15 August 2024 -- Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary
Rev 11:19; 12:1...10; 1 Cor 15:20-26; Luke 1:39-56
Homily
The Gospel account we have just heard is full of a freshness that is good to find again after hearing the rather violent picture of the vision of the Apocalypse given in the first reading, as well as Saint Paul's text describing Christ crushing all his enemies with his feet, even if the last enemy he destroys is death.
Saint Luke shows us a very young daughter of Israel, barely pregnant, running through the mountains of Judea to greet her elderly cousin, herself pregnant in her old age. It is easy to recognise in Luke's account all the imagery of the transport of the Ark of the Covenant described in chapter 6 of the2nd Book of Samuel. Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant, the dwelling place of the Lord of Lords; and just as the first Ark was carried through the mountains of Judah to the house of Obed-edom of Gath, where it had been a source of blessings, so Mary races through the mountains of Judah, carrying the Son of God in her and bringing joy and grace to the house of Elizabeth, her cousin. And John the Baptist's movements of joy in his mother's womb reproduce David's dance before the Ark.
But let us not be too easily charmed by this freshness. For as soon as Mary intones her song of praise, it already takes on almost warlike tones, like the account in Revelation. He scatters the proud. He topples the mighty from their thrones... sends the rich away empty-handed. And that brings us back to the story of Revelation.
At the time when John, the seer from Patmos, was writing his Apocalypse, the Church was being persecuted. Many Christians were being put to death because they dared to confess their faith publicly and refused to deny Christ when forced to do so. The "signs" of the Dragon and the Woman clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet and her head crowned with twelve stars, represented, on the one hand, the Church and, on the other, the oppressive and persecuting powers. From every point of view, the Apocalypse was a subversive work. So was Mary's Magnificat, which proclaimed the final victory of the little ones, the weak and the oppressed. But beware! This Magnificat is not about the victory of one form of violence over another, but about the victory of God's love over human violence. His love extends from age to age. A maternal love, to which the New Testament often gives the name of mercy, translating an Aramaic root (rekhem) that designates the mother's womb. From Mary's song, we know very clearly which side God is on whenever human beings, his sons and daughters, are the victims of violence.
Just as the author of the Apocalypse reads the events of his time in the light of this revelation, so must we. In the early centuries, it was the Roman Empire that waged holy war, in the name of the religion of the State, against the new 'sects' - and Christianity was seen as one of them - which were seen as enemies of 'religion'. Today, except in a few rare corners of the world, Christians are not persecuted because they confess God. But on a universal scale, and perhaps more massively than ever before, the weak and the small are crushed by the great and the powerful. There is no shortage of witnesses to the faith. But when they are eliminated, it is usually because they stand up for and identify with the small and oppressed.
The last half-century has seen a number of totalitarian regimes that the world's powerful made do with until the day when it seemed appropriate to overthrow them by violence. But alongside these totalitarian regimes has developed another, on a global scale: the steamroller of a form of global economy that has never stopped driving the masses into poverty in order to enrich a minority. And, to make matters worse, it is the poorest of the poor who have to bear the burden of remedying the crises created by the economic system itself, which is now in disarray.
Faced with this situation, it is more urgent than ever that we be reminded of the message of the Magnificat, which is the victory of love over violence. If the witness of our brothers at Tibhirine continues to have such an impact throughout the world, it is because they embodied this message: caught between two forms of violence, they refused to choose between the two. Instead, they chose to show the same love to all people, whether they were on one side of the divide or the other. They paid for it with their lives. The same thing happened to Jesus of Nazareth.
The Woman of the Apocalypse withdrew into the desert. We did the same when we came to the monastery. When the first monks withdrew to the desert, it was not primarily to find a quiet intimacy with God, but rather to continue the fight with Christ and his Mother against the forces of evil: these forces that we find present in each of our hearts as soon as we are given the grace of a certain lucidity. With Mary, let us continue this struggle so that we too can be "assumed", like her and with her, into the glory and beatitude of her Son, the First Born. Then, like John the Baptist in his mother's womb, we will leap for joy and, like Mary, we will sing an eternal "Magnificat".
Armand VEILLEUX