ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

Sunday, August 15, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt

In the Episcopal Church calendar, today’s feast is called simply Saint Mary the Virgin. In the Roman Catholic Church, its official name is the Solemnity of the Assumption. In the Orthodox Churches it’s the Dormition of the Theotokos, that is, the Falling Asleep of the God-Bearer.

By whatever name it’s known, August 15^th has been observed in both East and West since the early centuries of Christianity as a feast commemorating the mysterious circumstances surrounding the end of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s earthly life. 

The Episcopal Church does not explicitly acknowledge Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. Nonetheless, today’s Collect in the Prayer Book hints at it: “O God, who hast taken to thyself the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of thy incarnate Son …” The Collect then proceeds to ask that we may share with her the glory of God’s eternal kingdom—the glory into which, it is implied, she’s already been taken up.

Even though the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption only as recently as 1950, the belief is documented as dating back to the early centuries of Christianity. According to Saint John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, during the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451, the Byzantine Emperor asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem for the body of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Relics of the saints were in high demand in those days; the churches in most cities possessed and treasured the bones and other keepsakes of their founding Apostles. It would thus have been a great coup for Constantinople to have taken possession of Mary's mortal remains.

But to the Emperor’s surprise, the bishop explained that no bodily relics of the Blessed Virgin were to be found anywhere. He then related the Jerusalem Church’s local tradition that when Mary was coming to the end of her earthly life, all the Apostles but one—I’ll come back to this presently—returned to the Holy City from their missionary travels to bid her farewell. Having peacefully fallen asleep, she was carried through the streets on a bier to her final resting place, and laid in a tomb. 

The one missing Apostle was Thomas, who arrived three days later, and asked that Mary’s tomb be opened so that he could pay his respects. (Just as Thomas had been absent from the Upper Room on the first Easter Day, so he was absent from Mary’s funeral and interment.) When they opened the tomb, however, they found it empty. In some versions of the story, the gathered apostles then saw a vision of Mary being lifted to her waiting Son in the heavens. And in a few further versions, on the way up, she dropped her sash or waistband down to Thomas below, furnishing the doubting disciple with incontrovertible proof of her Assumption.

I hasten to add that none of this is attested anywhere in Scripture, so as Anglicans we’re free to make of it what we will. Interestingly, when Pope Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption as binding upon Roman Catholics seventy-two years ago, he did not explicitly cite any of these apocryphal traditions. His argument was instead a theological one: that since Mary was full of grace and without sin, it was inconceivable that God would allow her to decay in the tomb. But again, as Anglicans we’re not required to believe in Mary’s Assumption if we remain unpersuaded, and neither are we prohibited from believing in it if we find ourselves so inspired.

Either way, whether we take it as literal truth or symbolic image, a scriptural key to understanding the Assumption’s meaning for us is John 14:3 where, at the Last Supper, Jesus says to his disciples: "In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? When I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also."

In other words, the Assumption is not about Mary alone. It depicts not only Mary being taken into heaven at the conclusion of her earthly life, but also our own future resurrection (on the Last Day) and assumption into God’s presence following the completion of our earthly lives. Mary is thus sometimes referred to as the “First of the Redeemed”—or, we might say, the advance representative of redeemed humanity in heaven.

The Feast of the Assumption celebrates the hope of eternal life for all who are united to Christ. It’s that simple, really. In the Apostles’ Creed we recite the words: I believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Those words teach us that the world to come is not some ethereal realm of disembodied spirits, but rather the restoration of the material creation in all its glorious physicality.

To be fully human is to live in the body. God created us for embodied existence in a material world, which in the beginning he proclaimed to be “very good.” It follows that to fulfill the promise and potential of our creation, our redemption must be a bodily redemption. Only then can the life of the world to come bring about the perfection of our humanity in communion with God. As Jesus rose from the dead, so in the last day he will raise us as well—in bodies that are somehow continuous with those of this life, yet wonderfully restored, transformed, and made new, no longer subject to corruption, decay, and death.

Mary’s Assumption is best understood in the context of this hope. Just as Jesus rose not just in spirit but in the fullness of his bodily existence, so when the time came for Mary to fall asleep, God took her to himself in both body and soul.

Today, some of us may experience the same difficulty visualizing Mary's Assumption as we do Christ's Ascension. For we no longer think of heaven as a place somewhere up there, in the sky. The important point, however, is that somehow, in a mysterious way that defies explanation, Mary has been taken up, in the fullness of her humanity, into the fullness of God’s presence. 

The life that Mary lives with God as the first of the redeemed is none other than the life we’re all called to share in the age to come. In the meantime, we enjoy a living relationship with her here and now. She prays to her Son for us. We may certainly entreat her prayers on our behalf. And her prayers will help us towards our heavenly destination, where she and all the angels and saints are waiting for us, and from which they cheer us on as we make our pilgrimage through this life in this world.