Vigil Mass
1 Sm 15:3-4, 15-16; 16:1-2
God has pitched his tent among us. David brings the Ark into Jerusalem with great celebration. The Ark of the Covenant was a source of power and inspiration, containing the tablets of the Law written by God's own hand. The Ark gave the people of Israel assurance that God was with them. In Christ, God is with us - Emmanuel. Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant. Not of cedar wood or gold plate, but flesh and blood. Christ fulfills the law and the prophets. He is with us - we rejoice and are glad.
1 Cor 15:54b-57
It is an epic cry: Death where is your victory? Death where is your sting? Today's feast points to the fulfillment of the Resurrection. Where Christ is now, we hope to follow. Mary is the first of all disciples. Her entire life, from the moment of the Annunciation was centered on her Son. She said 'Yes' and kept her promise. If we try our best to be close to her Son, where she is now we will be.
Lk 11:27-28
Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it. The Word was made flesh in the womb of Mary. We hear her instruction at Cana; do whatever he tells you. We hear his word in the scriptures and in the Church. The hearing is the easy part, its the keeping that is difficult. Mary went through suffering in pain from the beginning: what young couple would want their baby born in a stable, an animal shed. But from there, through life to the Cross she stood by Christ, to the joy of Easter, Pentecost and Heaven.
The woman in the crowd was right: the womb that bore Him was blessed. But so are we, for we have become God's chosen in Christ.
Mass during the Day
Rv 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab
Strange sights in the sky. Dragons, horns and heads. Not exactly bedtime story stuff. The woman clothed in the sun with the crown of stars and the moon at her feet has traditionally been associated with Mary. She is the woman who gave birth to the one who was to reign over all; with an iron rod. God cares for his people. He has given us the consolation of the truth in Christ. Even though the way is long and narrow, we are given all the strength we need to be faithful and keep following. The wind maybe high and the sea rough; but God is always faithful.
1 Cor 15:20-27
Assumption and Resurrection go hand in hand. Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven. Death was not allowed to claim her body in decay. Christ was 'flesh from her flesh, bone from her bone.' Who did Jesus physically look like? He had no earthly father, there was no sharing of genes. He is the perfect image of the Father; but must he have looked like Mary? In the case of Our Lord, not only did he grow to maturity under the care of His mother, but the mother became more and more like her Son; so much so that now she shares in his glory. To become more like Christ is the call of the Assumption: to become like Him and to share in His glory as "He humbled Himself to share in our humanity".
Lk 1:39-56 Gospel
Magnificat: He casts the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly. A call to revolution or a call to conversion? After the fall of Napoleon, there was request to remove this prayer from the Bible; it was just too dangerous. Along with "how can this come about for I am a Virgin", "Be done to me according to your word" and "do whatever He tells you", the text of the Gospel today records the only words of Our Lady written in the scripture. She is full of praise "my soul glorifies the Lord", humility and dignity. God saw all that he had made and it was good. In a world of pain and disappointment, in hard times in our country, when many many people are suffering because of the mistakes of others, we have to hold on to the promise of green pastures. Mary's Assumption points to the faithfulness of God. His Word is good. The New Covenant, in Christ, gives each of us the hope of the life of the world to come, and the protection of God in this world "to Abraham and his children forever".
It is important to remember students who are getting there leaving cert results at this time. It is a very anxious moments for them and families.
ReplyDeleteWonderful site Father, I'll be following along! :)
ReplyDeleteI don't have anything to add to what you say about the Scriptures, but I always think the Preface of this particular feast is worth referring to in the homily.
ReplyDeleteI always tell people to listen especially closely to the Preface, but I wonder if they do?
Oh, one thing I do have to add about the scripture is the question of whether it's proper to identify the Lady of the Apocalypse with Our Lady. One could make a fair case that the Lady is the Church rather than Our Lady.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the two interpretations aren't mutually exclusive. Mary is the exemplar of the Church and the Patristic literature sometimes chooses her to represent the entire Church. So, we can see the passage as referring both to Mary bringing forth Christ AND the Church bringing Christ to birth in the world as well.
There's a tradition that Mary didn't suffer labour pains when giving birth to Christ, but that she did suffer them when Christ died on the Cross. In other words, her child-bearing pain has to do with the birth of the Church rather than the birth of her Son.
Now, you'd be hard pressed to make an intelligible homily out of all those scraps, but one or two of them might be useful.
Mary is mother of the Church. There is often a distancing between the mystery of our salvation and the mystery of the Church. The feast of the Assumption is rooted very much in the Church itself; the perfection which we all hope for, as members of the Body in Heaven. The 3rd Eucharistic Prayer in Masses for the dead "we shall see you our God as you are, we shall become like you and praise you forever though Christ our Lord."
ReplyDeleteOne ready daily in the papers in Ireland about a society falling appart, post christian, banking and political corruption and incompetence, unemployment, despair, greed, no leadership, and then one comes across this blog and that of Rationabile Obsequium. The sun shines, hope.I hope you guys and the other orders, Jesuits, Holy Gost, etc keep finding new ways in technology to get His message out. David
ReplyDeleteThe Assumption is such a joyous feast and a wonderful response from our Heavnly Father to Mary's Yes, her Fiat, her openness to God's desire. May we follow her example.
ReplyDeleteOn the first of November 1950, before a rejoicing crowd of up to one million people, Pope Pius XII infallibly proclaimed as a divinely revealed dogma of the faith “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory”. (Munificentissimus Deus)
ReplyDeleteAlthough some branches of Protestantism objected, and biblical fundamentalists were outraged, the Catholic Church, in making this solemn doctrinal definition, was doing no more than articulating something most Christians, both East and West, had always believed.
In the gradual crystallisation of this belief into a dogmatic definition, we see the living interplay between scripture, tradition and magisterium which characterises the Catholic understanding of divine revelation. It is in stark contrast to biblical fundamentalism which, in a vain attempt to honour God’s word by excluding ecclesial tradition and apostolic teaching, actually ends up reducing scripture to a lifeless matter of textbound archaeology.
The proclamation of the assumption was not a question of Catholics wildly inflating their beliefs about Mary because of their love for her. As with the other mariological doctrines, Christ himself is the power and protagonist of the story.
The truth of of Our Lady’s assumption reveals tremendous things about the redemption Christ has won for us. To know that Mary was brought to heaven in body as well as in soul also reveals some timely truths about the beauty, dignity and ultimate destiny of the human person.
Where soul meets body, without division, we have the human person in original wholeness and holiness - the crown of God’s creation. Christ seeks to save us in that wholeness. Not just our souls but our bodies too are to be saved if Christ’s power is to be full and fully unleashed.
When Christ rose from the dead and broke free from the tomb he simultaneously raised up our own human nature and set it free into glory. Jesus did not float out of the tomb like a ghost. His body was changed, transfigured so that he was not immediately recognisable to some friends, changed so that he could enter locked rooms, yet it was still in continuity of existence with his human body of flesh and blood. He still could eat breakfast with his disciples by the lake. He still had traces of suffering on his hands and feet. The central point is this. Salvation in Christ is for the full person, both in body and soul.
It is important that eschatology, the Christian understanding of the full consummation and final coming together of God’s plan, does not mean that heaven will be a ghostly community of spirits. The central tenet of our eschatology is not the immortality of the soul but rather the resurrection of the body. At the end of time - through the power of Christ - our bodies will be raised, transfigured, healed, beautified, made agile and immune to suffering. We will then be whole again.
Someone, someday would have to be the first person ever to taste redemption in its fullness. In a telltale sign of his true humanity Jesus chose his mother for this honour. Having been ‘predeemed’ at her conception Mary does not suffer sin’s radical divorce of body and soul at death.
In Mary of Nazareth, the resurrection’s follow-through into full and final redemption has already begun to take place.
The twentieth century saw tens of millions of human bodies slaughtered on battlefields and in abortion mills. It would also see an explosion of pornography, prostitution and sexual abuse.
It is no surprise that the Holy Spirit should choose such an age to clarify, as doctrine beyond debate, that the human body is sacred and designed for heaven.
Fr C