaning and justification and does it become a source of inner peace.” To that end, he says, we must “stir up in our hearts a willingness for the highest consecration, a readiness for sacrifice, for dying to the Lord…”
If I’m honest, I have to admit that at least some of what Bulgakov says about Mary still sounds strange in my ears. But what he says about consecration through suffering—that, that is terribly familiar, familiar as praise songs and altar calls, wailing prayer and speaking in tongues. The noisy, sweaty Pentecostals who delivered the faith to me (or, more to the point, delivered me to the faith, and taught me how to believe) had not lost touch, not entirely, with the blood-and-wound mysticism that characterized the earliest Pentecostals. And although it took me a long time to realize it, the truth is, believe it or not, that nothing (seriously, nothing) the tradition claims to be true about Mary, however outlandish, is actually scandalous or even that difficult to believe for us as Pentecostals. Who are we if not people who believe that for God all things are possible?
Truth be told, early Pentecostals were less afraid than we are to acknowledge Mary’s virtues and merits, and to celebrate her unique faithfulness. In the late 1930’s, Stanley Frodsham, a founding Pentecostal figure, argued in a Pentecostal Evangel editorial that the threatening words of Matthew 10:34—“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword”—were fulfilled first in Mary, “a holy woman, blessed among women, chosen of God,” as a sign of what must be realized in every believer. “Had the Son of God come to give peace? No, a sword. A sword into the flesh, destroying the flesh life. He had come to bring the holy fires of purification upon human flesh. He saw the same kindled already.” Mary, Frodsham realized, was the first to be consumed by that purifying flame.
In 1909, Minnie Abrams, the pioneering missionary-theologian, delivered a sermon at the Stone Church Convention in Chicago, a meditation on Isaiah 53 and the sufferings of Christ. Near the end, she appealed to Simeon’s prophesy over Mary as a word each of us must hear for ourselves:
Love is the fulfilling of the law of God. Not only love that is willing to do a kindness for another, but love that is willing to bear reproach for another, willing to have its name cast down as evil for another's sake. “The reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me.” Are we willing? If we want to be fruitful we must be willing for that. “And a sword shall pierce through thine own heart also” is the word of God. Can we bear it? Ah, we haven’t the strength; we haven’t the power, but we can fall down at the foot of the cross and let God work it out in us. He can do it if we are only humble, and willing to be nothing; if we are only willing to have our names cast out as evil, then we can do it.
While I was on faculty at Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee, one of my senior colleagues, Hollis Gause, wrote a meditation on Mary’s experience at the foot of the cross (a meditation I knew nothing about, unfortunately, until a few years after he had passed). In it, he imagines Mary looking up at her dying boy, remembering her life as his mother, gathering the whole of his life into a prayer she lifts to God. As Jesus gasps his last breaths, she remembers the first moments of their shared life, feeling the deep contradictions that marked her experience of him. She remembers the dread of Gabriel’s visitation, the shock of the news, the fear swelling up from the pit of her stomach. She realizes, with a start, that this boy, born all those years ago in disgrace, is now dying under an even darker sky. Right in that moment, Gause suggests, she feels the stab of pain:
Now the final words of Simeon’s prophecy rushed through her heart like a dagger, “A sword shall pierce your soul.” Mary thought, “Now I know what those words mean. Every nail in His hands and feet was driven into my heart, and it bleeds as profusely as His hands and feet. Is this the way that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed? Are these nails the scalpels that lay back the tissues of the heart exposing the innermost thoughts? They certainly expose the hearts of our rulers… Corruption pours out of them like the blood out of my Son.”
We cannot abide anyone stealing shine from Jesus. But of course that’s the last thing the saints want to do, especially his mother! Besides, Jesus is not needy and jealous for attention. And Mary, precisely because she is like her Son, is not offended by our rejection of her, our neglect. She does not need our attention, no more than God needs it. But we need to give her our attention because it is just as we see God at work in her and her at work in God that we find ourselves freed up to do what has been asked of us. “Listen to her heart,” Gause urges us, “a heart that in its grief has compressed the lifetime of her Son.”
What can we say to that but Amen?