The Assumption of Mary
What are we Celebrating?

A Sermon preached by Fr Geoffrey Kirk in St Alban's, Holborn, London, on the Feast of the Assumption 2004

If you were given the task of writing it, how would you begin a gospel? The question is not so hypothetical as it first seems. We have four existing gospels and among them three answers to the question.

Mark begins in medias res with the baptism of Jesus, after a lapidary first sentence which has given a name to the whole genre: 'The beginning of the evangelion, (the Good News, the Gospel) of Jesus Christ,'

Matthew and Luke each begin with a genealogy of Jesus, and then with an account of his birth. The genealogies differ and the accounts differ - according to the point of view of the author and the interests of his projected audience.

John famously begins with a prologue which is somewhere between philosophy and poetry, and which, like the overture to an opera, gives a foretaste of his main themes. Like many a dramatic composer, John introduces, early on, the dissonance, the clash of terms, which is his main theme. 'The Word,' proclaims John, 'was made flesh.'

It is hard, familiar as we are now with the resonant English, the great gospel of Christmas morning, to recapture the original vitality of those words. They are an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

Word 'logos' (from which we get all our '-ologies'; from geology, the study of the earth, earthy, to theology the Queen of Sciences) is an exalted, almost a spiritual term. It belongs to the untouchable sphere of Platonic Ideas, from which the physical world that we inhabit is held to be a sad declination.

Flesh 'sarx' is not so much different as exactly opposite. It means flesh in the primary sense of 'meat'. - the thing that lies inert and cold on the slab and gives way softly to the sharpness of the knife. And it has a secondary sense, particularly in the letters of Paul, one which corresponds to our word 'Carnal' 'The World, the Flesh and the Devil' go together in every language. The Greeks had, as always, a word for it!

John begins in this way because the whole of his gospel will be about the juxtaposition of those two words and ideas. They are there in the Prologue; and it is with them that he finishes.

Chapter 20 - 21 was by another hand and added later - ends, you will remember with the story of Thomas putting out his hand to touch the wounds of the risen Christ - the flesh of God. Blessed are you, says John, you who have not seen, have not touched; and who yet, in every Mass as the host is placed in your hands, truly believe.

It is, I want to suggest, John's formulation of the mystery of the Incarnation - the Word made flesh - which comes to its culmination in today's solemnity.

Let us be clear what the Church is celebrating today.

To do so, paradoxically, we must be clear about what she is not celebrating.

We are not celebrating what the Greeks call the feast of the Dormition - the death or 'falling asleep' of Mary. Legends quickly grew up, in the Early Church, about the manner of Mary's death; how it was announced by an angel bearing a palm branch (for the one whose heart had been pierced with grief at her Son's passion was truly the Queen of Martyrs); how she called the apostles back from their mission throughout the world to be at her bedside (for as mother of the church she is truly the Queen of Apostles); and how she died serenely and without pain (for the pains of death are the fruits of sin, and she alone was immaculately conceived.). But we are not concerned with those now.

Nor are we celebrating the entombment of Mary. The Eastern Churches have at least three sites for the tomb, one of them at the very foot of the Mount of Olives. But as this is not the feast of Mary's death, so it cannot be the feast of her entombment. It is not a tomb, but the lack of it, that the Church calls to mind. There is no earthly resting place of Mary, for in all her fleshliness and carnality she is lives with her Son in glory.

Conversely, we do not celebrate today the Ascension of Mary. Jesus, in the glorious power of his Godhead, rose triumphant from the grave, showed his power over sin and death by carefully folding his grave clothes like a man who had arisen from sleep, and in his own good time, ascended to his Father, a triumphant King showering blessings on those whom he left behind - not least of those blessings the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which makes of his Church the perpetual temple of his presence. In those blessings his mother had ample share.

But Mary, we must be clear, did not ascend into heaven: she was assumed, taken up, co-adjutated. She did not jack herself up, so to say, with her own bootstraps. She was called to glory through the power and sovereign will of her Son.

'The Word,' said John, 'was made flesh.'

But there is more. The Word, John also says, gives power to those who believe in him to become children of God. 'Who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.' Or at least so the familiar words of the Authorised Version go. But they are not the only, nor are they the best translation. Try this one for size: 'Born, not from human stock, or the urge of the flesh or the desires of a husband, but from God.'

John's point, surely, is that those who receive Jesus are given power to become like him; to have the same relationship with the Father that he has. Just as he took their flesh, from his mother and without the intervention of a human father, so those who believe in Him take on his divinity and share a risen body like his.

Here, of course, couched in characteristic Johannine language, is that strangest of all Christian doctrines - the Resurrection of the Body. Strange, that is to say, to modern forward looking Christians, who hardly dare to mention the resurrection in any form. The doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body is these days tucked away in decent obscurity at the end of the Apostles' Creed, and trotted out for cursory inspection only at baptisms and Prayer Book Mattins.

But for John it was central. When Godhead takes on corporeality, in John's gospel, he never lets go. His risen body can eat, drink and be touched. And so, by implication it will be with us

Mary, as we celebrate her in today's feast, is the first fruits of that Resurrection of the Body. It is appropriate - inevitable even - that the woman in whose womb the Word and the Flesh first embraced each other, should be the first to experience that closeness to God in the Bodily Resurrection which her Son has won for us. As Christ was in her, so she is the first of those who are to be Sons of God en Christo, in Christ.

More than that. As Mary is assumed into heaven so we see the eternal value of those holy bonds in the flesh, with parents, children, husbands, wives lovers which make us who we are. As Mary takes her place with her Son. - the Flesh of God seated beside the Flesh of God - it is the end of Platonic mythology and prissy idealism.

Rupert Brooke, in the famous poem, may indeed have looked forward to a time when he would be 'a pulse in the eternal mind no less'. I have never shared his enthusiasm. I rejoice with the Catholic Church, with Job and with Mary that 'in my flesh I will see God, I and no other.' But do not get me wrong.

I remember with something approaching horror a sermon preached on this day three years ago in the Cathedral of All Saints' Chicago. The preacher, a desiccated septuagenarian of Irish extraction, who had clearly been scarred by an eventful life in the sexual revolution of the sixties, had got only half the message. In the Assumption of Mary, he claimed, the Church is asking us to reconnect with our bodies and to be reconciled to our sexuality. The proximity of the young couple in the pew ahead of me led to suppose that they needed no encouragement.

But, of course the preacher was wrong. There is, as Paul repeatedly tells us, flesh and Flesh. Our flesh is purified, made ready for heaven, not by self-awareness and self-fulfilment, but by obedience. For Mary, a young woman with her life in front of her, motherhood might well have seemed an impediment to happiness and self-realisation. Abortion, not virginal conception was the answer of the sixties. But she said Amen - be it to me according to your will. There began our salvation and her Assumption.