Sermon by canon douglas wiliams, assumption of the bvm, aug 17 2014

A Sermon by the Rev. Canon Douglas E. Williams on the Feast of the Assumption (tr.), August 17, 2014 From this morning’s Gospel: “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.”1 These are the words that St. Luke ascribes to Mary, soon to give birth to Jesus, as she arrives to visit her aged cousin Elizabeth, who is soon to give birth to John the Baptist. “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.”

Poor Mary. Many in the Catholic traditions hold her to be almost more significant than Jesus himself: she is, after all, the mother of God; he is only God. Many in the Protestant traditions hold her to be not much more than a poor country girl who had a one-night-stand with God the Father. Neither approach is better than a caricature or a bad joke. The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s urged “theologians and preachers of the word of God to be careful to refrain as much from all false exaggeration as from too summary an attitude in considering the special dignity of the Mother of God.”2 I shall attempt to maintain that balance this morning.

First, let us be honest and admit that in the Catholic traditions Mary has been treated at times almost as a goddess, or as the fourth person of the Holy Quaternity. No matter how careful the theologians are, this seems to be an almost inescapable tendency at the popular level. The Protestant reaction may have been a necessary corrective to this tendency, because Mary is not a goddess. However, the almost complete neglect of Mary characteristic of Protestantism has a corresponding, and equally pernicious, consequence—that Jesus is also not God. And at that point, the Christian faith goes out the window.

The Christian faith hinges on the conviction that in Jesus we have met, and we meet, God. The reconciliation of human beings to God had to be done from the human side, but it was beyond the power of human beings. God had the power to do it but was in the wrong position.

Only when God became one of us, as the man Jesus, was there a human being capable—through his death and resurrection—of achieving that reconciliation, because he is also God. That is why we honor Mary: because she is the mother of God. That is the phrase—“the mother of God”— that the early Church struggled over and insisted on. For if Mary is the mother of Jesus, then you cannot deny that Mary is the mother of God unless you deny that Jesus is God. When God became one of us, a human being, as the man Jesus, this was not God putting on human nature like an old overcoat, only to take it off when he ascended once again to the Father. Jesus didn’t play at being human; in Jesus, God became a human being. And so God remains. Which means that Mary remains the mother of God. The Catholic traditions have sometimes taken that idea and run away with it. The Protestant reaction has been to see the incarnation something like this: Here was this poor Jewish girl, minding her own business, when, out of the blue, God suddenly made her pregnant with Jesus, and she is then standing around wondering what happened. But surely the incarnation would not have happened in someone with whom God did not have a deep and abiding relationship. The incarnation was no divine one-night-stand. It was the result of a deep and abiding relationship between God and Mary. As Luke tells the story, God, through the angel

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Luke 1:48b-49.

Vatican II, Lumen Gentium 67.

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Gabriel, made the offer, and Mary responded, “Let it be with me according to your word.” 3 By her own agreement, Mary chose to become the means of life for all of us, and our first representative in the new life.

The incarnation has always been a confusing thing for many people, and I am not going to try to unravel all the puzzles this morning. I am simply going to hold on tight to the fact that Jesus, while fully a human being, is also fully God. And Mary is his mother. And Jesus did not lay aside his humanity at the ascension; he remains human. So Mary is still his mother.

There are immense mysteries here. I suspect that none of us can begin to imagine what it is to be the mother of God. But for us, it is enough to know that she is. How can we, then, honor him without honoring his mother? If she is, indeed, his mother, then there is a special relationship between her and him, unlike any other relationship with God. If we believe that the intercession of the saints is valuable, how can we not value the intercession of our Lady, the mother of God? “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

Because of that special relationship, the devotional life of the Church has always seen Mary’s life as anticipating that of all Christians. Her relationship with God was already deep enough for her to be given the invitation to mother the one who should save his people. Most probably her life is what the mystics would call one long state of infused contemplation. In her, Christian reality begins immediately, for God is now flesh of her flesh. In her we see what we shall become.

In speaking of the fullness of Christian reality, of the resurrected life, of the glory that shall be revealed, we always speak in images, weak and fumbling. We are talking about a reality that we only vaguely comprehend. As St. Paul said, “Now we see through a glass darkly.” 4 And so, in speaking of life beyond death, we have stumbled around, talking about the separation of the soul from the body, and their eventual reunion after the final judgment. Even St. Paul danced around the issue, talking of a “natural body” that we have now, and a “spiritual body” that we shall have then.5 If you can make sense of the idea of a “spiritual body”, you are a better philosopher than I. What all these fumbling attempts do agree on is that you and I have a lot to go through before we are finally brought to the glory of our ultimate goal, face-to-face with God. In attempting to appreciate fully the place of Mary, the mother of God, we also work with fumbling images. We see her also “through a glass darkly.” As the one who received the fullness of life into herself, the Church has come to see her as fully redeemed from the moment of her conception, in anticipation of her willing cooperation. And, while most of us have a long process yet to go through, whatever images we may use for it, we have come to recognize that in Mary, the whole process has already been worked out, that in her—and perhaps in a few others—the resurrected life, soul and body, is complete. It is this that today’s feast—the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary—celebrates. In a long tradition, stemming from the earliest centuries of the Christian era, the Church has come to recognize, in the words of Pope Pius XII, “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.”6 This is not about biology; it is about the fullness of glory for the whole person, the glory that awaits all of us eventually in Christ.

On the feast of the Assumption, the Church points to the resurrected life not simply as a faint hope for the future, but as an accomplished fact. Mary, as the mother of God, has an intimacy with God to which one day we shall all approximate. And Mary, assumed body and 3

Luke 1:38.

1 Corinthians 13:12.

5 1 Corinthians 15:44 6 Munificentissimus Deus, 44.

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soul into heavenly glory, is a present reality, witnessing to the reality which we shall all eventually experience Mary. The mother of God. The one who received the fullness of life in responding, “Let it be with me according to your word.” The one who shows us the redeemed life in its fullness.

The one “assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” The one who intercedes for us as mother of us all. “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.”

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