Saturday, September 03, 2016
Assumption of the BVM
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Sermon
for the Sunday near
the
Dormition of the BVM
August
14, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let your Holy One experience corruption.
+In the Name of God,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity
St. Basil the great observed that the Church’s devotion
to the Blessed Virgin Mary belonged to the dogmata
and not the kerygmata. That is, to the inner, secret life of the Church
as opposed to our public preaching. Accordingly, I will say little so that we
can devote our time to praise her after the liturgy.
I
will note that the public, Papal definition of the Bodily Assumption of the
Mother of God was, nevertheless appropriate, in the historical circumstance.
The world had just experienced an unprecedented satanic assault on the dignity
of the human body, in the form of the Nazi death-camps. The celebration of the
Assumption of Mary may be understood as the Church’s defiance of those horrors,
the affirmation that all material creation is destined to participate in the
Divine Life. In 1950, perhaps, it was time to say so in public and to proclaim
it from the rooftops: Mary in her bodily Assumption represents Creation
restored to perfection, just as she represented all creation in her willing
coöperation with God in the Redemption: Behold
the Handmaid of the Lord. Let it be unto me according to your word. Mary’s fiat undoes the disobedience of Eve and
makes ordinary creation a participant in divinity.
St.
Irenaeus said God became human so that
humanity might become divine. The
Transfiguration refers to the first part of the saying: God became human and we
beheld His glory. And the Transfiguration refers not only to the Godman, Jesus
Christ, but to all His human relatives, beginning with his All-Holy Mother. She
is in no was different from us and the rest of creation, except that she has
already passed beyond the Resurrection and Judgment to the perfection God
intended in the beginning.
There
is an ancient tradition of her coronation in heaven. Here, again, she
represents creation. Queen of Heaven,
as we acclaim her, was a title that particularly bothered some reformation
theologians. It sounded way too pagan. It smacked of goddess-worship. In fact,
the Holy Pro-phet Jeremiah had railed against the Canaanite cult of the same
name. But Mary as Queen of Heaven is, actually entirely biblical! Gabriel had announ-ced
that God would give her Son the Kingdom of His Ancestor David. Well, the
ancient Davidic Kings were polygamists and none of their wives was ever called Queen. That title was reserved for the
King’s mother. The only Queen of Israel was the Queen Mother. So, if Jesus is
the King of Heaven, then His Mother is Queen of Heaven. Not a goddess, not the
oriental Great Mother worshiped at Ephesus, but the first human being to
participate perfectly in the Divine Life, which is what Christians mean by theosis or divinization. We do not become gods,
but we share in the Life of the Blessed Trinity.
God became human that humanity might become divine. It is appropriate that we should recognize the theosis of Mary. As God received our human life from her, so she is the first
to receive Divine life from Him. The iconographic depiction shows our Lady in
repose, having “fallen asleep” in the flesh. Behind her stands her Divine Son.
In a reversal of the image that shows her holding Him as an infant, He now
holds her soul. There is no depiction of what will happen to her immaculate
body. That remains a mystery, hidden within the heart of the Church. A
Byzantine hymn imagines her last words:
O Apostles, who
have assembled here
from the ends of
the earth,
bury my body in
Gethsemane,
but receive my
spirit, O my God,
O my Son!
But from earliest times
Christians have believed not only that He did receive her, but also that He did
not suffer to see corruption the human body out of which had come His own
sacred Body.
Arise, O Lord,
into Your resting place:
You and the Ark
of Your sanctification
AMEN
