Today’s
feast expresses the ancient faith that the Blessed Virgin Mary, having come to
the end of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven, defined in
the lifetime of many of us here, in 1950.
In
the first pages of the Scripture, in the Book of Genesis, after the fall of the
first man and woman, there is a haunting verse:
Eve became the mother of all the living.
What transpired in the garden resulted in their fallen human
nature. We receive the nature of our
fathers. And so all who come after them are
afflicted with original sin, save the Blessed Virgin Mary, preserved by a
singular privilege of God by virtue of the merits of Christ. At the other end, in the final pages of the
Book of Revelation, the inspired author says that death will be no more. And there is this woman, the Blessed Virgin
Mary, Our Lady of the Assumption: a
woman clothed with the sun, wearing a crown of twelve stars.
With sin came death. There was no death in the garden before original sin. And even when death entered in, God placed the foot of the woman on the serpent’s head as a pledge that death would be overcome. And so Mary, freed from sin in the Immaculate Conception, was spared the effects of death, and was assumed into heaven. And as the Mother of the Savior, she became the mother, in the order of grace, of all who believe in her divine Son.
If she is our mother, whom she certainly is, then her song is also our song. She proclaims, my soul magnifies the Lord. What does this mean? Johann Sebastian Bach is, arguably, one of the greatest composers of all time. He was eventually commissioned to Leipzig, where he had a fine orchestra, and he was able to write his best music. The orchestra, in its excellence, magnified the abilities of a great composer. He always had the ability, but now he had the instrumentality available to him to express it.
So it is with Mary. The pride of Eve blocked out God, but the humility of Mary gave Him room to size in and through her, and do His greatest work, that of the birth and incarnation of His Son.
This is how we want to be, instruments of our great God, who continues to work His wonders in and through us in the mission of His Son, so that the final words of Mary’s great song are also ours: His mercy is from generation to generation, to them that fear Him.
With sin came death. There was no death in the garden before original sin. And even when death entered in, God placed the foot of the woman on the serpent’s head as a pledge that death would be overcome. And so Mary, freed from sin in the Immaculate Conception, was spared the effects of death, and was assumed into heaven. And as the Mother of the Savior, she became the mother, in the order of grace, of all who believe in her divine Son.
If she is our mother, whom she certainly is, then her song is also our song. She proclaims, my soul magnifies the Lord. What does this mean? Johann Sebastian Bach is, arguably, one of the greatest composers of all time. He was eventually commissioned to Leipzig, where he had a fine orchestra, and he was able to write his best music. The orchestra, in its excellence, magnified the abilities of a great composer. He always had the ability, but now he had the instrumentality available to him to express it.
So it is with Mary. The pride of Eve blocked out God, but the humility of Mary gave Him room to size in and through her, and do His greatest work, that of the birth and incarnation of His Son.
This is how we want to be, instruments of our great God, who continues to work His wonders in and through us in the mission of His Son, so that the final words of Mary’s great song are also ours: His mercy is from generation to generation, to them that fear Him.
