NewCreation

Homily for Solemnity of the Assumption

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the Solemnity of the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven. So this Sunday we interrupt our passage through the Gospel starting with Mark and then expanding out from Mark's feeding of the five thousand into John's treatise on the bread of heaven. Today we interrupt that and come to the Assumption of Our Lady. To be quite honest, this is my favorite church feast. And it's also, I think, the end of the liturgical year as far as I'm concerned, because it's the end of the whole pattern of salvation that was introduced, that we've lived through in Lent and Easter, where we finished with the Ascension and then had the coming of the Holy Spirit and then we had the Trinity to wrap up the God stuff. But here in the middle of the summer at the time of greatest heat in the northern hemisphere, and in the middle of the winter in the southern hemisphere, we have the great feast that is the fulfillment of everything. For this is the moment, if you like, when all that had been promised started to be realized for the first time in a human being who wasn't God. In other words, one of us. This is the feast about the fullness of creation and Mary's place in the fullness of creation, her being assumed into heaven, such that there is now organic continuation between her life amongst us and her life in heaven. And this is, I think, a wonderful feast with which to celebrate creation. Creation was good despite everything. It was possible for something good to happen in our midst. The vessel for this good thing was the Virgin Mary, and the good thing that happened actually made it possible for the whole of humanity to become something greater, richer, more important, more resplendent than we thought possible. And it already is that in her, and we are waiting for its fruit, if you like, as it were. So I think that that's the sense for me of this great fulfillment of the new creation, with it already started, us being leaned into by it through our celebrating this feast and becoming able to share in that being brought into the new creation. So we're taken straight to the Gospel of Luke. The first reading is from the Apocalypse, and I hope that I'll have some time to comment on that. But what we're shown here, if you like, is the earthly living out of the celestial imagery that's given in the book of Apocalypse. So what happens? Mary, remember, has been spoken to by Gabriel. Apparently she didn't see him — she heard him. Zechariah saw him; Gabriel spoke to her. She was told she would conceive, and she had responded: "I am the handmaid of the Lord." We'll see that that "handmaid" term is very important — we'll see that in just a second. Then the angel departed from her, and in those days Mary set out… And went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. Zechariah was of priestly family. Elizabeth was of even more priestly family. She was a direct descendant of Aaron. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?" So three really important little hints are being given here. The child leaps in her womb. The verb is the same as that of King David dancing before the ark as it was to be taken into Jerusalem. David stripped down to his underwear, causing some concern amongst the people around, who thought that it was unseemly that he should do such a thing, and he danced in front of the ark on its way into Jerusalem. This is the language here that's attributed to John in Elizabeth's womb leaping, dancing. This is a sign that the ark is coming in. The true ark, the expected ark, the longed-for ark of the covenant was coming back, if you like, to the Temple — or that all the imagery of the Temple was being fulfilled in this person. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry. And the loud cry with which she exclaimed — that's exactly the same Greek verb as in the Book of Chronicles. It refers to how the Levites made music to accompany the ark. So it's the same imagery. We have the ark coming into Jerusalem. This is the true ark, the one bearing the covenant, except of course the covenant in this case is not a couple of sets of stone or anything like that — it is a person. This is the covenant in person. "Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?" Notice that this phrase — we hear it often, we scarcely stop to think about it — but Luke is bringing out something which is: the mother of my Lord. That would have probably been Adonai in Hebrew. She's unlikely to have said "my Yahweh" — that would have been the inappropriate thing to do. But Adonai referred to Yahweh. In other words, she's pointing out that Mary is the mother of the Lord — the word, the what Jewish people understood to be the second power in God, as Philo of Alexandria relates. And this takes us back to the Book of Isaiah, at the famous passage which we usually get in Advent, where it says the Lord spoke to it. This is Isaiah 7, 10 and 11. "Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz," who was the king, saying, "Ask a sign of the Lord your God" — except that the oldest fragment that we have of this text, which comes from Qumran, says not "ask a sign of the Lord your God" but "ask a sign of the mother of the Lord your God." There's one tiny little letter's difference. between the fragment that is in Qumran and the official version, which of course is edited later. So Ahaz says, "I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test." Then Isaiah said, "Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman — the virgin, in fact — is with child." It's a singular: the virgin is with child, and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emmanuel. Now, of course, since the Reformation this translation has been contested. But what we've discovered more recently about temple lore makes the original understanding far more plausible, because in the royal house of Israel and Judah the royal couple consisted of the queen mother and the son. The queen mother was considered a virgin; she was considered to be under the sign of Virgo — that was how she was regarded as appearing — and she was considered to be a virgin. And the son was considered to be a servant, and she was considered to be a handmaid. And all this language is available in the Hebrew Scriptures, more or less carefully disguised. This of course is why it's very important that what we have finally in St. Luke's Gospel is the Ark of the Covenant being danced in front of by David. But it's the Davidic heir who is coming in — the one who is going to be the definitive son of the definitive mother, the one who has been coming in: the virgin, the queen, the mother of my Lord. And this is what Elizabeth recognizes. She, who has the priestly knowledge, comes from a priestly family, understands what's going on here. It's astounding what she's seeing and what she picks up. So: David, the Levites, and Elizabeth's phrase. At that stage Mary begins to speak, or to sing, the song of praise which we know — perhaps the most quoted psalm in the New Testament: "My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his handmaid." Again, it's this word amma, which is a technical term referring to the mother of the royal son, who was himself also referred to as a servant, ebed. So here we have a recognition that Mary actually sees herself — it's the repeat of the word "handmaid" which she said before, said to Gabriel — and now she's looking to the handmaid: "looked with favour on the lowliness of his handmaid." In other words, she's getting geared up to be the enactment, the fulfilment, of the promised royal semi-divine figurative mother of the Lord — the one who had been literally the king's mother in ancient Israel — something that had been lost when the Babylonians had destroyed the Temple, and would come back now with the Davidic heir who is going to be born. And whose birth is going to be the equivalent of the celestial birth of the sun in the Holy of Holies, because that's what's going on in parallel between heaven and earth in Luke's understanding. And in the Apocalypse we get the celestial understanding: what's the war in heaven, and then the woman about to give birth — we'll get that in just a second. So what we then go on to understand is how much of a fulfillment this is: "For the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength, the strength of his arm. He scattered the pride and the thoughts of their hearts. He's brought down the powerful from their thrones." In other words, this coming in is the fulfillment of a promise that has been made present throughout the history of the people of Israel and is now being brought to its fulfillment. It's being brought to fulfillment in this delicate, concrete person, Mary. "He's filled the hungry, he's brought down the powerful and lifted up the lowly, he's filled the hungry with good things, sent the rich away empty, he's helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy according to the promise he made to our ancestors." So again, this is a fulfillment psalm. This is: yes, the real thing has turned up, and rather amazingly, it's to happen through me. "And Mary remained with her for about three months and then returned to her home." Okay, well let's very quickly turn to the passage in the Apocalypse, which is the one that usually gets all the attention because of the imagery. And again, there was a period when people saw, "Oh yes, well of course all that's very splendid — nothing to do with Mary, of course." But actually, the more we've seen how Luke works, we can now see the same at work in the book of the Apocalypse. "And God's temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple." In other words, the celestial reality is now available in earthly form in this young woman who is pregnant. "Flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and heavy hail" — all of that indicates that something dramatic is about to happen. "A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars." So this is the sign of all the mother-of-the-Lord figures, all the great Lady of Jerusalem figures, who have been known to be a celestial figure related to wisdom, but finally coming into the person of — or being associated with — the person of the Virgin Mary. "She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth." The mother of the Lord has been trying to give birth throughout the centuries in the people of Israel, and now it was actually happening. Meanwhile, great empires across the world with different leaders: a great dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven diadems. This could be Assyrians, Babylonians, Parthians, the Moabites — of whom Herod was one, the one who massacred the innocents — the Romans of course, the Greeks, any number of imperial powers. "His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and hurled them to the earth. The dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born." That seems a pretty good reference to Herod. "And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron." So the real thing happened, but her child was snatched away and taken to God. The whole of Jesus's life is caught about that. "And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, so that she could be nourished for 1,260 days." So the mysteries of numbers in the Book of Revelation are great, but what we get here is the picture of the celestial reality having finally been fulfilled in a human person, and this being absolutely part of the war in heaven. And she has now been taken — this is the doctrine of the Assumption — she has now been taken into heaven. It's over. The war's over. The new creation has started, and she is in it. If Jesus is the first fruits, she is the first purely passive fruit, in the sense that she is purely a creature. And because of that, with us, we are able to rejoice with her as our sister, our mother, the sign.