HOMILY IN THE HIERARCHICAL DIVINE LITURGY IN L´UTINA MOUNTAIN ON 19 AUGUST 2018
God Became Heaven for Mary
Kurt Cardinal Koch
It is said of Jean–Paul Sartre, the well–known French existentialist philosopher and declared atheist, that on his death-bed he was asked by a friend if he did not after all believe in a life after death. By contrast with his usual consistently stated conviction that everything ended with death, he is said to have responded shortly before his death with the – of course rather feeble – word “Peut–être”, “Perhaps”. Sartre certainly does not stand alone with this response, indeed he stands for many people today, even Christians. They too seem to have become very unsure of their interpretation of death and what comes after it.
The crux of the faith at Easter
According to recent investigations, the population of Europe seems to be dominated by helpless uncertainty with regard to a belief in eternal life. There are many different interpretations. For some everything ends at death, others have hopes beyond death, above all in the form of rebirth and reincarnation. Others cannot imagine anything much for life after death. Not a few do not manage much more than Sartre’s “Peut–être”. Such surveys, with the uncertainty regarding a life after death they reveal, demonstrate that Christian proclamation has little success in communicating to today’s world its interpretation of death and above all of life after death.
In that regard the situation of the Church today differs substantially from that of the early Church. The Apostle Paul above all, finding the Corinthians apparently unwilling to accept the belief in their own resurrection, impressed it upon them with the utmost desirable clarity: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty (too) is our preaching; empty, too, your faith.” (1 Cor 15:13f.). Paul follows that immediately with unmistakeable emphasis: “For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins” (16:17). The early Church compressed the same conviction in the pithy formula: “Take away the resurrection and you destroy Christianity on the spot.”
The Christian faith stands or falls with the belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in the participation of the dead in it. This is the radical crux of the faith, the crucible as it were, which must be withstood. The resurrection of Jesus is of course not simply an historic event that happened almost 2000 years ago and involved only him. The resurrection of Jesus is to be extended to all humanity, as Paul stresses that in Christ “all will be brought to life”. Paul is speaking here of a sequence: Christ is the first fruits of all those who have fallen asleep, to be followed “then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ” (1 Cor 15:23).
That Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, must take the first place among these who belong to him must be self–evident in the logic of the Christian faith. Mary was the radical recipient so that Christ could come into the world, she went with him and stayed near him throughout his whole life and death. Therefore she is the first to receive her share in the resurrection of her son. Today’s Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos means Easter for Mary, it celebrates the first consequence of Easter for Mary, and invites us to immerse ourselves in the mystery of this feast.
The womanly quality of heaven
“Mary, received into heaven. Him whom she received, he receives her. Heaven is God.
Mary, received into love. Casts its fire into the heart of the church. The fire is God.
Mary, received to the right hand of the Lord. He whose maid she is, gives her the crown. The crown is God.”
This poetic prayer or prayerful poem by Silja Walter, who as Sister Hedwig lived and worked as a writer in the Benedictine cloister at Fahr in Switzerland, leads us into the heart of this feast. Initially the poem gives us an extremely brief “definition” – indeed it could not be more brief or more laden with meaning – of what heaven means in the Christian faith: “Heaven is God”. Indeed, what else could heaven be other than God himself, and what could “being received into heaven” mean other than being with God and resting at the heart of God?
If God himself is heaven, any person who comes into contact with heaven encounters not only God, but in their openness for God, also all people who live in perfect fulfilment with God. Heaven happens not only between God and me: in the encounter with God, heaven is opened also for the people who live with God. Heaven knows neither isolation nor loneliness: it is instead the open communion of all saints, and thus the fulfilment of human togetherness, which in no way competes with but instead follows from pure openness for the face of God. This is so certainly true that the salvation of the individual person can only really be whole and entire when the salvation of all has been realised, or, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, when the perfected are not only “beside one another in heaven, but with one another as the one Christ are the heaven”.[1]
In this communion of heavenly perfection, Mary the Mother of God stands at the forefront. Today’s gospel professes of her that she “has chosen the better part” in listening to her son (Lk 10:42). Throughout the centuries and still today the Church has therefore praised Mary as the “tota pulchra”, “wholly beautiful”, who for her part professes that God is not only good and true but above all also beautiful, and that we have very reason to give thanks and praise for the beauty of God and all mankind who share in it.
The fulfilment of the dialogue of love
In Mary the beauty of God’s plan for his whole creation and its fulfilment is illuminated, and it is not in the least coincidental that this occurs in the form of a woman. Pope John Paul I gave us a helpful indication of exactly what this sign means in his fictional letters published under the title “Your obedient servant”. Responding to a reproach by a class of school girls that women were disadvantaged in the Catholic Church, Albino Luciani referred to the mystery of the Dormition of the Theotokos: “The perfection of the creature as creature is realised in woman, not in man”.
Mary is the archetype and seal–bearer of the whole of creation. From that perspective we begin to understand the substance of today’s feast, that Mary the Mother of God has been received body and soul into heavenly glory. For whoever Christ wishes to take to himself and to bring into fulfilment, he wishes to have entirely with him. So nothing creaturely is left behind, all is taken home. The body too is drawn into this fulfilment. For what is more intrinsic to us human beings than our corporeality? The body too is to be received into the eternal perfection with God.
Thus it becomes clear once more that our Christian faith expresses the fulfilment of mankind in the first instance in Mary. Silja Walter has in turn given expression to this specific reason with extreme brevity and depth of meaning: “Him whom she received, he receives her”. Mary received God into herself and put her body at his disposal as his dwelling in our world. Her body became as it were a living tabernacle in which the All–holiest became present in our world. What Mary did for God, God has realised for her in her dormition. He received her with body and soul. So it becomes perfectly clear that Mary’s dormition, and eternal life itself, is a wonderful gift of God’s love.
Eternal life with God, which is revealed before our eyes by this feast today as our destiny too, cannot come from us human beings but only through the grace of God. Eternal life is not simply there within us, nor is it simply a natural potential of mankind, but is grounded in a personal relationship with the One who alone is eternal and gives eternal life. We human beings can therefore never be totally lost because we are accepted and loved by God. Just as all human love seeks eternity, so does God’s love, but he not only wills it but works it and is it.
Easter for Mary and the Church
Mary attests this primacy of the love of God with her life and her fulfilment. Therefore she can in no way stand between confessions but leads us more deeply into the common heart of our faith. She achieves this above all in her magnificent song of praise, the Magnificat, in which she sings of her heart’s desire that God be magnified. Mary wanted God to be magnified because she knew that mankind does not become small if God is made great, but rather receives a share in the greatness of God. Because Mary knew that she was the handmaid of the Lord, the Lord has given her the crown which is in turn God himself.
This crowning is the innermost mystery of the faith that we celebrate today, which has already been fulfilled in Mary and towards which we too are heading on our earthly pilgrimage. For in the fulfilment of Mary we are able today to foresee also our own fulfilment. The Easter feast for Mary today is also the feast of the whole Church. It is really the feast for all of us. Let us pray to the living God through the intercession of Mary the Mother of God that we grasp the mystery of this feast ever more deeply and understand it as the mystery of our own lives. Then, with the prefiguration of our own participation in the Easter glory granted to us today, we will not respond with “perhaps” like Sartre but with a whole–hearted and joyful “Amen. Alleluia!”
First Reading: Phil 2:5–11
Gospel: Lk 10:38-42; 11:27-28
[1] J. Ratzinger, Eschatologie – Tod und ewiges Leben (Regensburg 1977) 191 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology Death and Eternal Life. Tr. Michael Waldstein, (Cath.U.A. Press, 1988).