Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary 2024

Hidden away in a small chapel just around that corner, miraculously preserved from the iconoclast’s chisel, is a neat little ceiling boss of a woman, hands folded in prayer, being borne upwards, surrounded by the faces of delighted angels. Of all the images that attracted the Reformers’ ire, images of Mary entering into heavenly glory were among the foremost. Such a fond notion was not to be found in Scripture; neither, they felt, should it be found in church. The finest medieval art and hope was routinely chipped away to dust. The reason the one around the corner survived is anyone’s guess.

If you ever get the chance to walk slowly from the west door of the Frari Basilica in Venice, through the Quire and up to the altar rail, keeping your eye fixed on the image behind the altar of a woman being lifted up on billowing clouds—to see in her uplifted arms both terror and wonder, and then in her face, as it comes into focus, an intense rapture, on the point of tears—in this phenomenal sixteenth-century work by Titian, you might begin to get a sense of what this ‘fond notion’, held by faithful Christians since earliest times is all about.

And, at the danger of beginning to sound like a Cook’s tour, if you could then pop across to Rome, to the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, and gaze into the mesmerising twelfth-century mosaics; the colossal figures of Christ and his Mother; his arm around her shoulder, and in his hand the text from Matthew 25: ‘Come, you elect of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the earth’; if you can see, even in such imposing figures an astonishing intimacy and fondness, then you might begin to understand why the Assumption of Mary—her bodily passing from earth into heavenly glory, sharing in the resurrection and ascension of her Son, might have been so central to Christian hope and piety.

We could talk about the fact that though there are two tombs ascribed to Mary, in Jerusalem and Ephesus, they are both empty, and that the only relics relating to her are items of clothing, or a dubious lock of hair; but that probably wouldn’t cut much ice with our chisel-wielding friend.

We may not be able to provide irrefutable historical evidence to prove that she, the whole woman, shares in the fullness of the heavenly, resurrection life, but we can surely say that it is logical, based on what we are given in the Gospel, and how we might best receive it.

Hers is the body within which the Word was made flesh—Christ’s body issued from hers. Her ‘let it be’, in response to the angel’s message, opened a space within her, a tiny space within a vast creation, in which God could wed himself, not just to humanity, but to everything that he had made. She carried the bridegroom; and through her the whole church would become his bride, and the whole creation be called to his wedding feast. Her ‘let it be’ spoke for a whole cosmos.

And if the hope of the cosmos is to be brought to fulfilment in Christ, redeemed by his sacrifice, to share his eternal embrace, then just as Mary stood for the whole cosmos on earth, who else could stand for the cosmos, to embody its hope in heaven?

The reformers concern is always that Mary somehow obscures or eclipses Christ, but by removing Mary from our vision of heaven we remove ourselves—or at best our hope becomes disembodied, as if it were only about souls—and in a disembodied hope, if it is just about souls, then by extension the rest of creation is also eclipsed; losing its standing in our understanding of salvation.

But if the whole woman through whom the Word was made flesh has been taken up by angels into the embrace of the one whom she bore - the victorious, resurrected Son of God—then we have a vision of hope not just for ourselves, but for all creation. We see in her the fulfilment of the divine purpose in the Incarnation, to gather all things together in Christ. This is not a fond notion; it is central to our Christian hope, and may no chisel prevail against it.