The Feast of The Assumption of Mary, The Mother of Our Lord

Today’s Feast has been celebrated under various names: Assumption, Dormition, Falling Asleep, or simply the Feast of Mary, the Mother of Our Lord. One of six great feasts associated with Mary, this one is her “heavenly birthday”. When we call it the Feast of Assumption, as we have done tonight, we are proclaiming the belief that she has been “assumed”, body as well as soul, into heaven. A mysterious claim, to be sure. Yet this mystery has been widely affirmed from the earliest days of the Church (granted that it seems to have circulated orally for a few centuries before we find written accounts of it).

Christians sometimes struggle with this doctrine. Certainly, it has been questioned in the Protestant world on the grounds that it is not found in Scripture and is part and parcel of Christians making too much of Mary. Our most powerful rejoinder is a simple question: if not in heaven, where is she? Christians reverence the bones of the saints, and we keep track of them. Saints Peter and Paul rest in the Roman Basilica, for instance. There are, I believe, at least four or five places that all house the body of St James the Greater. Whereas it comes to Mary, most honoured among all the saints, the woman who held the Word of God in her very own womb, and no one claims her body.

St John Damascene, a great priest and theologian writing from a monastery near Jerusalem in the seventh century, records that at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD the Emperor Marcian and his wife Pulcheria asked the then Bishop of Jerusalem to give them the body of the Mother of God. They wanted to be keepers of her relics. The bishop told the emperor that although the apostles were with Mary when she died, shortly after her tomb was found empty. “Wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven.”

Christians, when we are being sensible, are reticent to say too much of heaven—heaven is beyond time and space, beyond all that we can imagine in light of our experience. It is, simply, that spiritual reality which we long for, because God is there. There to be known and adored in the full light of Divine Glory.

But one thing we can say of heaven that is distinctive of our Faith—is that heaven is capable of receiving body. We can say this, first and foremost, because it has received the risen body of our Lord. “He has ascended into heaven”, we proclaim. This tells us that, just as our physical world is capable of receiving the spiritual dimensions of our existence, so heaven is capable of receiving body, the glorified body of our Lord. The spiritual and the physical worlds interpenetrate each other. And it is peculiarly fitting that the body of Mary should be taken up already, since the Word of God once entered the world through her. He dwelt in her body, becoming flesh of her flesh, and bone of her bone. So now her body has been reunited, not only with her soul, but with her Son. As he once dwelt in her, now she dwells in him before the Throne of God.

So much for the grounds of belief. Now a little thought as to its significance. Why does this Doctrine matter? For one thing, it means that alongside the Incarnate Word, the one body we know to be in heaven is the body of a woman. She dwells in the presence of God, before the Font of Grace and at the Altar of Mercy. God has preserved her bodily integrity, from first to last, and has sanctified her.

Consider the various religious traditions and even the aspects of our Church history that have kept women at an arm’s length from that which is most holy. The Assumption can, I believe, speak to our deepest beliefs about the place of women in the Presence of the Sacred. Full of grace, Mary has been drawn as near to God as any human being has ever come. She is not just there for herself. She is there for us. She is like a Star in the sky pointing to our own deepest destiny and belonging in God. Hers is a luminous body, guiding us toward the Saviour in whom every person can be sanctified — restored, healed, made worthy of entering into the sanctuary and sacred presence of God.

Mthr Kathryn