It’s a deep Christian instinct – not restricted to us either – that there is such a thing as divine Providence, and behind it an all-embraving divine purpose, a wisdom and love that guides the universe, the world, each one of us, with no detail – no sparrow – . It isn’t always clear or ‘easy reading’ as it were. There’s enough of the ungodly around to keep us baffled, and we learn not to be too facile about what God is ‘up to’.
And if our lives fall within this all-embracing purpose, if its origin and intentions are benign, if it’s love at play – the willing of our good – what is its goal? Sometimes we’re asked, “what is your endgame?” What is God’s? Where is it taking us?
Today’s feast – Mary’s taking up into heavenly glory – is surely one pointer. Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote the ecstatic end-of-summer sonnet, Hurrahing in Harvest. This feast has been called Our Lady in Harvest Time. Today, as it were, she is harvested, harvested home to the divine granary, allowing us to glean some of the glory she leaves behind for us. Today is Mary’s Easter – Easter in August it has been called. It’s the overflowing of Christ’s Easter into her. She is taken up “body and soul” we say, that is fully, wholly, no fragment of her being and her self left behind. “And the last of the enemies to be destroyed is death.”
Nor is it just a private happiness which is at stake here. “The angels rejoice”, says the Liturgy; in other words, the whole of creation, the cosmos which the angels guard. “The sanctuary of God opened and the ark of the covenant could be seen inside it. Then a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman adorned with the sun, standing on the moon and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown.” Here, sun, moon and stars, creation on its material side, is involved as well. “Opening”, “covenant”, “sign”, “woman”: these are large words. They resonate. They suggest fulness. When Mary sings her Magnificat, we notice how easily she passes from her own joy to “all generations”, to all time (“from age to age”), to “those who fear him”, whatever be the time and space they occupy. “He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly”.
The Lord’s Resurrection was more than a fatherly pat on the back, “Well done, my boy”. It was the coming of the Kingdom of God. There must have been an inexpressible intimate joy into today’s reunion of Mother and Son, but even this was no mere private affair. The Assumption is confirmation of the Kingdom’s coming, and every one and every thing is called to this wedding feast. There is a completion being foreshadowed here: the Vision (the glorified Christ) now has human eyes to behold it, Man and Woman meet, the Bride hails the Bridegroom, the Church finds the arms of Christ, Spirit-filled Creation comes home to its incarnate Creator. Genesis and the Apocalypse take each other’s hands.
So today, in Mary’s wake, we too can rise with haste and head for the hills. Through the window of this great sign, we can see the goal of God’s great purposes. We can praise and magnify. The end – without end – of the divine game, the divine comedy, the victory over Satan, sin and death, the dragon’s defeat. In the Roman Catholic Church, it was precisely in the middle of the most death-dealing century in history – in 1950 – that a Pope, Pius XII, raised the flag of Mary’s Assumption, defining the dogma. “For everything – death included – is to be put under his feet.”
And now too, a quarter of the way through our century – when talk of World War III can’t be dismissed as simply scare-mongering – we surely want to wave the flag of this feast, “having the eyes of our hearts enlightened , that we may know what is the hope to which he has called us, what are the riches of the glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power towards us” (Eph 1: 17-19). Let’s revive hope in our wilting spirits!
And what is heaven in the end? What is this goal of God’s action? Can’t we say: the glorified body, the resurrected being, of the paschal Christ fully realised, extended to its utmost? And for us an incorporation into this great space, this face, this heart, these arms, this whole. The beauty, truth and goodness of his Son is the home the Father has prepared for us from all eternity and that the Holy Spirit nudges, nurses, urges us towards through all life’s wanderings. This is why, as we travel together, we keep communion in the body of Christ, the Church, we eat the Body and drink the Blood of the one we will one day see and touch as Mary does. It’s why we seek to “glorify God in our body”, by living chaste and fruitful lives. “Body-language” is everywhere in the Church. And so we want to grow a sense of responsibility for every human being and every blade of grass. Everything is called, in its different way, to be housed and embodied in Christ, to be put – not crushed but flowering – under his feet, to be part of his body, to have him as its head.
This is what God purposes for us. And Mary shines with the knowledge and love of it. Today she enters this all-embracing, transfigured, spacious body of Christ, she who gave it / him birth on earth, “born of a woman” as he was. And with all her being, “body and soul”, closer to us than we imagine, she prays that her “end without end” may be ours as well. Amen.
St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 15 August 2024
