The Assumption of Our Lady Year C 2022

 

The Assumption of Our Lady (2022)

(Revelation 11:19; 12:1-6, 10; 1 Corinthians 15:20-27; Luke 1: 39-56)

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The official, dogmatic, teaching of Mother Church about Our Lady’s Assumption, which we joyfully celebrate today, was proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1950 and is quoted in our modern Catholic Catechism as follows:

The Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, so that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords and conqueror of sin and death,

That text combines both the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady and her Coronation as Queen of Heaven together in one long sentence, which the Catechism then goes on to distinguish and explain:

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a singular participation in her Son’s Resurrection and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians.

 Which all means that Mary’s Assumption was not achieved of her own power nor was it due to her own merits: it was a gift, a unique share in the glorious power of Jesus’ Resurrection, given her because, by her very own ‘Fiat’, she had willed and enabled -- by virtue of the overpowering Spirit of God -- the Son of God Himself to take on human flesh as Jesus of Nazareth, and become her very own son and Saviour.  Having thus become human in body and soul as Jesus, while remaining divine in His Person as Son and Word of God, the Messiah sent among men by God the Father could and would win victory over sin and death for the whole of mankind.

Having duly and dutifully won that victory over sin and death in the flesh and blood He received from Immaculate Mary, the Assumption became the most fitting expression of Mary’s unique participation and sharing in her Son’s triumph won for all mankind. And today I want to propose to you that, while Mary’s Assumption is indeed a unique participation in her Son’s triumph, it is not intentionally exclusive; on the contrary, it is of sublime significance for all women.

Mary’s exaltation and coronation as Queen of Heaven is based on her totally unique motherhood of, love for, and co-operation with, her Son in His sacrificial life and death on earth; she alone was, is, and ever remains, exclusively, Queen and Mother.  But her Assumption, I believe, is not totally based on her uniquely-gifted personal sinlessness, but also on her femininity, in the sense that it contains a message and offers a transcendent inspiration and aspiration for the whole of Christian womanhood.

Once Jesus, God made man, had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven for our salvation, there could be no rational doubt for believers that the whole of mankind … men and women, both formed in the image and likeness of God as human beings… would, granted God’s goodness and mercy, be both allowed to participate in that glory.  However, given humanity’s enduring frailty and occasional sinfulness and indeed perverseness, there can be little doubt that it could soon have been irrationally bandied about and secretly whispered that Jesus had gone to heaven because He was God; and that men also might indeed possibly go there too, having ‘already gone there’, so to speak, in and with Jesus as man.   But what about women, not having that direct sexual relationship?

I like, therefore, to think that today’s great feast has also the purpose and function of recalling and heralding the native dignity and glory of God’s original plan for humanity as a whole, and that the Assumption proclaims Mary’s peerless expression of the wondrous beauty of feminine humanity as intended in God’s original creation, now redeemed by Christ, and ultimately glorified by the most Holy Spirit.

Think of Mary hearing the angel Gabriel’s greeting, so religiously and calmly satisfying herself about his personal integrity and authority, then going on to question him humbly yet pertinently about the meaning of his message for herself; before most courageously committing herself --  unconditionally and unhesitatingly -- to God’s purpose, for His glory alone.  And this she did despite being aware the possibility (remote but real) of her being put to death by the religious authorities of her time, and knowing most certainly that she would have to endure the public contempt of all who did not know her intimately, most especially those women who knew her only well enough to be able to gossip  about her  at the well and the ‘shops’ in Nazareth!

Peerlessly full, brave, and spiritually beautiful, womanhood; framed and presented in a physical presence of appropriate perfection, that is what Mary’s Assumption manifests.

There are many today, however, who think that Mary’s expression of womanhood treasured for so long by the Church is not enough; modern women want power more than spiritual beauty and courage:  total power over their eggs (!) and total freedom in the exercise of their physical and sexual being; in the Church they  want the diaconate now, and who knows, perhaps the priesthood next.  And later, who hasn’t heard of the ludicrous Pope Joan?  Foolish?  Yes, indeed, for now; but who could possibly have imagined today’s horrors afflicting Mother Church throughout the West, abortion, abuse, sexual disorientation and pride, some 40 or 50 years ago?

This mentality -- ruled by secular logic, not inspired by Catholic faith -- has no appreciation whatsoever of the beauty and power of complementarity.  For them, if one person or group has something another does not have, that is prejudice, and, as such, it is ethically wrong according to the standards of those who worship words discoursing about equality, freedom, and fairness, but will not subject themselves to serve God’s revealed will concerning what is right and wrong, good and bad, for the humanity He made.

And yet, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, our faith in God -- His very own Personal Being, and His creation in all its wonderful diversity -- proclaims the sublime and indeed ultimate beauty and power of complementarity, which not only requires and demands, but actually, and quite uniquely, evokes those two most sublime virtues of Love and Humility which are the hallmarks of all Catholic faith and life.

Those who look at Mary’s most easily recognizable beauty and glory, but find that insufficient -- for their taste -- without the addition of power and authority, will inevitably come to look upon Christ Himself and see less and less recognizable beauty there, only questionable Power ever more!  For the present, they simply skip over His more forceful word, such as 'Let the dead bury their dead, but you, follow Me' and concentrate, often over-emotionally, on His teaching on mutual love and forgiveness.  Mary’s whole being has always and in every way, physically, spiritually, and theologically, served to protect the fullness of the glory of her Son and Lord, and to help our right appreciation of it and our true love for His Person.

Mary as shown forth in her Assumption is and always has been the ideal of Christian womanhood: beautiful and glorious, humble, and heaven bound with and for her Son and as our Mother:  a beauty not excogitated and worked out by human pride, but one created by God for His own glory and our great blessing; a beauty most perfectly redeemed by Christ and then totally polished like an incomparable gem by the Most Holy Spirit of both Father and  Son in the complementarity of Their eternal Unity of Being.  

 

 

 

19th Sunday Year C 2022

 

19th. Sunday of the Year (C)        

 (Wisdom 18:6-9; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-12; Luke 12:32-48)

 

The deliverance of the righteous and the destruction of their enemies were expected by Your people.  For by the same means with which You punished our enemies You called us to Yourself and glorified us.  (Wisdom 18:7-9)

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, those words, from the OT book of Wisdom, which refer originally to God’s destruction of the pursuing Egyptian army in the Red Sea in order to bring His People out of slavery, find a two-fold relevance and fulfilment in the New Testament: first of all, when Jesus broke Satan’s enslaving power over us through the allurement of sin and the threat of death, by His suffering, death, and resurrection:

            You punished our enemies

and then by His ascension, went -- in the glory of the Spirit -- to His Father in heaven, where He now sits as Man in human flesh at the right hand of the Father:

            and (thereby) glorified us.

Those two distinct events of Jesus’ life, His suffering for us beginning with His agony in the  garden, and  His ascension into heaven in His glorified humanity -- are made active and effective in our lives -- become SALVATION for us -- through faith in Jesus.

This gift of new life with its promise of eternal glory is, so to speak, the overarching cover, the shielding and sheltering protection, of our lives as children of  God, enabling each of us to grow to individual, personal, maturity in Jesus by the Gift of Jesus’ Holy Spirit, our Helper in and throughout our lives.

A few words from the second reading explain why faith is so supremely important for our life in Christ:

      Faith is the substance of things hoped for.

Our Christian hope is for those heavenly realities and that heavenly fulfilment put before us by Jesus, in promises that resonate to the furthest depths of our being as  humans uniquely made in the image and likeness of God.  They cannot be apprehended by us here and now because they transcend us; but, in the ultimate realization of God’s providential plan, they will be our sublime fulfilment in the glory of Jesus.   Such blessings hoped for from God, according to the promise of the Scriptures, can, however, begin to be appropriated by us, here and now, through faith in Jesus, by the working of His most Holy Spirit in us, through the ministry of Mother Church.  We can, indeed, begin here and now, to truly appropriate and gradually appreciate such heavenly realities as we begin to really apprehend something of the fulfilment they offer through faith, which, as St.  Paul says:  is the substance of things hoped for.

We must turn to the Gospel, however, to learn an aspect of supreme importance within this broad outline of our salvation.  Jesus there tells His disciples:

Provide yourselves money bags which do not grow old, a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys.

Now the reason why He tells them to provide a treasure for themselves in heaven is because, as He went on to explain:

      Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Because He is seeking to draw us, in Himself, to heaven where there is no gold or silver, no tight purses or secure safes, He draws attention to our heart -- the seat of human affection and attachment – for which personal love alone is the supreme and exclusive treasure. 

Likewise, when He advises His disciples to:

            Sell what you have and give alms,

He is not really interested in seeing us reduced to poverty: but He does want us to open our hearts, unreservedly and fully, to receive His Father’s gift of the Kingdom:

            It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom;

He wants us to unreservedly love the promise and the prospect of heaven where, He assures us, our dearest and most precious treasure -- our heart’s treasure -- awaits us.

And so we have this outline of our salvation:

The deliverance of the righteous and the destruction of their enemies were expected by Your people.  For by the same means with which You punished our enemies You called us to Yourself and glorified us. 

By the glorious Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, and through our faith in Him, God has called us to Himself.  And we have learnt, broadly speaking, how that glorious calling is to be realised: through the prospect and promises of hope, faith leads us to open our minds, hearts, and lives to the ultimate inspiration of divine charity.  That is the way we are to finally attain ‘our treasure’, our hope, or, as Jesus put it earlier, ‘the Kingdom of God’:

Seek the kingdom of God, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Jesus spoke repeatedly of the Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of heaven; St. Paul, however, tells us that the Kingdom of God is also the Kingdom of the Son:

He (the Father) has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love. (Colossians 1:13-14)

Why does Paul speak of the Kingdom of the Son whereas Jesus always spoke of the Kingdom of God?

First of all Paul speaks in this way because, ultimately, Jesus Himself is the Kingdom of God present in our world and in our lives.

And secondly, because the Kingdom of the Son, of which St. Paul speaks, will ultimately to be handed over to the Father, and in that way become the Kingdom of God, the Father.  Listen to Paul’s explanation:

In Christ all shall be made alive, but each one in his own order: Christ the first fruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming.  Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power.  For He (Christ) must reign till He (God the Father) has put all enemies under His feet.  The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. … Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him (God the Father) who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:22-28)

Jesus is the load-stone drawing the affection of our hearts to God by the fact that He is God-in-our human-flesh.  Like loves like: and companionship in human flesh – gifted by Mary our Mother -- enables us to respond most deeply to Him Who is God, yet become One-like-us.  Our response to His promises, His example, and His call; our faith in Him and our human love for Him; will gently open our hearts to the working of His Spirit Who will then form us gradually in His divine likeness until we come to love God for His divine beauty and goodness.

From this we can see that our personal treasure will ultimately be the glorious Jesus when He returns to make the final proclamation and manifestation of His eternal glory, and to hand all that is His over to the Father, so that He, the Father, might be ‘All in all’.

Now we can, as it were, ‘pull all the strings together’ in order to get a complete picture, a full understanding.

‘Treasure in heaven’ is essential, as Jesus Himself said, if our hearts are to be fully, totally attached to heaven.  Faith guides us towards the attainment of our heavenly hope, but faith is commitment to the teaching of Jesus directly, and only mediately commitment to the Person of Jesus.  Love, on the other hand, being, most accurately, the gift of divine charity, commits our whole being immediately, directly, to the very Person of Jesus.  This personal commitment to Jesus – mediated, I say, by faith in His teaching, is directly attained through our sharing in the gift of divine charity, for Jesus is Himself the Kingdom for us.  And this love -- being, as I said, a heavenly gift, indeed the Gift of the Spirit -- transcends our present time and this visible world, and takes us into the eternity of God Himself where Jesus will ultimately, as we have heard, hand over His  Kingdom to the Father and lead us -- as members of His Body in and with Him -- to love, yes, to love divinely, the Father Himself, as Jesus would have us love Him; for the Father must become, as you heard, ‘All in all’.  

Faith is the ‘substance of things hoped for’; by our faith, we can, by a life of discipleship on earth, already gain some experience of what will be our heavenly fellowship with Jesus, before the Father, in the Spirit.  That experience, that fellowship, that love of charity, can and should deepen within us throughout our life on earth, but that can only come about in Mother Church, through our faith in her proclamation of the Gospel, and by the grace of her sacraments, which bestow on us the Spirit of Love and Truth Who unites and binds together Father and Son. 

And then, for all those faithful sons and daughters of Mother Church who thus grow in the knowledge and love of Jesus our Saviour, the words of the Psalmist are most beautifully appropriate and consoling:

Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name.  I will deliver him and honour him and show him My salvation. (Psalm 91:14-16)

                                                                 (2022)

 

18th Sunday Year C 2022

 

18^th. Sunday of the Year (C)

(Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23.  Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11.  Luke 12:13-21)

 

 

Watching a news programme on the television a few years ago, I saw a picture of a Mosque in Birmingham filled with men worshipping.  Then, and even more now, you could go, to Christian churches, even to Catholic churches, and find them half empty.  Why is this?  Because so many Christians, too many Catholics, are not living their faith today: they are either living for the world, for its pleasures and advantages, or in fear of the world in its denial of God and criticism of the Faith.  The Muslims I then saw filling the mosque, on the other hand, were there, at that time, because they felt themselves to be a minority somewhat under threat, and so they were rallying together round the one thing that, in a somewhat alien country and historically Christian society, most distinguishes them from others and most unites them among themselves, that is their Muslim faith.  It was like that in Ireland over a hundred years ago when Irish men and women, under persecution and oppression, held firm by rallying together round their faith, their Catholic Faith,  which distinguished and sustained them in the face of their Protestant persecutors and British opponents.  The same phenomenon occurred in Poland when Catholic Poles were under atheistic Communist rule.  When oppression more or less ceased in both Ireland and Poland, then the practice of the Catholic faith also began to fall in fervour as men and women, more at ease with an  apparently friendly world, began to enjoy living in the world more than they rejoiced in the practice their faith: with the world an enemy, the faith was a lifeline; with the world apparently friendly, should the precepts of Catholic faith be allowed to disturb that mutual acceptance and the approval of surrounding society?

Today especially, even where Catholics still value their faith, too many are tempted to live at ease with the world in which the ruling society most assiduously claims itself to be doing GOOD, by doing whatever is acceptable to modern men and women, by promoting whatever assimilates the great majority of them into one … a process that used to be  known as finding the lowest common denominator, but which is now regarded as political correctness, enforceable by criminal law.

Those modern Catholic and Christian believers and practitioners of whom I speak do not openly or totally give in to such temptation, but are prepared to make serious concessions to it, and so, they begin to talk about the need to make our faith acceptable to and popular with, modern society where people claim to have a much greater knowledge of science and a much wider understanding of  non-Western cultures than their forebears possessed, and a much greater awareness of and hatred for, racism, colonialism, prejudice, etc. etc., indeed for whatever divides or distinguishes.   In this way some come to justify singular interpretations of the Faith, indeed they seem to feel it their vocational calling to do all they can: watering down difficult teaching and brushing aside unwanted rules, all in order to make their presentation of the Faith as attractive and as easy to understand as possible, for others whom they hope to thereby persuade to accept the Catholic way of life.  People will come to the Faith it is thought and said, if, but only if, they find us nice people not overburdened with troublesome principles; only if they find our message accommodating and comforting, and if the portals of our church are open wide,  welcoming and obstacle free, to all and sundry.

This is a most fundamental and insidious perversion of the Faith.  Jesus tells us quite categorically that it is the Father alone Who draws disciples to Him:

No one can come to Me unless the Father Who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. (John 6:44)

All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. (John 6:37)

The Father draws and gives to Jesus disciples who have come to know Him through the witness of Mother Church and her children, disciples who themselves make Jesus known by proclaiming His Truth and presenting His teaching to all who are sincerely seeking God and His salvation.  But, People of God, how could anyone come to love the authentic Jesus if His followers are intent, first and foremost, on presenting themselves as nice Jesus-people?  How can followers whose aim is to offer a popularly acceptable message, rightly proclaim the teaching of Jesus?  Their want to present their own version of the Gospel, a version adapted to modern ideas and current preferences, not the Good News of Jesus as given us in the Scriptures and proclaimed in the traditional teaching of the Church.    They do appear to be ashamed of Jesus and of His words in the face of the world!

           

Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.   For I have come to set a man ‘against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her other-in-law;

And that possible rejection of both Himself and of His teaching Jesus foresaw and most deliberately condemned it, by going on to say:

 

He who does not take up his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.  He who has found his life will lose it , and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.    (Matthew 10:34–39)

This state of affairs comes about because people all too easily think only in terms of this world, as if everything is to be decided here on earth according to human judgements and expectations; and therefore our readings today are providential, warning us, most explicitly, about this folly, by proclaiming that this world is not the be all and end all of life for a Christian or a Catholic:

Here is one who has laboured with wisdom, knowledge, and skill; and yet to another who has not laboured over it, he must leave property. This also is vanity and a great misfortune.

In fact, this world and our experience of it, is but mankind’s essential preparation for what is to come, a life of either eternal fulfilment or eternal loss:

Then Jesus told them a parable. “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.   He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’   And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”  But God said to him, 'You fool! This night your life will be demanded of you; and then the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?'

The currently widespread persuasion that the Good News of Jesus has to be subjected to our adaptation is an unacknowledged capitulation to modern society’s craven worship of popularity.  Therein is the root error: for popularity has neither role nor authority in matters of faith; indeed, at the best it is irrelevant, while potentially it is most harmful.

There are some disciples in the Church today who follow Pilate rather than Jesus:

Pilate therefore said to Him, "Are You a king then?" Jesus answered, "You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice."  Pilate said to Him, "What is truth?" (John 18:37-38)

What is truth? Pilate doubted there was such a thing as truth.  Today, pseudo-disciples give the same thought a different twist: the only true proclamation of the Gospel is one that makes Jesus and His teaching popular, we must therefore study modern  attitudes and practices carefully and sympathetically, so as to be able to make suitable adaptations to the Gospel message that will enable it to win more widespread acceptance.

Now that can never be the authentic Christian, Catholic attitude; we only need to look at and listen to Our Blessed Lord once more to realize that:

Remember the word that I said to you, 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also.  But all these things they will do to you for My name's sake, because they do not know Him Who sent Me. (John 15:20-22)

Today we need to renew our trust in God and in Jesus our Lord and Saviour; we have to stir up more courage on the basis of our faith.  The original apostles, the original Christians who were called Catholics from the very beginning, did not cower before the world's criterion of popularity as so many do today; for example, the gentle, loving, Apostle John  (1 John 4:6) says quite bluntly:

We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

And they had this confidence and strength because they firmly believed what the infallible Faith taught them, as we heard in the second reading:

If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Think on what is above, not of what is on earth.  For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with Him in glory.

In other words, they looked forward to a heavenly, not an earthly, fulfilment, and, in order to attain that blessedness they proclaimed a Gospel of Truth, knowing that only divine truth can form a human being in the divine likeness:

The new self is being renewed for knowledge in the image of its Creator.

That very truth required them to preach what would be unpopular at times.  Indeed, the essence of the Gospel message is that we can only find salvation through the Cross of Jesus, Who died for our sins before rising again for our salvation:

(He) bore our sins in His own body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed. (1 Peter 2:24).

Therefore, even in the early Church, there were those who wanted to preach a Gospel without the Cross, a popular Gospel instead of the Gospel of righteousness.  Of them, the Apostle Paul said with incisive clarity (1 Corinthians 1:18-19):

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent." 

And again in his letter to the Galatians (5:11):

Brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why do I still suffer persecution? Then the offence of the cross has ceased.

People of God, in times of trial we must cling to Jesus all the more closely in Spirit and in Truth, for:

This is a faithful saying: if we died with Him, we shall also live with Him; if we endure, we shall also reign with Him.  If we deny Him, He also will deny us; if we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.  (2 Timothy  2:11-13)

                                                            (2022)