Taking the gold for Team Humanity: homily for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Homily for the Assumption

My brothers and sisters, I’m no angel.  Before you respond with too much glee, “Oh, Father, we know,” let me point out—you’re no angels, either.

Now, when people say, “He’s no angel,” usually what they’re saying doesn’t mean what they think it does.  Usually, if someone says, “He’s no angel,” they mean, “He’s not so nice.”  Maybe there are a few skeletons in his closet.

But not all the angels were good.  Lucifer and the demons are angels, and they have so many skeletons there’s no room for clothes in their closets.  Today’s great feast is dedicated to a woman who never sinned.  But today, the feast of the Assumption, we celebrate the fact that Mary is no angel.  She is a human being.  A woman.  One of us.

You see, because the real reason demons don’t have clothes in their closets is because they don’t have anything to wear them on.  Angels don’t have bodies.  But we do.  That’s the difference between angels and human beings.  Otherwise, we’re quite a bit alike.  We both have intelligence and free will—which is how the fallen angels sinned.  The big difference is the body.

Today we celebrate the fact that at the end of her life on earth, Mary’s body entered immediately into heavenly glory.

And, my friends, this is not some bit of religious trivia, but something very, very important for each one of us.  Because it means that to be saved, to enter into heavenly glory, we don’t have to give up being human.  We don’t have to become angels.  God wants to save us as human beings, which is why his plan for our salvation involved taking the flesh of Mary, a woman, to become a man, so that we, women and men, might be saved in our human bodies.

Mary’s Assumption is a preview of our Christian hope of salvation.  This hope is that our bodies will rise again.  Not the memory or idea of us, not reincarnation into the bodies of different people or different things, but that our bodies—made perfect and immortal, like the body of Jesus after the Resurrection—will pulse again with a new and better life.

Sometimes the body gets a bad rap, and some of our sins—gluttony, lust, anger—originate in bodily impulses or drives that are good in themselves but sometimes get out of control.  But the worst sins—pride and envy—are spiritual and intellectual.  Those are what caused the angels to fall. Sometimes, in fact, our bodies very weaknesses can help us to stay humble, reminding us that we need God’s strength.

The Gospel passage we read on today’s feast, however, does not talk about the end of life, but the beginning, the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, when both were pregnant—with Jesus and John the Baptist respectively.  And this glance at the very beginning of Jesus’ life in the body allows us to reflect on the meaning of the body for human beings in general and for Christians in particular.  

One of the truths about our bodies is that they are gifts.  Life begins as a gift.  With apologies to Benjamin Franklin, there is literally no such thing as a “self-made man.”  All that information in our chromosomes—whether we will turn out tall or short, whether we’ll have curly hair or a sleek and handsome bald head, whether we are men or women—come not from our hard work, but are pure gift. Sometimes the body can be a source of anxiety—we think we should look like the people on the screens—but we shouldn’t.  We should be grateful for the gift that we are given.  How much anxiety we would save ourselves if we remembered that ever cell and sinew, bone and chromosome, is an unearned and unmerited gift.

And the best feature of this gift is that our bodies allow us to meet other people.  The picture of baby Jesus and baby John in their mothers’ wombs is a good reminder that from the first moment of our existence we are already in a relationship—a relationship of dependence—on others.  I sometimes say that on our birthdays, we should actually be baking the cake for our mothers, since they did all the work.  We just cried and flailed our arms.  Because of our bodies we do not—we cannot—live in isolation from each other.

And it is through our bodies that we come to know each other.  I can see you, and you can hear me, and we’ll shake hands at the sign of peace, all because the gift that is the body allows us to see and hear and touch and know each other.  That, I think, is the body’s deepest meaning, what give these blobs of skin and lymph and blood and fingernails its infinite dignity.  It’s a dignity that Christianity amplifies and extends into eternity because it is in our bodies that we encounter God.  He who shares none of the body’s limits—neither space nor time—has taken on those limits so that he could meet us in our flesh and in his sacraments.

So it is fitting that the first of us to touch Jesus in the flesh, the woman on whom the Son of God first depended for life, the Lord’s first fully human relationship—that that woman should be the first of us to be assumed into bodily glory.  Mary wins the gold for team humanity.

In fact, if you see paintings of the Annunciation—the scene when the archangel Gabriel appears to the girl in Nazareth—you’ll often notice a very telling detail.  Gabriel is kneeling.  The angel’s knee is bent before the woman.

Mary is no angel.  She is the one before whom even angels kneel.  The most blessed among women has risen higher than the angels.  Today we celebrate her Assumption because of what it means for her and what it means for us.  Today is a good day to be human.  It’s a good day because she—the best of us—is one of us.

Readings: Rv 11:19A; 12:1-6A; 1 Cor 15:20-27; Lk 1:39-56

St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church

Rapid City, South Dakota

2024