The Assumption of the Blessed Ever-Virgin Mary

(with an added note on the Immaculate Assumption)

By the Revd Canon Francis C. Zanger, OLW [da Igreja Lusitana (Comunho Anglicana)]

Among the last words of Our Savior on the cross were those He spoke to John, his disciple, and His Blessed Mother. Woman, behold thy son! He said, and, to St. John, Behold thy mother. Although not stated in Scripture (which last chronicles St. Marys life at Pentecost), there is a tradition in our Church that the Blessed Ever-Virgin Mary went to live at the home of St. John in Ephesus, in what is now Turkey. At the Council of Ephesus, in the year 431, this tradition was repeated, and a later (and probably less reliable) tradition even identifies the very house in which she lived. Catholic Christians in both the East and the West believe Mary lived out her years in quiet and prayer, and then, on her death (or, for the Orthodox, her falling asleepkoimesis or dormition), was taken body and soul into heaven. Around the late 500s in the Eastern Church, an Imperial decree set the Feast of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin for the 15th of August, and declared it one of the twelve great festivals of the Christian Church year. The Western Church, while sharing in the belief that Our Lady, on her death, was taken body and soul into heaven, didnt see a need to codify it until a millennium later, when in 1950 the Pope Pius XII delivered a Papal Bull to the Roman Catholic Church, officially making Our Ladys Assumption a part of Roman Catholic dogma (Mary semper virgo, when the course of her earthly life was run, was assumed in body and in soul to heavenly glory). The Roman Catholics also declared August 15th as the Feast of the Assumption, as it is for us. Protestant theologians, needless to say, disagreed vehemently, declaring

that such a thing could never be, and that all it would do is further divide Roman Catholicism from Protestantism. Of course, there was and is an easily understood reason for the Virgin Marys Assumption, just as there is for the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception1. While there is a common misperception that the Feast of the Incarnation and the Feast of the Nativity (that is, Christmas) are one and the same, they are of course not: The Son of God became incarnate (from the Latin for took on fleshthe Spanish word carne comes from the same Latin root) nine months earlier (as we read in St. Luke 1:35), for the Angel Gabriel said that, rather than being impregnated in the normal human manner, the Holy Spirit would come upon her and the power of the Most High overshadow her but not without her agreement. I am the servant of the Lord: be it unto me according to thy word, Mary responded in obedience to Gods angel(Luke 1:38), thus counteracting Eves original disobedience2. Godin Christ Jesustherefore became incarnate first within Marys womb, and His first nine months in human flesh were within her, making her a holier temple than that of Jerusalem or of any church or cathedral built before or since. It was for this reasonthat she had been the physical home of the Living God, as well as being the first Christian, that God the Father and God the Son chose to bring her body and soul directly to heaven after her death, rather than letting the body which had once held the Lord God deteriorate in the soil until the End Times. St. Bernard of Clairvaux described her Assumption to Heaven said that, because of her role as Theotokos, not only the world but Heaven itself (the Heavenly fatherland, in his words) shines more brightly because it is illumined by the glow of her virginal lamp. Her assumption elevated her above the angels and archangels, and even all the merits of all the saints were surpassed by this one woman who formed from her flesh, who bore in her body, God Himself. Spanish Sister Maria de Jesus de Agreada in 1670 wrote that Our Lady, was elevated to the right hand of her Son and the true God, and situated at the

same royal throne of the Most Blessed Trinity, whither neither men nor angels nor seraphs have before attained, nor will ever for all eternity. This is the highest and the most excellent privilege of our Queen and Lady: to be at the same throne as the divine Persons and to have a place in it, as Empress, when all the rest of humanity are only servants or ministers of the supreme King. Is belief in the Assumption necessary to our salvation? Perhaps not, but it is a part of the teachings of our Catholic Faith, whether Roman, Anglican or Orthodox, going back in written record to at least the Third or Fourth Centuries and very possibly to the end of the First, and is for many a spiritual help and consolation. As such, it is not to be abandoned or condemned, but recognized as part of the Faith given to us by the God who loved us enough to create us in His own Image.

This latter, despite some Protestants misunderstanding, has virtually nothing to do with Jesus conception, but with Marys own, and to her parents Anna and Joachim (these names come from tradition and are not mentioned in Scripture; however, the doctrine remains the same no matter what her parents names were!). The Immaculate Conception is the doctrine that Mary, through the grace of God, was born without the taint of Original Sin inherited by humanity from Adam and Eves original disobedience; given that God knew that Mary would bear Christ Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, within her body for the first nine months of His incarnation, and that Jesus genetic material would come solely from her and not the Childs father, God essentially did as any one of us would do before moving into a new househe cleaned it. In this case, he cleansed it of Original Sin, so that Jesus Christ, being born of Mary, would not be tainted by itsee Hebrews 7:26. 2 Genesis 3:6