Fr. John O’Callaghan: “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
There are several feasts in the Church’s year where the Blessed Virgin Mary features greatly: like the Annunciation of the Lord (on 25th March); the Nativity of Jesus Christ (nine months later) and today’s feast of Mary’s Assumption into heaven. The foundation of them all, their sine qua non, is what Elizabeth said in today’s gospel: “Blessed is she that believed!” That belief allowed the conception of Christ and the whole sequel.
Belief was her role in what was ultimately the saving work of Christ. Mary was there as ‘the servant of the Lord’, to serve his project. Belief allowed her “to concieve first of all in her heart, before even in her womb,” as St Augustine said. And she continued to believe through the pregnancy, the birth, and Jesus’ youth, during the ups and downs of his mission and, against all the odds, at his crucifixion and into the mystery of his resurrection. She, his perfect disciple, has that to teach us, to believe in God carrying out, fulfilling, his mysterious plan throughout the vicissitudes of life so that, in the end, all may be well. Mary’s assumption into glory, which we celebrate today, is God’s work come full circle for her.
Time and eternity coincide in Mary. Her life, like that of all humanity, is evoked dramatically in our first reading, from the Apocalypse: ‘A woman in labour, crying out in the pangs of birth;….a huge red dragon with seven heads and ten horns – it stopped in front of the woman as she was having the child, so that he could eat it as soon as it was born from its mother’. This scene recalls that scene in the Garden of Eden where Eve, mother of us all, is promised that childbirth would occur in pain. The dragon which evokes Satan, sometimes called the devil, the serpent, represents the more or less explicit presence and power of evil, hostility to God and to his people. And the biblical author may well intend us to also perceive in the woman, Mary, the new Eve, who is giving birth to the Messiah, surrounded by hostile powers, and the imperial power of Rome.
It is into such an ambiguous world of good and evil that the Messiah was to be born and in which Mary was to make her pilgrim way, and we ours. As her path must have challenged and shaped her faith, so does our experience challenge and, hopefully, mature our faith. Like her, we must rise to the challenge.
In our own times the sheer monstruous suffering in the world tests our faith. It alone seems to prove there is no God. Alternatively we can take the matter of God’s invisibility. For those able to see with the eyes of faith, that is his very greatness; but for anyone who cannot or will not make the leap, it makes God somehow refutable. Faith is always under threat but it is also our individual struggle with ourselves, and with God. It is not easy, and faith is not a light that scatters all our darkness; it is a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.
We know that personal suffering cannot be eliminated, yet suffering can assume a meaning, can be an act of love, and an entrustment into the hands of God who does not abandon us. To those who suffer God’s response is his accompanying presence; he shares our path. Even death is illumined and can be experienced as the ultimate call to faith. ‘Come!’ is spoken by the Father, to whom we can abandon ourselves in the confidence that he will keep us steadfast even in our final passage.
Mary’s true greatness is to be found in that enduring trust in God, holding faith through the profound and perplexing challenges of her life. Her belief that the scriptures were being fulfilled called for radical renewal, evolution of her faith, deepening of it and she upheld it right to the end, to the cross itself. She is the perfect icon of faith. She exemplifies the long history of faith of the Old Testament, with its account of so many faithful women. So Mary is our inspiration throughout the vicissitudes of life, both individually and collectively as the Christian people of God.
And a life beyond this one, to which she has gone, is part of the Christian way of looking at things. She is one who put her trust in God and now she is gone to God, to glory. May she help us to entrust ourselves fully to Him, believe in his love, especially in times of difficulty, until the dawn of the undying day which is Christ himself!