HOMILY for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Our Lady’s , Cowley
Most people know that we Christians believe that God gives us new bodies beyond death, but many misunderstand this promise, thinking of it as a new physical body. Clearly such people have not 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 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 get it. 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. 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 in death.
Normally we express this process – purgatory – as a period of time. So, for great saints it’s almost instantaneous but for us sinners it’s rather longer, and for Mary it does not need to happen at all
And why? 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. So we give thanks for her on this great day.
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