Assumption of the Blessed
Virgin Mary
A school teacher told a
story about a child that she once had in her class. She said that one day this little boy was
crying, really weeping bitterly. And she
knew that just the past week that his sister had been buried. And so she walked up to the little boy and
put her arm around him and said, “Johnny, what’s the matter?” And he started sobbing even louder and he
said to her, “I know my sister is really gone.
She’s never coming back.” And the
teacher said, “Yes, but you know she’s alive, she’s just with Jesus in
heaven.” And the boy said, “No. We put her in the ground and covered her
up. There’s no way she could still be
alive.”
And the teacher thought
about that for a moment. And she said,
“Johnny come with me for a minute.” She walked him over to the windowsill of the
classroom where there were these little milk cartons placed along the
ledge. And just a
little bit before the class had planted some seeds in the dirt inside of the
milk cartons. And so the teacher
pulled one of the milk cartons over and said, “Remember when we planted seeds a
few days ago”? Johnny said, “Yea.” And she said, “Remember we put them in the
dirt and we covered them up?” And he
said, “Yea.” And she
put her finger in and plucked out one of the little seedlings and there off the
little stem or the roots with the seed still hanging on it. And she said, “See, even though we placed it
in the ground and covered it up it wasn’t dead.
It was just becoming what God always wanted it to be. That seed wasn’t created to be a seed, it was
created to be a flower and it’s becoming that because we planted it.”
Today we celebrate the feast
of the Assumption of Mary into heaven.
It’s a feast where we celebrate the fact that at Mary’s death she was
taken, body and soul into heaven. The
glorification of her body took place immediately and she was lifted up. No decay was allowed to touch her because she
was the mother of Jesus, she was the perfect disciple,
as we see in the gospels.
A lot of times we tend to
think that this is some kind of a great thing that happened to Mary, and only
Mary, but that’s not true. You see
whenever we celebrate Mary and her feast days we always celebrate them kind of
gazing in a mirror. Because
what happened to Mary will also happen to us. It is true that you and I, when we die and we
are buried and our bodies will undergo corruption there in the graves, but I
think sometimes we as a Christian people don’t really know what our own faith
teaches. And sometimes even though we
repeat it over and over and over every Sunday in the creed it just doesn’t sink
in.
It seems most people that I
talk to have this idea that once we die the soul leaves the body and the soul
goes off to heaven where we’re with God for all eternity. Wrong!
That’s not what we believe. There
is a moment where the soul and the body are separated—yes. And there is time where the soul is with
God—yes. But that’s not the final end.
We believe that what
happened to Mary will happen to us. That
we too, after we die will one day, at the end of the world, be body and soul
back together in the presence of God for all eternity. We call that the resurrection of the
dead. And the belief is that at the end
of the world God will come and He will call forth once again our bodies, and He
will recreate us and reshape us. The
body that is now—we won’t get this one back again—but we will get this body in
a perfected nature.
It’s kind of like, if you
want a symbol of it, the caterpillar that goes into the cocoon that comes out
as a butterfly. Obviously it’s the same
stuff in the body but it’s developed and it’s perfected, and it’s brought to
the fullness of it’s beauty as it comes forth as that
butterfly.
The same is true for
us. We are body and soul, and to be
human we always have to be body and soul.
And God will redeem our bodies and make them perfect. Make them after the image of Jesus in His
resurrected body. And there is nobody
that can read the stories in the gospel and think that Jesus’ body, after He
died was the same as before. It’s
impossible. We have stories of Jesus
coming and appearing out of nowhere in a locked upper room with the
apostles. Doors and windows were all
barred and yet Jesus just materializes and is there with them. Once He has spoken to them He disappears.
There’s a story of Jesus
walking with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They don’t recognize Him. They receive the bread from Him and then all
of a sudden they recognize Him, but again He disappears from their sight. They run back to
How do we explain that? Well we can’t. We just take it on evidence.
The same thing is true of
Mary obviously. We celebrate throughout
the year different feasts of Mary that have to do with Mary appearing to people
here on earth. Our Lady of Guadalupe,
the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima. In all of these things and places Mary
appeared in bodily form from out of nowhere, and then she disappeared back to
where she was before.
Somehow we believe that in
this resurrection of the dead that God granted to Mary and what God granted to
Jesus will also be ours. That our bodies
will be freed from pain, from aging, from all of that stuff that tends to make
them less than perfect right now. That
we may live forever in a perfected, glorified, beautified state with our
God. And we also believe, by the way, that
that’s not going to be a place up in the sky called heaven, but rather we believe
that God is going to recreate this whole world and He is going to spiritualized
and perfect it as well and that is where we will live with our God for all
eternity.
Today’s feast of the
Assumption is a promise for us of a future glory, of a future wholeness, of a
future perfection with our God if only we remain faithful to Jesus. Because after all that is
the primary reason that Mary was assumed. Luke point out over and over and over again
in his gospel that the reason Mary was so great was that she was faithful to
her Son. She is held up as the model
disciple, one who is always trying to hear God’s word, reflecting on that word
and to live that word in her life. Mary
is presented as the one who would rather suffer all kinds of pain, abuse, even her
own death than to ever offend her God.
It is because of that that Mary received the beauty of the
assumption. And it is for the same
reason that you and I will achieve our own resurrection to life if we are
faithful to Jesus and to the way of life that He has placed before us.
And so today, realizing that
we are weak, we are selfish, we are human we come here to this table and we ask
to be fed once again with Jesus Christ Himself, His body and His blood, so that
He can strengthen us so that we will be better able to be faithful to the way
of life that He has called us. God
places before us this beautiful picture of an eternity with Him in a perfected
physical and spiritual state. And all He
asks is that we do our best to be faithful.