Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab
1 Corinthians 15:20-27
Luke 1:39-56
The children’s television programme Blue Peter has been on our screens for over 50 years, and so could well be part of the childhood memories of many of us here. If it is, you’ll remember the phrase, “here’s one I made earlier”. In each programme the presenter would make some useful object or improving toy out of bits of old rubbish, cardboard, offcuts of cloth, string, and of course sticky back plastic and rubber solution glue.
I don’t know about you, but somehow my efforts at reproducing these wonderful things always fell woefully short of the ideal that the presented showed us. But nonetheless there was always that type, that model – “here’s one I made earlier” – held up as the perfect example towards which I could struggle with my sticky fingers and glitter all over the living room carpet.
Today on this wonderful feast day of the Assumption of Our Lady, the Church’s attention turns towards Mary, and it’s as though God is saying to the Church, “here’s one I made earlier”. Here is the type, the example, of a life lived in perfect conformity to the will of God, a life transfigured and taken up into the glory of heaven because that is God’s will for each and every one of us.
The church lavishes so much attention on Mary, on this humble woman from the hill country of Galilee. Today, shrines all over the world will be decked with flowers and splendour in her honour. In more southern and fervent climates statues of Mary will be carried through the streets in baroque magnificence and greeted with rapturous enthusiasm.
She will be hailed by every title that the Church and popular devotion has bestowed upon her: Mother of God above all because she is the Mother of Jesus and we cannot separate Jesus from God; Our Lady of Guadalupe, of Lourdes, of Fatima, of Walsingham; Queen of Heaven, of Saints, of Martyrs, of Peace; Refuge of Sinners and Ark of the Covenant. Preachers far more erudite than this one will be reminding the faithful of the many doctrines the Church teaches concerning Mary: her immaculate conception, her perpetual virginity, her bodily assumption into heaven.
It’s all very splendid and unrestrained. But perhaps at the back of the reserved English mind there’s a little bit of doubt about all this. The protestant distrust of outward things has seeped into our culture. Is it not perhaps all a little excessive? Might it not tend just a little bit towards superstition and idolatry?
But to think that is to mistake what Mary is about, and indeed to mistake what God was about when he chose Mary to be the mother of his Son.
All the devotion, adornment and doctrine that Church lavishes on Mary do not turn her into a goddess. Rather, they bring out most truly what she is, a human being.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, of course, is both God and Man. Divine by nature, the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God from all eternity who was made flesh in time and space as Jesus of Nazareth. Not so Mary, or any of us. We are simply human, created out of nothing, receiving our being as God’s free gift.
And yet we are created out of nothing with a glorious destiny. The incarnation of God in Jesus was for us, and bestowed on human nature a Divine dignity which reveals our deepest calling. Human beings, as St Gregory of Nazianzen put it, are animals who have received the call to become God, not by nature, but by grace, by God’s free gift. We are dust and clay, bundles of animated earthiness, called to discover that our true life, our deepest being, is God.
God reveals himself in Jesus as creator and redeemer, the generous giver of our being and the one who calls us into union with him. He is therefore not a rival for the space we occupy, and we do not need to fear that honouring Mary or any saint detracts from God. The life into which God calls us in fact is a life beyond rivalry, beyond competing for space and drawing boundaries around what’s mine and what’s yours. The exaltation of the human does not displace God.
But God will not draw us into that life against our will. God has given us free will and we do need to co-operate with God at least to the extent of allowing him to align our wills with his. One of the mysteries of salvation is that we cannot save ourselves, but God will not save us without us being involved. God does everything for us, but by his generous gift the work of our salvation becomes ours also.
So it was with Mary. Her co-operation with God’s will for her salvation and ours was complete and instantaneous. “Be it unto me according to your word”, she said, a single act of her will made with her whole being and which she never took back. God had chosen her and foreseen from all eternity that she would be the one human creature in our history able to respond to his will in that way. And yet God prepared her for this role by his free grace, without which she would not have been able to respond. But God still waited for her response.
The doctrines of Mary’s immaculate conception and perpetual virginity are not meant to tie our minds up in speculation about biology. Rather, they embody the truth that Mary was completely open to God, and completely free from guilt and fear. She was a stranger to the hesitation and ifs and buts and clinging on to what’s mine that come bundled up with our sinfulness and our being closed in on ourselves. And her assumption into heaven points to the universal significance of this one human life.
In today’s Gospel reading Mary sings the Magnificat, the hymn of salvation for all God’s people in general which flows from what God has done for her in particular. We are saved because God’s handmaid said “Yes”, and not otherwise. And in that amazing vision from the book of Revelation the veils are stripped away and we see the great sign in heaven of a woman, a human being, an animal called to become God, who is clothed with the cosmos and appears as a universal sign of salvation because she has become the mother of the Redeemer.
As we gaze on that vision we see our own destiny. Our response to God’s grace indeed is hesitant, faltering. We know we are sinners. Perhaps we feel that we have even fallen back, rather than advancing towards that vision. No matter. God’s grace is there for us, and we begin again. We do not labour alone. We have before us the great sign in heaven of the woman whom God has already perfected and raised to Glory, she who points always to Christ, her redeemer and ours, she who never ceases to aid us with her prayers.
Because there is no space between her will and the will of God, because there is nothing essentially different in what God has done for her and what God wills to do for us, we can with confidence honour Mary and call upon her prayers. In the words of today’s preface to the Eucharistic prayer, we can receive her as “the beginning and pattern of the Church in its perfection, and a sign of hope and comfort for God’s people on their pilgrim way”. Mary accompanies us on our way, and with her we rejoice and sing because it is the way to glory.
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