Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Assumption of the BVM
15 August 2021

A formal part of Catholic faith is our belief that God has blessed Mary with certain privileges.  These privileges bring salvation to Mary and they come purely from the generosity of the Holy Trinity.  These privileges are an answer to the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, and so they are part of God’s plan to make it possible for mankind to have eternal salvation.  All the privileges of Mary stem from her first or main privilege, namely that God chose her in a singular way to be the Mother of God the Son in the flesh.  In the privilege of the Assumption that we celebrate today we express our Catholic faith that at the end of her earthly life Mary, having been preserved from sin from the first moment of her life and having chosen to use her freedom to live sinless her entire life, was rescued from the decay of the tomb and brought up body and soul into heavenly life.  You can find this doctrine already believed and celebrated liturgically in the fifth century.  Finally, being formally defined in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, this doctrine is thereby a dogma of the faith.

You may have noticed that the Scripture readings do not make explicit reference to the assumption.  I actually love pointing that out because it raises an important lesson for us, especially important for a Catholic to grasp here in the Bible belt.  The lesson is highlighted in this question: Which came first, the Church or the Bible?  Or another way to ask it, did the Church’s faith precede the Bible or did the Bible precede the Church’s faith?  The answer is that the Church and the Church’s faith came first, well before anyone had a Bible to use.  Now, I want to pause right here, and say clearly that by making this observation I am not in any way downplaying the Bible or its importance to our faith, or suggesting it be allowed to collect dust on your shelves.  No, the Church reads and digests the Bible, and reflects upon it, and sees it as the inspired and inerrant recording of God’s Word in Tradition.  “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” St. Jerome says.  By observing that the Church precedes the Bible, what is important to highlight is that the Church was alive and faithful to the Lord well before the Church even decided at the end of the fourth century which books made it in to the Bible.  Still more, the Church was alive and faithful to the Lord well before the invention of the printing press, well before any printed copies of a Bible were available to the general public and for a user to hold before his eyes for personal reading.  So, for all those hundreds of years, how did the Church and individual believers hear God’s Word?  The answer is that God’s Word has its first and proper context within the Sacred Liturgy, hearing God’s Word proclaimed in the living faith expressed in our worship.  The liturgy is the first and proper context of the Church’s listening to God’s Word.  The Assumption of Mary can put an exclamation point on this foundational lesson of biblical history and how we read the Scriptures in a Catholic way.  One important understanding of the Scriptures is that they are read in a typological way.  That means that the Old Testament prepared the way for the New Testament and that persons, images, and events in the Old Testament are “types” that prefigure persons, images, and events in the New Testament.  So for instance, figures like Moses and Elijah are revealed through typology to prefigure Christ.  Again, the People Israel prefigures the Church.  As Christ and the Church are prefigured in the Old Testament, likewise so do the images of the woman, mother, and queen prefigure Mary in the New Testament.

While we don’t have passages of Scripture that make explicit reference to the assumption, we do have passages that refer to the ark of the covenant.  And this is key for our observance of the assumption of Mary.  The ark of the covenant in the Old Testament was the dwelling place of God with His people Israel; the ark was His sanctuary on earth (Ex. 25:8).  The ark was the sacred chest, the container that carried within it those precious signs that were incarnations of God’s presence and promise: namely, the ark contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 25:16), a golden urn containing the manna from the desert, and the staff of Aaron that had budded miraculously as a sign of the priesthood.  The ark was made of acacia wood (Ex. 25:5), which was known as a hardy, incorruptible wood.  The ark was covered in pure gold, and veiled in a cloth of blue (Num. 4:5-6).  It was placed in the holy of holies in the sanctuary.  This should sound familiar to a catholic and should get us thinking typologically about Mary. 

Since the Gospels do not record an account of the assumption, the Church chooses the Gospel of the Visitation.  That choice deserves some attention.  There are similarities in the passage of the Visitation that hearken back to the Old Testament, to King David’s triumphal transfer of the ark of the old covenant into Jerusalem, recorded in the 2 Book of Samuel 6.  There we read that David rose and went to the hill country of Judah to bring up the ark of God.  David exclaims, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?”  He leaped before the ark as it was brought into the city with joyful shouting.  Considering this joy before the ark of God’s dwelling we can appreciate the devastation when, upon exile, the ark disappears and is not seen again.  The Gospel of the Visitation echoes this Old Testament event of the ark.  Mary who is carrying God-incarnate in her womb goes out, like David, to the hill country of Judah, and she visits Elizabeth.  Before the presence of God contained in the ark of Mary, John leapt in his mother’s womb, like David had leapt and danced before the ark.  Elizabeth cries out in joy, like David had done, and asks “how can the mother of my Lord come to me?”  The Gospel of the Visitation shows that Mary is not only the Mother of Jesus, but also the New Ark of the Covenant.  With this in mind, the Gospel of the Visitation has been read by the Church for centuries typologically as an account of the ark’s return, a return not just to the earthly Temple, the sanctuary made by hands, but rather to its proper place in the heavenly sanctuary, since the earthly Temple is a copy of the heavenly one. 

The first reading of this solemnity opens with the apocalyptic vision of St. John from the Book of Revelation.  That reading began, “God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple.”  St. John is given a vision of the true and lasting Temple, the one not made by hands, but in Heaven.  It’s as if the veils or curtains, the parts and divisions of the heavenly Temple, are opened and St. John sees all the way into the holy of holies, the inner sanctuary where the ark is kept.  And immediately, coinciding with this vision of the ark, as if the same image in different form, St. John reports next: “A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”  By choosing the Gospel of the Visitation and St. John’s vision, the Church wants to instruct us on how the faith has viewed Mary from ancient times.  She is the fulfillment of the Ark of the Covenant.  She is the New Ark.

Mary’s first privilege from God, that she was chosen by Him to be the mother of His Son, tells us that for all the reverence and care for the ark of the Old Covenant, Mary is greater still for she is the New Ark.  As fitting as it was that the ark of the old covenant be placed in the holy of holies, how much more does it make sense that God’s chosen daughter, and the vessel of the Incarnation of the Son, should be preserved from the corruption of the grave and dwell in God’s presence in the heavenly temple where He is worshiped?  Thus, the choice by the Church to have us listen to the Gospel of the Visitation and St. John’s vision in the first reading tells us something important about Mary and helps us situate our faith in her assumption within the context of where the ark should rightfully dwell.

In celebrating Mary, we are reminded that God is with us.  As the New Ark, Mary fulfills to a greater extent than the signs of old that God is with us because she contained not just the old types of the commandments (God’s Word in stone), the manna, and the staff of priesthood, but rather she contained God’s Word-made-flesh, the Bread of Life come down from heaven, the one Who is the great and eternal High Priest.  Finally, we not only celebrate her rightful dwelling in the heavenly temple, but we find in our faith in her assumption a reminder of God’s loving invitation to us that we follow the life of grace, as did Mary, so that we may take up our place in the vision seen by St. John, the heavens opened for us by the Savior who came to us through Mary the New Ark, assumed body and soul into heaven.