Assumption of Our Lady 2021
Apocalypse 11:19, 12:1-6, 10; 1Cor 15:20-26; Luke 1:39-56
If Fr. Val Farrell, now resident at Nazareth House, were to receive royalties for all the occasions on which I have used a phrase which he passed on to me some forty years ago, he would be a rich man. The phrase, describing Our Lady, is “the eschatological ikon of the Church”.
Mary is the eschatological ikon of the Church as I have by now informed you probably more often than you have had hot dinners. This means, as you may now be tired of hearing, that Mary IS what the Church is called to be: she is what you and I are called to be, what we shall be in eternity, and what the Church, at her best, already is, at least in embryo.
Let us consider how this works. The most ancient title of Our Lady, apart from those given to her in the scriptures, is THEOTOKOS, God Bearer, Mother of God. This title was defined by the Council of Ephesus in the year 431. How, you may ask, can it apply to us?
We, as the Church, and as individuals, are called to be mothers of God today, bringing God, in the person of Jesus Christ, into today’s world, making Him present to the world by our words and actions. Mary is Mother of God not only physically, but especially spiritually, enabling Him to be a presence in and for the world: physically, we cannot do the same, but spiritually we can and must.
Many more examples can be drawn from today’s Gospel, of the Visitation. Firstly, Mary is seen as the woman of compassion, setting out to care for her elderly cousin in her pregnancy. Secondly, she is the woman who brings Christ to others, fulfilling her role as Mother of God spiritually, as He makes His presence known to Elizabeth and to her unborn son. Thirdly, she is the woman filled with the Spirit, as she enables others to be filled with the Spirit, as are John who leaps in the womb, and Elizabeth who prophesies. Are not all of these qualities to be looked for in the Church?
Mary goes on to reveal herself as the woman of prayer and praise, as she declaims the Magnificat, a prayer which the Church utters daily at Evening Prayer, or Vespers, and the Anglican Communion at Evensong. In that prayer, she exults in the saving works of God, she rejoices in her own lowliness, and she recognises both the holiness of God and the marvels which He has worked for and in her.
She then goes on to praise the compassion of God, and to encourage us to imitate Him in His preference for the poor and the downtrodden, in words which will find an echo in her Son’s Beatitudes. It is small wonder that the Magnificat has become a rallying cry among those working for justice in Latin America.
Perhaps most significant for today’s feast are Elizabeth’s words “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled”. Mary is the woman of faith, as the Church must be a people of faith, and we must be men and women of faith. This faith is the source of Mary’s blessedness, which she herself asserts will be proclaimed throughout the generations.
The Church’s definition of the Assumption of Mary as a doctrine, is an assertion of the Church’s faith in God’s promise to the Church. St. Paul reminds the Christians of Corinth that “all people will be brought to life in Christ, but all of them in their proper order”. As the Preface of today’s Mass points out, the Assumption of Our Lady makes her once again the eschatological ikon of the Church, because she is “the beginning and the pattern of the Church in its fulfilment”.
Mary is received body and soul into heaven. She is the Ark of the Covenant as the dwelling place of God: she is the woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon and crowned with the stars; but so is the Church. She has been taken to her fulfilment as the first of the redeemed: we are to follow. In the meantime, we must take to heart the words of the Magnificat, and “all generations will call (her) blessed”.