It’s always good to keep this feast. It seals the summer, somehow. If we lived out in the Scottish countryside and not in a city, we’d see the fields of barley just harvested and understand why this feast was sometimes called Our Lady in harvest time. Today, the Lord, as it were, reaps the ripe grain of his mother’s holy life and draws her into the barns of heaven, a prelude to the great ingathering of the End. Today is the echo, the replication, of Jesus’ resurrection in his mother; it is Easter in August. This feast lifts the heart; it helps us pray. And for the pilgrim people of God, Mary becomes through her Assumption body and soul into heaven a “sign of true hope and comfort”. Thanks to her, following her, we too can hasten to the hill country to add, in God’s good time, our own Magnificat to hers.
Mary lived her life. She died. She fell asleep in the Lord as Eastern Christians like to say. And the Lord took her. He took her up (which is what “assume” means), took her up in her entirety, “body and soul”, into heavenly glory. And thus he confirmed that his Resurrection is for sharing, by Mary first, and “then at his coming” by us all, the whole Church.
Today is also the patronal feast of this Cathedral and of our diocese.
Further, this year marks the 75th anniversary of the definition of the dogma of our Lady’s Assumption by Pope Pius XII – in 1950. A dogmatic definition might be likened to a canonisation. Just as a canonisation does not create the holiness of the one canonised, but recognises and proclaims it, so Pius XII was not inventing something new for us to believe in. Rather, he was recognising a long held and long celebrated belief of Christians in East and West and, with the authority of the Successor of Peter, declaring that this belief is an integral part of divine Revelation and requires “an irrevocable adherence of faith” (CCC 88). It is part of God’s great deeds on our behalf. The Pope, too, was also wanting us simply to celebrate Mary, to echo her Magnificat, to bless the Father for the great things he has done in this humble servant of his. He wanted all Christians, I believe, to see the great sign in heaven that John the Seer saw and wrote in the book of Revelation – our first reading – the woman clothed with the sun.
This is a feast of multiple messages. To stay with Pius XII a moment, I think there is meaning to be gleaned from the timing of this definition. It was made just 5 years after the end of World War II. A few days ago we passed the 80th anniversaries of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6th and 9th of August 1945. We’ve all seen pictures of the mushroom cloud. We’ve all seen photos and footage from the early days of World War II: strutting dictators on platforms – the modern version of the mighty on their thrones – the flag-waving crowds, the false euphoria, the lines of uniformed men ready to fulfil their rulers’ ambitions. Fast forward six years from then to 1945, and what do you see? Ruined cities, bomb sites, graves marked and unmarked, people hungry, displaced, crippled, families grieving. In World War II some 75 to 80 million people, largely civilians, lost their lives, creating the deadliest conflict in history. The tale of that terrible war was one that began in sin and ended in death. The tale of Mary is a tale that begins in holiness: the grace of her immaculate conception and ends in her entering body and soul into the fulness of life. There is the greatest possible contrast here. And it was then in the aftermath of that war, as its cost was being counted, as reconstruction was beginning, that the Church, pointed to this heavenly woman clothed with the sun, her Son.
This is a feast of multiple messages. How many of those who died in World War II, and who are dying now in multiple conflicts, are simply ordinary people caught up in horrors not of their own making. How many frankly, were nobodies, humanly speaking. And who was Mary? She wasn’t a politician or a philosopher or a campaigner. In a nondescript village under foreign occupation, she baked bread and drew water. She looked after her husband and son. She visited a pregnant cousin. She became for a while a refugee. Back home she attended village weddings. She watched her son go his strange way and saw him executed on false charges before her eyes. She spent the last years of her life under the care of and caring for one of his closest friends. She never stood on a podium or featured in the news. Cherished in a small circle of disciples, no doubt, she was never a celebrity. She was never wealthy. She didn’t power dress. She was among the poor, the humble, the overlooked of the world. What did she do? Well, she believed the message of an angel and in that faith became God’s Mother. She simply did what Elizabeth praised her for and every generation will call her blessed for: with humble faith and brave obedience, she brought the Son of the living God – Jesus the Christ – into the world. She did God’s will, and for that every one of us, every blade of grass, is eternally in her debt and for that was glorified.
This is a feast of multiple messages. In the wake of that War and of every recurring cycle of sin and death, Mary assumed into heaven and clothed with the sun is a sign of another way, another kind of life, an alternative power and significance. She’s the beatitudes in flesh and blood, she’s the humble exalted and faith blessed. She’s good news to the poor and the broken-hearted. In the context of World War II, we can note too that Mary was Jewish: a Jewish woman glorified in the wake of the Holocaust – an extraordinary gesture.
Yes, this is a feast of multiple messages. It’s an honouring of the value of an ordinary human life lived in faith and love. It honours dignity of the human body. It honours woman. As at the beginning Adam is incomplete without Eve, so at the end is the Lord without his mother. Jesus means Mary just as Mary means Jesus. Honour your father and mother, says the old commandment. Jesus honours his mother to perfection today and teaches his brothers, every man, to honour all the women, loved and lost perhaps, who have graced and grace his life and save him from a withered heart. And Mary in turn calls each of her sisters, every one of us in fact, to have her son as their All and join her in singing God’s mercy.
Mary, assumed into heaven, pray for us!
St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 15 August 2025
