Mary’s Assumption: the ultimate celebration of the human body

Homily for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (from 2021.)

Ounce per ounce, the largest bone in our body, the femur, is stronger than steel.  Laid out end to end, the blood vessels from an adult’s body could circle the globe four times.  Our brains contain 86 billion nerve cells, which are joined by 100 trillion connections.

Right now in your brains several million of those connections are lighting up asking, “What in the world is he talking about?  Nice factoids, padre, but what do they have to do with anything?”  The answer is that today’s feast, among the most solemn on the Church’s calendar, is a celebration of the human body.  

Today we celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the dogma that at the end of her life Mary was taken up soul and body into heavenly glory.  This dogma is more than just an interesting factoid.  It is deeply relevant to each one of us because Christianity professes belief in the resurrection of the body.  St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians talks about Christ’s resurrection as “the firstfruits” of a much larger harvest.  In a sense, Mary’s Assumption is also a guarantee that the fruits of the resurrection will be shared with the whole Church.  Mary, the first Christian believer, the first to receive the news of Jesus’ Incarnation, represents the Church in a way nobody else can.  

We human beings are both body and soul.  We are not souls trapped in a body; our bodies are part of who we are.  Angels are souls without bodies, but we are not angels.  If the resurrection were an entirely spiritual phenomenon, it wouldn’t be us rising from the dead.  This is why Jesus became incarnate, coming in the flesh.  It is why the Gospels insist so forcefully that, when Jesus rose from the dead, he had not become a ghost or a hologram but remained a man who ate food and whose flesh bore the wounds of his passion.  It is why the sacraments require material elements, and not just any material elements but specific elements connected to Jesus’ physical existence on earth.

In the first centuries after Christ, the Church faced opposition from a movement called Gnosticism, which claimed that physical matter was evil, and that only spiritual knowledge brought salvation.  But the Fathers of the Church insisted again and again on the importance of matter in our religion.  They insisted, for example, that washing the body with water in baptism was necessary because the body too needs salvation.  Jesus came not to redeem a part of us, but all of us, our whole being.  A recycled version of Gnosticism still lurks around today when people dismiss the so-called “externals” of our religion—religious art, the Sign of the Cross, kneeling, vestments—as unimportant. In a sacramental religion neither what is internal nor what is external can be left out.  We experience God through our senses because we experience everything through our senses. 

The Catholic sacramental sense of the human body is today one of the most counter-cultural aspects of our faith.  In modern society we seem to live uneasily in our bodies.  We try to change their shapes and colors; we pierce them and we tattoo them; we add or remove lumps and lines; we add or remove hair.  None of these things are necessarily wrong in themselves, but sometimes we seem frantic to change our bodies and never quite satisfied with the alterations.  The increase in eating disorders, self-harm, and the cruel recent phenomenon of vulnerable people manipulated into mutilating their bodies through surgery and hormones in an attempt to change their gender are examples of unease with our bodies becoming pathological. 

Christianity offers two attitudes toward the human body that I think can correct some of these harmful tendencies.  The first is that we need to remember that our bodies are a gift.  We did not do anything to earn or deserve our existence.  But the givenness of our lives sometimes makes us uneasy because we live in an entitlement culture.  We’re good at claiming what we’re owed, and we seem to be getting better at imagining that we are owed more and more.  This sense of entitlement requires us to ignore the fact that the most fundamental thing—our existence—was just given to us.  I sometimes joke that on our birthdays we should really be giving presents to our mothers because they did all the work.  Likewise, God owed us nothing but gave us everything we are.  And how much happier we would be if, when we thought of our bodies, we began with wonder at the stuff of which we are made and gratitude for existence.  We would be less anxious about whether our bodies fit into somebody else’s ideal, and no one would be fooled by the illusion that happiness requires one to invent a new gender.  Our bodies are a gift even when they begin to wrinkle, to slow, to wear out, to break down.  Somehow our bodies’ limits are a part of the gift too.  

This brings us to the second attitude toward the human body that Christianity suggests.  Our bodies, as we experience them right now, are not in their final versions.  Rising again means bodily existence, but of a different sort.  We don’t need to fit ourselves into Barbie and Ken boxes because we can’t and won’t achieve bodily perfection in this life, and we aren’t really meant to.  Breaking down and eventually shutting down is what this version of our bodies does.  But these aren’t the final version; this same clay will somehow be reformed, and it won’t happen through plastic surgery or the latest diet.  The resurrection of the body will also be a gift.

The human body is a wonder.  Not only because the human heart weighs less than a pound but pumps 2000 gallons of blood a day.  The most wonderous thing about these gifts we are is that they are places of encounter.  We encounter the world through our bodies, through taste and touch, scent and sight and sound.  We encounter each other that way too.  And most remarkable of all, we encounter God in our bodies because God so loved the world, he so longed for such an encounter that he who is beyond all limits, beyond space and time, took on a body to meet us in this human way.  He took the flesh of Mary, a humble and faithful virgin of Nazareth.  And Mary’s Assumption, body and soul, into eternal blessedness is the promise that the encounter with the Lord we experience here in this moment is the beginning of an encounter that will last forever.

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

August 15, 2021

St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church

Rapid City, South Dakota