Some time ago I watched an episode of Silent Witness – the UK’s equivalent of CSI. On it were two young pathologists discussing life after death. The young woman doctor had just been to her grandmother’s funeral and it had made her think about dead bodies in a different way. Asked by her atheist colleague, she said “I think I do believe in something after death, though I don’t quite know what.” He replied “Well if there is life after death then it’s a good thing that people are given new bodies, or it would be fairly obvious which bodies had been under the pathologist’s knife, wouldn’t it!” You can see and hear giving this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvwQz1jLP3o
What I found interesting was that this doctor, even though an atheist, realised that we Christians believe that God gives us new bodies beyond death, but was only able to understand this, and thus reject it, in physical terms – a new physical body. Clearly neither doctor had read the 15th Chapter of St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians - part of which was our 2nd Reading today. For here Paul makes it clear that the body we are given by God after death is a new kind of body. He writes. “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (v.44) Indeed both kinds of body (soma in Greek) are not what we mean by “body” at all. A body to us means something made of flesh, blood and bone but for Paul it means “all that we are” – yes expressed now in a fleshly form, but actually much more than just flesh – something that we might more accurately describe in English as “body and soul”
The big problem with all this is that we are trying to express things that are beyond the physical world – the world accessible to science; but the only words we have are words from the physical world. Even saying something fairly simple, for example that our loved ones who have died are with God in heaven is difficult, because prepositions like “with” and “in” are not really relevant in heaven. There is no up or down, no far away or close, no inside or outside. Heaven is part of the mystery of God – in the end no words can describe it, even though we must use words to hint at what the things of God are like.
There is also no time after death. St Paul tells us (again in 1 Corinthians 15) that although we all die at different times there is only one moment when those who are given eternal life in heaven actually get it – the last Trump. So, in order to explain this, he uses the metaphor of sleep, for when we sleep – sleep deeply that is – we have no sense of time. Notice he talks of all who have “fallen asleep” in our 2nd reading. So when we die we leave time behind. We are at the “end” not just of the world but of all things - when God is “all in all”.
This leads us at last to what we celebrate today - about Our Lady’s entry into heaven – her Assumption as we call it. Our prayers affirm strongly that she has been raised “body and soul to the glory of heaven”. But, we might ask, what is so special about that, since this is also the destiny of everyone who is open to God? Yes indeed that’s true, but we reach heaven through a process of purification, which we call purgatory. We die imperfect, and we believe that it is only through the life and death of Jesus that God makes us perfect and thus fit for heaven – to be with him for ever. Partly, we hope, this begins as we respond to God here and now, it is why we’re here at Mass – to allow the saving love of Christ to wash through us – but since we never reach perfection in life, the final part of this process takes place, we believe, after death.
Normally we express this process – purgatory – as a period of time. So for saints it’s very short, but for us sinners it’s much longer. But remember, this can only be a metaphor, for there is no time after death. We might try then to express it another way – we might say that for sinners like us the purging is more intense whilst for the great saints it is very gentle. But still we are still using inadequate words – nothing can really express what we’re trying to say. Anyway however inadequate our words are, the doctrine of the Assumption declares that for Mary there is no purgatory. At the moment of her death she was and is with God in heaven.
What then is it about Mary which means that she achieves this? Is it that she was a better person than any of us? Well not really, for no human being, even Mary, becomes perfect by “doing” things - however good they are. That is to think of perfection in a worldly way. The perfection we Christians seek is a perfected relationship with God – a full and utter openness to the power of goodness and glory underpinning the universe.
So Mary is perfect, not because of what she did, but because she was fully open to God – she was prepared to say a complete “Yes” to God. And this “yes” is not just allowing God to work in her womb, so that she might conceive and bear Jesus within her, but is also a “yes” to what this implies. As she says in her great song – the Magnificat - that we heard in our Gospel today (Luke 1:39-56) – it means a turning upside-down of all the ways the world thinks and acts. So pride and power and money become meaningless, as the Lord does great things. This “Yes” also means accepting pain and grief and desolation as part of the way God brings salvation. “A sword will pierce her soul” says old Simeon to her in the Temple. How wonderful that this young teenage girl should have accepted all this? For me, the words of Mary that are crucial are “The Almighty has done great things for me.” She reminds herself that in all this she is responding to God at work in her, not in something she achieved for herself
This is a hard thing to do isn’t it? We want to do things we can be proud of, and oh how easily that pride becomes a selfish desire for praise. We want people to think well of us. I wonder how many of you know the story of the saint we celebrated this week. St Teresa Benedicta who started life as a Jewish academic philosopher called Edith Stein? She became a Catholic in 1922, and then joined the Carmelites. After that she could anticipate a hidden life and a quiet death. No-one would ever praise her. But then the Nazis found her, and carted off to Auschwitz to die horribly with millions of other Jews. In life she had no praise and expected none. Now we honour her as a saint, and she stands for all those Jews murdered in that horrific way. Like Our Lady, it was not what she did that took her to heaven, but the fact that she put her trust in God, expecting nothing in return. Both women are examples of faithfulness and love, and I have no doubt it was Mary who inspired Edith Stein. Two Jewish women to thank and praise God for.
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