Sunday, 15 August 2015
Homily by Fr. Raymond
MASS
The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Saturday, 15 August 2015
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary - Solemnity
The Bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven
By Fr. Raymond
The Bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven is one of the three great personal privileges of Mary: The Immaculate Conception; the Divine Motherhood and the Assumption. The Immaculate Conception prepared Mary for her Divine Motherhood and her Assumption into Heaven was a consequence of it. This connection between the Divine Motherhood and the Assumption can perhaps be best understood if we think of the debt any man owes to his Mother. It is a debt that can never be repaid. Our Mothers gave us our very life and existence. They formed us in their wombs; the nursed us at their breasts. ‘No man can pay the price of his life’ as the psalmist reminds us. The best we can do to repay our Mothers for the gift of life is for us to love and honour and respect them, and of course to care for them in their old age.
But things are not so between Mary and the Divine Son she bore. He was Almighty God and was well able to make a fitting recompense to his Mother for giving him his body of flesh. He repaid this debt of gratitude by taking her own body of flesh and blood and preserving it from the corruption of the grave and assuming her, in her bodily entirety, into heaven just as he himself had been at his Ascension. Nor is this just something personal to Mary. We must wait, of course, till the last day for our bodily assumption into heaven, but Mary’s bodily assumption, like the ascension of Christ himself, gives us already a kind of pledge and guarantee of the ultimate destiny of our own body of flesh and blood. Christ, the New Adam, has entered the New Paradise, of which the Old Paradise was just a foreshadowing, and Mary, the New Eve, has been given to him as his first companion in the fullness of her humanity.
When the doctrine of the Assumption was first defined, our separated brethren asked, “Where is this in Scripture? We can’t believe what is not in Scripture”. But we can answer that this wonderful event is well prepared for in Holy Scripture. The mind of faith is prepared for it by such events as the lifting up of Elijah from this earth in the fiery chariot. We are prepared for it by the disappearance from this earth of the bodies of Enoch and Moses for example. But by far the most important foreshadowing of Mary’s Assumption takes place in the very first chapters of Genesis where it is said of the first Adam: “It is not good for Man to be alone”. There were plenty of other living creatures around, but none “like unto himself” to share his life with him on a fully human level. So too surely it must be with the New Adam in the new Paradise . There are plenty of angels and spirits of the just there too but, for the fullness and perfection of all beauty and truth, he needs one by his side who can share his life in the fullness of his glorified humanity, body as well as spirit. Yes even for the New Adam in the New Paradise “It is not good for Man to be alone”.
THE ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
Solemnity
Solemnity
In this festival the Church commemorates the happy departure from life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her translation into the kingdom of her Son, in which she received from Him a crown of immortal glory, and a throne above all the other Saints and heavenly spirits.
After Christ, as the triumphant Conqueror of death and hell, ascended into heaven, his blessed Mother remained at Jerusalem, persevering in prayer with the disciples, till, with them, she had received the Holy Spirit. She lived to a very advanced age, but finally paid the common debt of nature, none among the children of Adam being exempt from that rigorous law. But the death of the Saints is rather to be called a sweet sleep than death; much more that of the Queen of Saints, who had been exempt from all sin. It is a traditionary pious belief, that the body of the Blessed Virgin was raised by God soon after her death, and taken up to glory, by a singular privilege, before the general resurrection of the dead.
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the greatest of all the festivals which the Church celebrates in her honor. It is the consummation of all the other great mysteries by which her life was rendered most wonderful; it is the birthday of her true greatness and glory, and the crowning of all the virtues of her whole life, which we admire single in her other festivals.
Lives of the Saints, by Alban Butler, Benziger Bros. ed. [1894]
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