THE THREE ‘ WOMBS’
Jacob of Serugh saw the Nativity,
Baptism and Descent as a series of three ‘staging posts’ in the course of the
Incarnation, and elsewhere, along with other Syriac writers, he describes these
as ‘wombs,’ the first real, the second and third metaphorical. The relationship
between these three wombs is well
brought out in a beautiful prayer common to the Maronite service and the old
Syrian Orthodox one in Add. 14518: (§ 31)
Your greatness, Lord, was pleased
to save us by your unsparing love, and you sent, for our salvation, your
only-begotten Son and everlasting Child, who was born of you without a
beginning, who left his hidden abode, descended and dwelt in the Virgin’s womb
so as to appear visibly in bodily birth; remaining entirely with you, he came
entirely to us, and though he was not wanting or lacking in anything he was
baptized in the river Jordan and sanctified for us the womb of water, to be a
womb full of health and power. He, Lord, by his own will and by your will dwelt
in the world for our sake in three different abodes, in the womb made of flesh,
in the womb of baptism, and in the gloomy abode of Sheol.
The parallelism between Mary’s
womb and the Jordan’s womb led Ephrem to see Christ’s presence in Mary’s womb
as her own baptism, thus anticipating his sanctification of baptismal water at
his baptism:
The Light settled on Mary as on
an eye,
it purified her mind, it cleansed
her understanding,
it washed her thought, it made
her virginity shine.
The river in which Christ was
baptized conceived him again symbolically,
the damp womb of the water
conceived him in purity
and bore him in holiness, made
him rise up in glory.
In the pure womb of the river you
should recognize the daughter of man
who conceived without the aid of
man, and gave birth as a virgin, and
who brought up, through a gift,
the Lord of that gift.
(H. Eccl. 36.2–4)
and more explicitly:
O Christ, you have given birth to
your own mother in the second birth
that comes from water.
(H. Nativ. 16.9)
Although the three ‘staging
posts’ or ‘wombs’ are separate in ordinary time, they nevertheless come
together in sacred time, forming a single unit, seeing that their salvific
content is essentially single. Thanks to this insight, Ephrem can boldly
reverse the apparent sequence of events in ordinary time.
The relationship between Mary’s
womb and the womb of baptism is again brought out in a striking prayer,
attributed to Philoxenus, who puts the following words into the mouth of Jesus
at his own baptism: (Quoted by Dionysius bar Salibi, Comm. Gospels,
ed. Vaschalde (II (2) ), p. 304)
Do you, Father, open the heavens
at my prayer and send your Holy Spirit upon this baptismal womb, and as the
Spirit descended upon the womb of the Virgin and formed me from her, so may he
likewise descend into the womb of the baptismal water to sanctify it, to
fashion men and to give birth from it to new children, making them your sons and
my brothers and fellow heirs of the kingdom…Every time the priests of the new
covenant baptize and call upon you, do you send the Holy Spirit upon the
baptismal water with which they are baptizing men. May the fact that the Spirit
has appeared visibly at the present moment be an indication that he will
descend invisibly whenever they baptize…
Rather a different slant is given
to the parallelism between Mary the mother of Christ and Baptism, the ‘mother’
of Christians, in a passage by Jacob of Serugh:
Mary gave a body for the Word to
become incarnate,
while Baptism gives the Spirit
for men to be renewed.
Stated in formulaic terms we have
here the contrasted pattern:
Through Mary the Divine becomes
human
Through Baptism the human becomes
divine. (Sebastian P. Brock, The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition
[Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 12; Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press,
2013], 152-54)
