Frances Flatman writes on the Readings for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary:
How we read the Bible can dramatically effect our understanding of it. Christian Fathers of the early centuries frequently read much ‘allegorically’, that is as pointers to our understanding of Christ. Indeed, Origen believed that ‘unenlightened literalists’ were the lowest of the low and had little appreciation of the text at all. This method of reading the scriptures can be extremely helpful and will certainly detract from meaningless searches in the Middle East for ‘Eden’ or the discovery of Noah’s Ark, for it is the implications of the story that are important in our relationship with God.
Certainly any reading of the Apocalypse (11:19;12:1-6.10) has to accept that this is a very weird piece of writing, and if we take it literally frankly it presents a vision of the divine which is extremely violent and bears little relationship to the God of Jesus Christ. If, on the other hand, we can see it as allegory, a picture of a great cosmic battle between good and evil, it has something to offer. Certainly, for the converts to Christianity from paganism John the Divine was writing for in the province of Asia in Turkey, where the world was a savage place, and in which, as Peter Brown writes ‘Demons were as common as microbes are in our understanding of the world’, hope of divine intervention made sense. This is what we have in the vision, with the great dragon sweeping stars from the heavens and threatening the tiny baby. It’s all quite whacky, until we recognise something of the radical nature of salvation by Christ, born of a peasant in obscure Palestine and no part of the might and power of Rome which conquered with impunity. Behind the story is the message of the marvellous working of God’s redemptive power in the face of impossible odds, a sort of rags to riches story so beloved by ancient people.
Luke’s Gospel (1:39-56) plays this for all its worth as he begins his story of Jesus for his Patron the powerful and super rich Theophilus, and via him to his cronies and the developing Church, in a world which understood power and greatly valued the class divisions of society. Luke subtly works to show these great and good people precisely how the Christian message overthrows all the worldly things they take for granted, giving them a fundamentally new outlook on God’s creation and their hopes for immortal life in Christ. We have just had the Annunciation to Mary, who rather than coddling herself – the norm- promptly makes quite a journey to visit Elizabeth her cousin, now about six months pregnant and a mature first mother; and we note she stays with her until her child, John is born. Zechariah of course has been struck dumb for his disbelief, despite his role as a Temple priest, and so important. It’s all up to the women! On greeting Mary, John in the womb ‘recognises’ the Christ in Mary’s womb, and Elizabeth is ‘filled with the Spirit’. Then we have another dramatic moment of radical role reversal, as Elizabeth greets Mary with ‘Of all women you are the most blessed’, a phrase used only of two women in the Old Testament in Judith 13 and Judges 5, for women who assumed dominant roles and slew Israel’s enemy leaders; but here applied to Mary, one of no estate and who herself goes on to paraphrase Hannah’s Song from 1 Sam 2, our Magnificat, and all about God’s favour to his slave woman in whom ‘All generations’ will recognise the workings of God who shuns the proud, the mighty and the great, and favours the poor and lowly. God, we are told, does not work as would have been expected in paganism, or even by early Christians, in the great, but in the lowest of the low, fulfilling his earliest promises to Abraham and the destiny of Israel as bringers of the Saviour.
In the Greek, two verbs stand out to work this image, in the first verse the Jerusalem Bible has ‘Mary set out’, but in the Greek Rising up Mary, which is anastasis, the word for resurrection, and later v45, ‘She who believed the promise’ is drawn from the verb ‘teleios’ of the end, or completion which of course relates to our salvation in Christ. What we have then in this story, of an apparently dutiful and family visit, is a potted story of salvation and of the overthrow of all those things which Theophilus and we think of as important in ‘fixing’ stuff, as Luke embarks on his account of the Saviour of the World, not our way but God’s.
By the time we get to Paul’s Letters to Corinthian Christians, here (1 Cor 15:20-27) we are into quite a sophisticated account of the Christ event, in which Paul plays allegorically with the contrast between Adam the first human, and Christ the first mythically who brought death into the world, whilst Christ literally brings eternal life. Greco-Romans held that, Emperors excepted, total wipe out was the fate of the rest, which accounts for the careful burial of so many with grave feasts, and even pipes by which wine could be trickled down to the remains of loved and lost family members. But Christianity, via its Jewish roots, developed their understanding of resurrection, now no longer about earthly Jewish dominance but by the life and death of Jesus guaranteed each and every believer continuing post mortem existence with, through and in his resurrected life. This means that in the end God will destroy all his enemies, death included, that final and ultimate rubbishing of creation; and that every enemy of God’s creative power will be defeated. For the Church this is why Mary matters so much, and why we celebrate her entry into God’s eternal life; for she, as Mother of God the Son, provides that definitive link between God and humanity, and points the way to glory for each and every believer.
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