Homily for the Assumption

15 August, 2010

 “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown” (Rev 12:1).
 I can never, today, get beyond this woman, this cosmic queen of the Apocalypse.
 She appears with the Introit, and then she appears again at the 1st reading. In the stained glass of our Rose Window, she presides every day over our passage through the transepts.
 Symbols speak more powerfully than words. Who is she? Who is this woman? For whom does she stand? She has been compared to the Egyptian goddess Isis, and to the Greek Leto, the mother of Apollo. But this is the Bible we’re hearing, and the imagery crystallised in her has its own biblical line. She’s a personification of Israel, it seems; she’s Mary, mother of the Messiah; most of all, she’s the Church. Perhaps best: she’s the Church in the form of Mary. And suddenly halfway through the Book of Revelation, heaven opening, she appears: queen of the universe, the antagonist of the great red dragon, the antithesis of the whore of Babylon (her caricature).
 “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman adorned with the sun.” This sign appears today, the solemnity of the Assumption. It appears as we are praising God the Father for taking up the mother of his Son in the Holy Spirit, taking her up body and soul into the glory of heaven, a sign of certain hope and consolation for us, the pilgrim people of God.

 What is it that’s being offered us here? It’s like a conjunction of planets: a biblical image and a Catholic dogma, a symbol and a person. What’s the grace of today?
 Something very timely, I think.
 It’s the passage - in our minds and hearts - from feeling the Church as “problem” to knowing her as joy.
 I can’t elaborate now on why and in what ways and for whom the Church is felt as problem: in our society and culture, to friends as well as enemies, to ourselves and to other Christians and to those who are not. But I don’t think this is my imagination. And the Pope’s forthcoming visit is serving to bring a lot of it to a head.
 How, though, might today - might the Woman of the Apocalypse and Mary assumed into heaven - get us out of the jam? How can we be taken from the Church as “problem” to the Church as joy, lifted - let’s say - from the Church as “them” to the Church as “she”?
 There is a Catholic instinct as regards the Church. It may be buried or bruised or just bemused. But it’s there. It’s infused with the gift of faith. And when, as today, the great sign appears in heaven, whenever Mary visits the house of our hearts, this instinct - this sensus fidei, sensus fidelium - leaps up like John in Elizabeth’s womb.
 And what it senses is simply this: that, for all the failings of Christians, for all those corporate Christian crimes for which John Paul II made public confession in the year 2000, for all that the Church is a Church of sinners, she is also always a holy place, always faithful to Christ. She receives God’s word and keeps it with virginal fidelity. She brings Christ to birth in human history.  She forms individuals and families and communities in him, gathers them into his body. She stands with humanity when humanity is being crucified. She keeps praying for the Holy Spirit. She is where the human person can rise above sin and death, can journey to eternal life and the resurrection of the body. All of this she does imperfectly, of course, at one level, but, at another, deeper level, really, truly, unfailingly. The Church is a miracle in the midst of human history. And she all is this, first and foremost, in the person of Mary of Nazareth. To develop a thought of Cardinal Newman’s: no one would hail the Church as holy, immaculate, faithful, all-glorious within, or as mother of Christ and of men, if the Church were not all of this, first of all, in someone. And in someone real, a historical person with a face and a heart and merciful eyes, and hands that help: a woman, a virgin, a mother, the mother of Jesus.
 Mary is a real presence in human history: think simply of the great shrines throughout the world. They are great signs too. And as she becomes a real presence for each of us, in the world of our faith and our prayer, when we start to sense her touch at particular moments in our life, then - without a doubt - this passage from feeling the Church as a problem to knowing her as a joy will happen. “A great sign appeared in heaven”: at once Mary and the Church. Each inheres in the other. And it’s Mary who keeps the Church, beyond all that affronts us, a place of joy. It’s Mary who revives and keeps alive our Catholic instinct for the Church. Thanks to Mary the joy of being a member of Christ’s body will carry us. And no one, not even any fellow sinner in the Church, can take that joy away.
 May Mary visit us then! May she bring us joy at the hidden Christ present in the Church!

 Let’s widen this to end. Let’s sing the Magnificat of today. Today, as Abbot Alfred liked to say, is our Lady in harvest-time. Today, as Fr Giles likes to put it, is Mary’s Easter. Today, as the lyrical theologian John Saward has it, is Easter in August. Today a great sign appears in heaven. Do we see it? A woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, twelve stars for a crown. Do we see her?
 Today, with the Assumption of the Mother of God, body and soul into heavenly glory, Christmas, Easter, Pentecost yield their first harvest, the anticipation of the End.
 Thanks to today the beauty of the Christian hope rises before us.
 Thanks to today, we know that God’s glory is not just something above us and beyond us, not even just for us, on our side, as it were. It’s something to be in us, to be ours.
 Thanks to today we know that the beauty, goodness and truth born in Bethlehem wasn’t just his, wasn’t simply a flash of lightning in the dark, didn’t end in noble futility on the Cross. No, it flows on and out. It has a complement, a recipient, a fulfilment: Mary first, the Church to follow. And therefore each and all of us. Beside the Man stands a Woman. Beside the new Adam a new Eve. Beside the Bridegroom a Bride. Beside God’s Word an human answer.
 Thanks to today we know what the Holy Spirit can do: eternalise human relationships  (like those of mother and son), glorify bodies as well as souls, matter no less than spirit.
 Thanks to today we know that the world of nature is not a closed impermeable system, locking us in to an endless cycle of birth and death, generation and corruption. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9). No! Sun, moon, and stars - which for the ancients symbolised this very thing - are now in orbit round another point: the sign in the heavens, the woman all creation waits for.
 The poor of Latin America, the simple faithful of Europe, the sick at Lourdes, the new Christians of Africa, Sri Lankan Catholics recovering from war - they all know these things. They see the sign, and nothing stops their prayer. The soul of Mary is in each of them to glorify the Lord, her spirit to rejoice in God their Saviour. Mary is a fighter too. And in the soul and spirit of each and all of us, there is one and the same real battle: between hopelessness and hope. We all live that. Today a great sign appears in the heavens. Today we know where the victory lies.
 Thanks be to God!

 Abbot Hugh Gilbert