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The Assumption of MaryThursday 15th August, 2024Some Initial ObjectionsThe Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the belief that Mary the mother of Jesus, having completed her earthly life was assumed, body and soul, into heavenly glory to be with her Son.More will be said about that in a moment, but how do we make sense of this belief as Anglicans? The Reformation anxiety about such beliefs is that there is no clear Scriptural foundation for it. Additionally, there is not even a clear tradition of the Assumption for the first four or five centuries of the Christian Church. You would think that, if Mary had not died, but had been taken up into heaven in a similar way to Christ at his Ascension, then somebody would have made a note of it somewhere in the first half Millenium of Christianity.So should we be celebrating the Feast of the Assumption at all? Shouldn’t we rather do as our Church of England would have us and call this day simply the Blessed Virgin Mary?An Anglican Case for the AssumptionPerhaps, although I want to make a case for the Assumption, even if one understands it as a purely symbolic reality. It might be helpful to ask ourselves why the Church ever thought that such a belief was edifying or necessary.I want to say two things about this: firstly, that the Assumption teaches us about the purpose of human life, and, secondly, that the Assumption teaches us about how to fit ourselves for that end.The Purpose of Human Life and the AssumptionTo begin with, theologians have speculated that God’s original intention for his human creatures was that they would progress towards him and be taken up into heaven when their life on this earth was completed. Imagine that Adam and Eve had never sinned and broken fellowship with God. If that had happened, so this view says, then, one day, after a period of joyful fellowship with God and obedience towards him on this earth, they would be taken up, as it were, to a different dimension of heavenly glory to be with him forever.(Anyone familiar with C.S. Lewis science-fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet will see this view embodied in that story.)This view does indeed appear to have biblical precedent: consider, for example, Enoch in Genesis 5:24: ‘Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him’. And a similar thing happened to Elijah in the book of 2 Kings.The Assumption of Mary, therefore, sees Mary in that sort of category: a human person whose life was so intertwined with that of God through Christ that she truly fulfilled the end or telos of humanity: which is to be united with God forever – in a spiritual sense in this life and in heavenly glory thereafter.The Fittingness of the AssumptionBecause Mary fulfilled this human purpose so eminently, therefore, there is a kind of fittingness to her fellowship with Christ not being broken by bodily death. Here I will quote from the Roman teaching document on the subject, Munificentissimus Deus, which says this:‘It seems impossible that she who conceived Christ, bore him, fed him with her milk, held him in her arms and pressed him to her bosom, should after this earthly life be separated from him in either body or soul.’Whatever you think about this, try and consider the point that is being made. The Anglican theologian John MacQuarrie puts it this way: ‘The closeness of Jesus and Mary, it is being asserted, could not be broken by the end of their companionship on earth’. Why is this? Because Mary bore Jesus in her womb, because she fed him of her own body, because she was the first to know him in his Incarnation, because she loved him as her Son and as her Saviour, because she followed him as a disciple, because she accompanied him to his death upon the cross, because she was a witness of his joyful resurrection, because she knew Jesus in the most intimate way it is possible to know another person. Therefore, so the thinking goes, when the time came for her earthly life to finish, she was simply translated into his pres