Mary’s Assumption into Heaven
The world’s take on Mary is pretty lightweight, and the solemnity we celebrate today
sheds a different light on Mary’s role in the history of salvation. We can let the
world’s take on her influence our thinking and think she was a little protected
Palestinian flower who God treated like a Jewish princess, but that does not cut it:
Mary was the most perfect creature. So perfect she’s living the Apocalypse now.
Today we celebrate a path that we’re all called to walk: from here to Heaven. We
celebrate Mary’s assumption, body, and soul, into Heaven after her time upon this
world. Mary received the grace to be body and soul in Heaven along with her son.
The other just souls that have preceded us are in Heaven, but they’re separated
from their bodies until the Last Day when Our Lord raises everyone from the dead in
the Last Judgment. Our Lord ascended into Heaven in glory; Our Blessed Mother
was assumed into Heaven.
The First Reading today reminds us that Apocalypse and Revelation are
synonymous.
The apostle John had years to reflect on Mary’s Assumption, and in the First
Reading, he tries to express her role in the Church yesterday, today, and
forever.
She is clad in the sun: in Revelation, the justified is simply clad in white, but
Mary’s brilliant clothing shows the graces she’d received from God are even
more dazzling.
The moon is under her feet: as the most perfect creature, the heavenly
bodies are subjected to her, not the other way around.
Crowned with twelve stars: the queen of the apostles and the mother of the
Church in the order of grace.
Totally beyond the dragon’s power: it can sweep the stars from heaven, but it
cannot defeat the mother of God or her mission to be the mother of the
Redeemer and our mother.
When the Jew’s Kingdom in this world, under Saul, then David, then Solomon
fell flat, they looked forward to a Kingdom of the future, but the future
Kingdom they had in mind wasn’t much different from the Kingdom they
dreamed for in the here and now.
Christ showed them the “Kingdom at hand,” and it wasn’t what they expected.
It was a Kingdom only seen by faith, starting here and now in this world, and
only achieving its full glory in the world to come.
In today’s Second Reading St. Paul reminds us that Christ was the first fruits of the
definitive victory over death that was to come.
In the end, “[Our Lord] hands over the Kingdom to his God and Father, … For
he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet … the last enemy
to be destroyed is death.”
The Assumption is God’s reminder of that victory to come. Whether Mary died
at the end of her time on earth is not clear, but the decay of death did not
spoil her. Taken up body and soul into Heaven, her Son’s final victory was
shown in her.
Through Mary’s fiat her desires for the Kingdom, which she sings for in
the Magnificat, coincide perfectly with that reality to come, and she accepts it
and strives for it with total faith.
Mary was no spared little flower. When the Kingdom took flesh in her womb
she had Joseph to contend with, a flight to Egypt, thirty years of silence in
Nazareth, three years seeing how many people did not accept her Son’s
message, then Calvary and her greatest commission: to be the mother of the
apostles and of the whole Church.
She’s continuing that mission, body, and soul, from Heaven, showing us what
is to come as long as we keep working and hoping.
In today’s Gospel Elizabeth rejoices that her cousin had come to visit, not just
because she was glad to see her kin, but because Mary is aglow with accepting the
invitation to become the Mother of God.
John leaps in the womb at the presence of Jesus in Mary’s womb. Their
missions are closely linked.
Elizabeth blesses Mary because she “believed that what was spoken to you
by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
Mary was extraordinarily blessed because she believed in the Lord, and in
the Assumption, we see that she believed in the Lord throughout her earthly
life and beyond.
Mary doesn’t take credit. She glorifies the Lord with her canticle, and now she
does so in eternity.
