Homily on the Solemn Feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven
Homily on the Solemn Feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven
Fr. John Okoro Egbulefu CCE
Rome 15th August 2024
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ !
@1 We, members of the Church of Christ on earthly pilgrimage to heaven, have gathered to celebrate the joyful Solemn Feast of the glorious Assumption of Our Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven.
The nearer this Feast Day was drawing the more
that very shining Light began to cast a multitude of His rays upon our mind and into our heart as the two eyes of our human spirit like at Pentecost He was poured forth like tongues of fire on our Ancestors and into their Community making us see clearer and clearer and lending us more new insights into the mystery of the glorious Assumption of Our Mother for our celebration of Her our calling her Blessed and narrating about Her mystery seen from here in Rome to all the ends of the earth. She is Our Lady so very much unique in all ramifications of the term: our only one heavenly Mother, and the only fellow human assumed into heaven with the human body and soul and spirit upon the request of the Son to the Father to let those that the Father has given to Him be with Him there where He the heavenly Ascended Son is and see the Glory with which the Father loved Him before the foundation of the world ! And since She is the first of such persons on earth whom the Father gave to the Son, it is logical, and indeed theo-logical, that She be the first to be carried up to Heaven to go and be with Him there and see that Glory, to enjoy the sight of that Glory, to become like what she is seeing, to be graced with participating in the Kingship of the Son, to be crowned Queen up there in the sight of the splendid Assembly of only the Holy Ones (in splendoribus Sanctorum), of whose company we are begging to be part, into whose Assembly we are asking to be let in when we cross into that other side at the end of our own current earthly pilgrimage to the heavenly Kingdom of God, City of God and House of God as where Our Lord and Master Jesus Our Love is waiting for us !
@2 We begin the liturgical first half of the Feast with the beautiful entrance hymn for the Holy Mass of the Day in commemoration of her Assumption into heaven as her solemnly festive entry into heaven: “Gaudeamus omnes in Domino, diem festum celebrantes sub honore Mariae Virginis, de cuius Assumptione gaudent Angeli, et collaudant Filium Dei”.
In English: : “Rejoice all of you in the Lord who are celebrating to the honour of the Virgin Mary, concerning the assumption of whom the Angels exult, and are together praising the Son of God”
@3 We introduce into the intellectual second half of the celebration with four reflections, the first two of which are ruminations on the curious events that preceded this spectacular event of our Mother’s angelically assisted journey to heaven, namely her death and her resurrection here on earth. The third reflection brings out from latency to evidence the logical, and Theo-logical reasons that ground the legitimacy of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. The fourth reflection is a putting of us her children into the shoes of our Mother to feel with her how she felt when the Angels sent by God came to collect her for such a journey without precedence and when she was airborne and high in the skies during so long a journey to a most far distant place.
@3a) The Assumption into Heaven of Mary the Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ who gave her to us as our Mother and gave us to her as her children was preceded by her death here on earth called the dormitio Mariae, i.e. her passing on to the land of the dead through sleep. She
died differently both from how Her Son, Jesus, died, and from how St Joseph died to whom she was betrothed before her conception of the child Jesus in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The three of them, Jesus Mary and Joseph, died differently from one another.
Infact, there are only three ways of dying as of passing on of the human soul from the world of the living to the world of the dead: either dying by being killed (interficio, like Jesus died) or dying by passing on to the land of the dead by ceasing to breathe any more when sleeping (dormitio, like Mary died), or by dying out of old age and general weakness of the mortal body containing immortal soul and spirit, whereby when the limit of the days given to the mortal body arrives the body collapses and the immortal soul and spirit contained by the body have no more container and hence fly back to God from whom they came and by whom they were put into the body at creation (collapsus, like Joseph presumably died),
It goes beyond doubt that our Mother died, for there were eye-witnesses to her death. Tradition has it that after Jesus had died and was risen from the dead and had ascended into heaven, John the beloved Apostle whom the Lord Jesus, when he was about to die on the Cross, gave to Mary as her son and to whom He gave Mary as his mother, whereby the two were to take care of one another (cf. Jn 19:25-27), retired Ephesus in an ancient city in today’s Turkey, called Ephesus to live there with her in his house, and that after a good number of years John noticed that the end of Mary’s stay on earth had begun to show its signs and so sent word to fellow believers in Christ in the neighbouring regions of the earth to come to Ephesus and to bid farewell to the Mother of Christ the Redeemer and Saviour , and that “in the presence of the Christian community at Ephesus and others from far and near, the Blessed Virgin Mother breathed her last”.
@3b) But about her burial and resurrection there is no reliable information. No where is known to be her tomb. No witness exists about her and her resurrection, called coming from the land of the dead back to the land of the living.
What comes across is that after her death there was this theological discussion about how someone like Mary in whom the eternal World lived like in a temple and who had been intensively sanctified by the Holy Word of God that dwelt in her should see corruption, since God would not allow His holy one to see corruption.
@3c) And so the idea arose that since on the one hand her holy body could not have been consigned to decay or corruption nor to cremation, and yet could not be found anywhere, and on the other hand Christ has requested His Father to let those whom the Father had given to Him on earth to be with Him where He is in glory (“Father I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they may always see the glory you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” Jn 17:24), and Mary is the first of such people whom the Father gave to His Son on earth, but the Father has always heard the request of His Son (cf. “Father I thank you for hearing my prayer. I knew indeed that you always hear me, but I speak for the sake of all these who stand around me, so that they may believe it is you who sent me” Jn 11:42), it follows that Christ who has ascended into heaven to prepare a dwelling place for his followers (“Trust in God still, and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s house: if there not, I should have told you. I am going now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you may be too. You know the way to the place where I am going. .... I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me” Jn 14: 1-4.6), must have prepared a seat of eternal glory for his holy Mother up there in heaven and sent from there Angels to come to carry her alive from here on earth to himself in heaven.
This suspicion was hardened by the argument that since Christ is the Truth and therefore cannot say things that are not true, and has said to His servants and followers “If a man serves me, he must follow me, so that wherever I am, my servant will be there too, if anyone serves me, my Father will honour him” (Jn 12:26), but now Mary has served Christ and Christ has ascended into heaven, it follows that the Father will honour Mary by bringing her to be in heaven too where Christ is.
But since no one saw any of these events take place in reality – the event of the Father’s honouring Mary by bringing her to be in heaven too where Christ is, and the event of the angels carrying Mary body and soul from down here on earth to Christ up there in heaven - these conclusions remained for years in the swing between their logicality and the lack of objective evidence or of ocular witnesses to the suspected event that must have taken place.
That is why the facts of Mary’s Assumption into heaven and of her coronation in heaven could not be included in the Credo at the time the Credo was being formulated and could be therein included now since the middle of the 20th Century, For. it was only in 1917 when the Virgin Mary herself appeared in the sky, introducing herself thereby as the Immaculate Conception itself in person that an objective evidence for her being truly in heaven became palpable and undeniable.
So it became possible for the teaching authority of the Church to solemnly define on 1st November 1950 Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven as dogma with the words: “We pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory” (cf Pope Pius XII, Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus).
Mary ‘was assumed into heaven’ is the formulation of a certain action in the passive voice, and the action is this that she was in an ascending movement towards heaven whereby however she was not ascending by her own struggle or power, unlike Christ who ascended into heaven through the power that is within him, rather she, being a creature that has been redeemed by her Son, was taken up into heaven above the heavens by divine power, symbolized by the Angels as the carriers of her to heaven.
And like there are three persons in one God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, so there are in this definition of the dogma of Mary’s Assumption into heaven three preceding dogmas: the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, the dogma of Mary’s Motherhood of God, and the dogma of Mary’s perpetual Virginity.
The apparition of Our Mother Mary in 1917 at Fatima is that in which she, through her speaking and saying that she was the Immaculate Conception, showed, by her speaking at all, that she is a living person.
A person is that spirit - intelligent living being - that speaks, can produce words that are intelligible to fellows fellow spirts, words that can be understood by fellow intelligent living beings, words that can create dialogue and conversation between the speaker and the addressees and, among the addressees themselves words that contains and communicate the intention and the Will of the speaker.
And by calling herself the Immaculate Conception, whereby like the Truth is that being which underlies and sustains the trueness of that which is true, so too the Immaculate Conception is that being that underlies and sustains the state of being immaculately conceived in which one who is immaculately, stainlessly, conceived has found oneself, Mary has said
that she is that being that underlies and sustains that state of being immaculately conceived in which (that statusquo that) she who is immaculately, stainlessly, conceived has found herself. Thus Mary is a highly and deeply mystical figure.
And such a permanent status in which she has found herself has further consequences for some other states in which she has found herself and for all the acts, actions and activities of hers that are closely connected with the cause or consequences, with the reasons and purposes, of that state of being immaculate, stainless, without impurity, all her life long.
Her permanent state of being immaculately conceived to be immaculate all her life long , has namely as consequences her permanent state of Motherhood, her permanent state of virginity, and her permanent state of obedience to God, according to which she is a mother all her life long, a virgin all her life long, and obedient to God all her life long, respectively.
And this perenity of her state of virginity, and of her state of obedience to God and of her state of motherhood is connected with her immaculateness, as long as this stainlessness means freedom both from the three things that the world offers and from sin as not doing the will of God. For, on the one hand, there is in her nothing of those three things that the world offers, namely there is no sensual body, i.e. no concupiscence of the flesh, no lustful eye, i.e. no concupiscence of the eyes, and no pride of possessions, i.e. no pride of life, while, on the other hand, she does the Will of God and therefore remains (so) forever (“Nothing the world has to offer – the sensual body, the lustful eye, pride in possession – could ever come from the Father but only from the world; and the world, with all it craves for, is coming to an end – i.e. is transitory; but anyone who does the will of God remains for ever” (1 Jan 2:16-17)
@3d) How must have our Mother Mary felt when the Angels sent by God came to collect her for such a journey without precedence? She must have been very excited when the Angels to her their mission to her. We know that from how she reacted in an earlier episode when the Angel Gabriel who, sent by God to her, came from heaven and announced to her the message that she would conceive and give birth to a a baby boy whom she was to give the name Jesus (meaning the Redeemer of His people), while the people themselves whom He had come to redeem would call Him Emmanuel (meaning ‘God-with-us’), for if God we’re not with Israel His people the enemy would have swallowed Israel alive.
Mary’s excitement is natural and understandable when one comes to think of it that it was that Holy Child as Son of God who had come from heaven into her womb and had inbetween been born by her, who now has sent His ministers to come to collect her from the earth as from the dark and miserable valley of tears down here below to be with Him up there above in heaven as in the luminous and glorious Kingdom, City and House of God.
And How must our Mother Mary have felt when she was airborne and high in the skies during so long a journey to a most far distant place?
The journey was really a most long one. It departed from the planet Earth, hence from the natural/empirical world of directly visible and only indirectly visible creatures. The journey passing through the preternatural/metaempirical world of invisible spiritual creatures and created spirits, to, till into, the supernatural/eternal world of uncreated beings: to, till into, the Reality
Unitriune God .
The Unitriune God is that single unit whose unity, precisely unitrinity, results from the mediated union of 1) the unity, oneness in number, of the container-component of God (resulting from God’s being the first and the last of His kind of being, the only one of His kind, the numerically only one first and last, the only one God) with 2) the trinity in structure, the trinitarian structure, of the content-component of God (consisting in the unity resulting from the union of the only one divine Trinity with the three intra-divine places named the Kingdom of God lying directly under the one divine Trinity, the City of God at the right of the one divine Trinity, and the House of God at the left as the heartside of the one divine Trinity, three intra-divine places in which there are three diverse things in three diverse forms, namely the eternal Light as thing in the form of an object, the eternal Life - lived by the three named divine persons as their life of eternal love for one another, eternal joy at one another, eternal glorification of one another, eternal peace with one another - as a thing in the form of an event, and the eternal beatitude or blessedness as thing in the form of a state, a state in which, a statusquo, the realities existing or living in the named three places are or find or have found themselves, eternal beatitude consisting in the unity resulting from the union of the eternal happiness/felicitas irradiated by the divine Name with the eternal gladness/laetitia irradiated by the Father, the eternal joy/gaudium irradiated by the Son, and the eternal jubilation/jubilatio irradiated by the Holy Spirit in the one divine Trinity, the one divine Trinity consisting in the unity resulting from the union of the three persons in the Trinity who are named the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively, with the one and indivisible Name of God, the divine Name expressing the essence of God, the divine essence from which derive the divine attributes in the union of which consists the divine nature and from which union results the unity that constitutes the all-embracing power underlying and sustaining the infallible efficacy of the words and actions and works - hence the infallible efficiency - of the named three persons in the one divine Trinity, the all-embracing power which on account of its underlying and sustaining character and function is termed the substance of God, the divine substance only united with which each of the three persons in the Trinity, namely the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, is a divine person, namely God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, respectively, and only with which together the three persons, namely the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, constitute the triune God, the triune God whose Trinity, the divine Trinity, results from the intertwining of the three divine persons, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, first due to the omnipresence of each of them as truly God, according to which each of the three is present in all the rest two at the same at all times and secondly due to the order of the originating of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, from the Father, according to which only the Father has no origin, the Son originates only from the Father and passively by being generated as Image of the indivisible divine substance by the Father, while the Holy Spirit originates from the Father and from the Son at the same time and actively by proceeding as the vitally indispensable and most pure Breath of Life from the Father and the Son together, whereby the three named divine persons are jointly the King, enthroned saving Ruler, reigning in all the three places and beyond over and above all the beings they have jointly created - be it the things that God created by calling them into hierarchical existence through the eternal creative Word as constituent of the Son spoken by the Father while respiring, breathing in and out the Breath of Life itself in person that the Holy Spirit is, be it the persons that God creates by first making their container-components out of matter, giving form to the matter, and then putting the content-component as a spiritual being, a being contrary, opposite but not opposed to the container, into the container-component like He created the living human being, be it the persons that God creates by first taking their content out of a certain container and then enclosing it in another container the nature of which is contrary - opposite but not opposed - to the nature of the new container and uniting the content-component inside the new container-component with this new container to give rise to a new reality - it is like taking a rib, which is by nature a bone, out of the side of the sleeping male and enclosing it in flesh as in a thing contrary - opposite but not opposed - to bone as to the nature of the rib, and uniting the rib as the content-component inside the flesh as the inside the new container-component that by nature is contrary, opposite but not opposed, to the rib to give rise to the female as the new human reality called the woman as the human being of the gender contrary - opposite but not opposed - to the gender of the man as of the male species of the genus ‘human being’.
During that long journey to heaven, as Mary was being carried to go and meet her Son, her heart naturally must have been filled with the joy and hope (gaudium et spes) of seeing her Son soon whom she had been missing and whom she loved with an unrivaled maternal affection and who also loved her so much as to provide a son for her when Himself, her only Son, was about to die on the Cross and has gone further to make provision for her in heaven and send for her to transfer to the absolutely best among the homes that there can be .
We can feel her joy and thank God for her and with her and begin ourselves little by little to desire and long for the grace to be allowed to make the experience of traveling from this planet earth on a direct flight to heaven as our Lord, through His Ascension, and our Lady, through her Assumption, have made it ahead of us and have since then been drawing us heavenwards to come to be with them, while the Holy Spirit whom the Father through the intercession of the Son, had sent to us since Pentecost, has been spurring us on from here below to keep going upwards towards heaven to live there with Our Lord and Our Lady as Our Brother and Our Mother respectively and to reign from there with them as Our King and Our Queen in the unity of the same Holy Spirit to the Glory of God the Father.