Today’s readings: Apocalypse 11,19; 12, 1-6.10; 1 Corinthians 15, 20-26; Luke 1, 39-56.
When the Church began to celebrate the falling asleep of the Mother of God, the Fathers of the Church made a direct connection between the womb that housed God and the tomb that could not hold his Mother. In his book Redeemer in the Womb, John Saward writes that “the reason for the bodily assumption of Our Lady is her divine motherhood”.
Mary is a paradox of discipleship. As an obedient and humble servant, her role has been very often interpreted as a means of fixing the role of women for centuries. At the same time, liberation theologians point out that the Magnificat furnishes a good starting point for a new and revolutionary interpretation of the Bible. These words attributed to Mary and found only in Luke have become the master text of a theology branded as revolutionary.
In the gospel of Luke, Mary heralds the birth of her Son with words that sing of a great social revolution: the scattering of the proud, the bringing down of thrones and dominions, the exaltation of the lowly, and the filling of the hungry.
Graham Ward, professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics, in his book The Politics of Discipleship, writes that “discipleship is political because it is implicated in a messianic reversal of established values and is a challenge to received authorities and principalities”.
The world cannot be a closed system of corruption. Christianity, which for so long and for so many served as rubber stamp for the status quo, seems to disclose itself as a call to arms in the stories of Mary, the Apostles, and in a long litany of martyrs coextensive with human history, including people such as Archbishop Oscar Romero. It is a challenge to authority, even within the Church itself.
This is the significance of what we are celebrating today. The sign that appeared in heaven in the words of the Apocalypse was a sign given at a particular moment of history to show that redemption is real. This calls for true discernment for all of us to grasp the signs in our culture today and that need to be read out loud.
No one is beyond salvation.The sign of the woman is the sign of hope. In fact, Mary is the signpost of hope. The evil that John depicts as “a huge red dragon”, and the “enemies” Paul refers to, which the king must “put under his feet”, evoke the imagery of spiritual warfare which is commonplace in the Scriptures. It’s a battle of two opposing kingdoms brought to an end through Christ’s victory over death.
Today this may sound too mythological. Yet what it stands for continues to be very real and capable of determining our human experience and marking our existence.
Today’s celebration is the evoking of this same battle that continues to mark the course of time. Evil has long fascinated psychologists, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and playwrights. But it remains an incredibly difficult concept to talk about sensibly. Can we imagine the mind of a serial killer or dissect the soul of people who do awful things?
Adam Morton, in his book On Evil, writes that one of the legacies of the 20th century is the work of witnesses such as Hannah Arendt, Primo levi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Desmond Tutu. How should we think about the atrocities committed during World War II, or in the Srebrenica and Rwanda genocides in the 1990s? There is something always puzzling about this, particularly when we seem so reluctant to open our eyes.
Nietzsche remarked that morality begins with primitive disgust and admiration. But if all sorts of abominations elicit horror and disgust, that is not enough. The human story would be complete if it includes Christ’s victory over death and evil. Otherwise it would only be a vicious circle that so easily and negatively engulfs our existence.
Mary is a signpost of this rounded story. Blessed are those who believe that this can happen.