Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary 2025

What are human beings made for? Our cultures and contexts give us different answers. ‘Born to be happy’, a t-shirt may say. Made to be useful, the markets might tell us, or successful or profitable, even more concerningly. Are we made for family, or relationship, or community? Perhaps so, although our dignity as human beings is certainly not dependent upon any of those things. Human beings are made for glory. We are made to participate in bliss, in the divine life itself, in the dynamic relationship of perfect love which is God’s own being. In his letter to the Romans, St Paul has a stab at this in precis – ‘those whom he predestined, he also called, those whom he called, he justified, those whom he justified, he also glorified.’ Human beings are made for glory.

Today, in the Church of England’s calendar, we celebrate the principle feast of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the first and most perfect disciple. Mary, Daughter of Zion, whose absolute faithfulness of God’s promises and openness to God’s will led to her bearing the Eternal Word. Mary, the Second Eve, who stands at the dawn of the New Creation as its midwife, offering rhw world the fruit of the Tree of Life, Christ our God, whose life will save the world from its sin. Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, into whose care is given the Beloved Disciple at the Cross; her divine Son forging new bonds of kinship and relationship even as he is being extinguished by the world’s violence. Mary, Mother of the Church, who gathers with the apostles to await the life-giving spirit of Pentecost, as Jesus’s ministry passes over into the life and activity of the Church.

From the earliest days of Christian reflection on Mary, there has been a strong conviction that at the end of her life she passed immediately into a full sharing of her Son’s glory. For some of the patristic witness, there is an insistence that she could not experience death as such, because death was a fruit of sin – some taught that, as the one who bore the Son of God, her flesh, could not be subject to the implications of sin. But for others, Mary’s falling into the very sleep of death coincided with her being taken right into the heart of her Son’s victory. You may have seen mosaics of Mary’s dormition, or falling asleep, where Christ is above the deathbed scene, holding a small figure of his mother in his arms. The Western tradition held that Mary was taken, body and soul, to Heaven, to share Christ’s glory, and celebrated this feast as the Assumption of Mary: the obvious and final implication of Mary’s ministry and unique role. As the great Swiss twentieth century theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar put it, ‘this earth was capable of carrying and bringing to birth the infinite fruit that had been planted in her. Today we celebrate the ultimate affirmation and confirmation of the earth.’

Many, although by no means all, of the sixteenth century reformers were very nervous of this, principally for two reasons. Firstly, the Assumption is not recorded in scripture, and the Anglican reformers (amongst most of the others) taught that Holy Scripture contained all things necessary for salvation. Certainly, then, people could not be required to believe such a teaching. Secondly, there was a great nervousness that boundaries were being blurred. What about the unicity of Christ, and his unique mediation? Do we risk saying of Mary more than we can say about any creature? Doesn’t that ring the idolatry bell, which so often tingles anxiously in the foreground of so many reformation debates? Isn’t it scandalous to point towards the glory of anyone but Christ?

Although these were questions of a particularly nervous age, they have surely prompted important theological housekeeping for the churches, and we should not dismiss these concerns too quickly. But in the subsequent centuries, our churches have come to re-receive, on the basis of scripture and the early common traditions, much of what was regarded as difficult or even dangerous territory in previous generations. For the last one hundred years or so, East and West have been learning together to receive afresh the vast theological wellspring of the first millennium. Our vocation to share Christ’s glory is indeed scandalous – but it is at the heart of the Gospel. The scandal is the inexhaustible height, breadth and depth of God’s love for the world, and the emergence of the new creation. The scandal is the resurrection of Christ, and its implications for all those who follow him; a scandal which sweeps us up to share his life and his reign. As Paul put it, ‘those whom he predestined, he also called, those whom he called, he justified, those whom he justified, he also glorified.’ One theologian has referred to Mary’s assumption into heaven as the end of this great Pauline series. ‘For the Mighty One has done great things for me.’

Mary has a distinctive and unique place in our salvation history. Her own flesh is linked in a unique way to Christ’s flesh: it was her likeness and flesh which God took when he became incarnate. In the words of the agreed statement of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission in 2005, we can say ‘his own bodily glorification now embraces hers.’ This is a pattern of hope and grace which we see in Mary’s life, which will be in the new creation, where all those who have followed Christ will participate in his glory. What we say of Mary, we must say of the Church, and of the Gospel vocation offered to all people. Mary, as sign of the Church, prefigures this ultimate triumphant reality.

But she does so not as a super-human, but as a human, one alongside us, also destined for glory. When Mary became the Godbearer, in offering her free will to the message of the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation, her ‘Yes!’ voiced a full and perfect response to God’s offer to the world. Her ‘Yes!’ is a kind of ‘Amen!’ to all God’s promises. At the end of Jesus’s birth narrative in St Luke’s Gospel, we are told that Mary treasured all that had been said to them about Jesus, and pondered these words in her heart. Mary is the keeper of the Church’s earliest memory. Mary is the original guardian and evangelist of the truth that God became human, and that human flesh could bear the dignity of the Divine. She is the first teacher of the Church’s faith.

We now live in an ecumenical age, where previously contested questions which have divided Christians can be considered afresh. Mary calls us together. She calls us together firstly because she calls us to the crib and to the cross, the twin sites of her maternal celebration and lament. She encourages us into the new humanity which we glimpse between her and the Beloved Disciple inaugurated at Calvary. Secondly, Mary calls us to Pentecost, to a renewal of the Church’s joy and the Church’s hope. She calls us into one body because there is only one Christ. And in each move, she calls us to celebrate the one, new humanity which is inaugurated in Jesus Christ. A humanity which is made for glory, and which in its poverty, fallenness and brokenness bears the indelible promise of the new creation.

In summoning us to Pentecost, Mary calls us back to the Upper Room, and to the gift of the Eucharist. In this great sacrament, the sign and seal of Christ’s full gift of himself, we, too, become Godbearers as we receive the sanctified gifts of bread and wine into our own frail bodies, charged to live Christ’s ministry of healing and reconciliation. Here at the Eucharist, we become embodied sharers in the memory of the Church: a memory which allows us to perceive the reality of creation and the destiny of a frail humanity in a fully redeemed light. In the great company of the redeemed, Mary, ‘prepared and sanctified for her unique vocation’, leads our praises, gesturing towards her Beloved Son, who invites us to share the full glory of his risen life. That is what humanity is made for.