The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary – (15 August 2021)
By Rev. Rudolf Ofori
If you walk into any Catholic church anywhere, usually you don’t have to hunt to find some shrine or altar erected in honor of Mary, the mother of God. To many non-Catholic people, Catholics used to be identified popularly as the ones who ate fish on Fridays and had missals bulging with litanies and devotions to Our Lady. Catholics were different, somehow. You could watch them taking to the streets in May in glittering processions, carrying statues, banners, candles, rosaries, hymn sheets, all dressed in their Sunday best and singing hymns to the Queen of heaven, the ocean star. Apart from the decked-out altar boys, they all looked as if they were having a good time.
Until the middle of the sixth century there were no feasts in the Church to celebrate and honor Mary. She was commemorated alongside the saints and martyrs. The Eastern Church, however, had plenty of Marian feasts-celebrating her Conception, her Birth, her Presentation in the Temple, and the Annunciation, but their most important Marian feast was the Assumption. This feast and all the other Marian celebrations were adopted by the Roman Church and included in the Western Catholic Church.
The belief in the Assumption had its origin in the popular faith of the people. Christians could not believe that Mary’s body underwent decay after being separated from her soul at death; they could not imagine that her body would disintegrate after the unique role she played in sacred history. The faithful came to believe that Mary was bodily assumed into heaven, thus guaranteeing that she was present with God, body and soul.
Although it was only proclaimed as dogma in 1950, the Assumption had been taught in the Church for centuries as a truth that emerged from the faith of the people. It also points to what we believe God will do for us. We believe that our whole person, body and soul, will be raised to a new existence in the peace of God. This is what the dogmatic definition tells us as it expresses the hope ‘’that faith in the bodily Assumption of Mary into heaven may make our faith in our resurrection both stronger and more active.’’ Mary’s importance is not limited to giving us hope about the afterlife; she gives every Christian hope in the growing struggle of everyday life.
In today’s Gospel Luke portrays her as the one who glorifies God because ‘’the Almighty has done great things for me.’’ She is a woman of the people whose song delights in God’s choice of her, whose spirit soars because God has not overlooked this lowly handmaid. But she is also a dangerous woman because she is the one who voices the subversive hope of the poor and the little ones. He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.
For many poor people, the song of Mary expresses their own hope in the liberating power of God. For them Mary is not alive in statues and pictures but in the real and powerful change that can be brought about in the world when God’s preferences and God’s choices are taken seriously. She is the mother of all who are oppressed and overlooked and scorned. She was the little one, the lowly servant, made great by the choice of God. That same choice is extended to all the lowly. Mary voices God’s opposition to tyranny, his determination to pull down the powers that brutalize their subjects. In that, Mary is no passive silent woman. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it is the poor who look to her most for help. It is them we see on our television screens carrying her statue with great dignity as they process in circles outside palaces and prisons and army headquarters. Clearly, they believe something that we have come to forget.