• Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10
• Psalm 45:10-12, 16
• 1 Corinthians 15:20-27
• Luke 1:39-56

Next Sunday, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption.  It is important to celebrate any feast of Our Lady in such a way that Mary remains clearly a fellow-member of the human race, and not a being too lofty for us to identify with or even approach. To be sure, it is a victory that the feast commemorates; but it is the victory of God, who works through human beings. The first reading makes this quite clear. John, in his exile on the island of Patmos, has been given a glimpse of the heavenly liturgy, and he is instructed to “write down the vision”, for the encouragement of his persecuted fellow-Christians in Asia Minor. For him it is absolutely clear that the vision comes from God: “God’s Temple, the one in heaven, was opened, and the Ark of his Covenant appeared in his Temple”. The “Ark of the Covenant” is a symbol for Mary, whose unfailing fidelity made her the ideal vessel in which God’s faithful creativity towards the human race can be expressed. So we are right to see the “woman clothed with the sun” as the Galilean peasant-woman who said her Yes to God; but she is also a symbol of God’s own victory. At the same time, we notice that she is very much a human being, who “cries out in labour-pains, and is tormented in child-birth”. And she is frail, an apparently easy victim for the “great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns”, whose “tail wipes a third of the stars from the sky”, and who waits to “gobble up her child”. But God is in charge and “her child was snatched up to God”, while “the woman fled to the desert, where she had a place prepared by God”.

Equally human is the bride who is being consoled in the psalm for the solemnity. She is told to “forget your people and your father’s house”, and reminded that “the King…is your Lord and you must worship him”. So a homesick girl finds new meaning in life.

In the second reading, Paul reminds his edgy Corinthians of God’s victory in Christ, which is the victory over death “as the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep”. It is Catholic belief that the Mother of God also “fell asleep”, and then was given a share in that victory, reversing the death that Adam has brought on his descendants; and Our Lady has a share in Jesus’ restoration of “the Kingdom to his Father, when he cancels out all rule and authority and power”. We rejoice at this victory that has been won for us and for Mary.

The gospel for next Sunday is the lovely story of the Visitation. We are invited to follow Mary setting out alone, a girl of perhaps no more than twelve, on the dangerous journey from Nazareth in the North to the hill-country of Judah in the South; and she does it “in haste”. When she arrives, she does the predictable thing and “greeted Elisabeth”; but the result was very far from predictable, because God is in charge: “and it happened that when Elisabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb”. Nor does it stop there, for the intensely human Elisabeth was, like so many other key players in Luke and in Acts, “filled with the Holy Spirit”, and correctly identified Mary as “the mother of my Lord”. Then she invokes a blessing on Mary that could equally apply to her (or to us, if we get it right): “happy is the one who believed that there will be a fulfilment of the things said to her from the Lord”. Then Mary is in turn filled with the Holy Spirit, and sings the beautiful hymn of the Magnificat, which for two millennia the Church has made part of its evening prayer. And notice, once again, that it celebrates the victory of God, expressed in frail human beings, “the lowliness of his slave-girl”, the raising up of the humble, and the feeding of the hungry. Next Sunday is our feast, if we understand it properly.