AUGUST
15Th
The
Feast of Assumption
We
are celebrating the feast of Assumption which means that God has
accepted Mary’s gift of her life. Just as the Father is pleased by
Jesus’ self-offering and raised him from the dead, so is also
pleased with Mary’s self-offering and raised her body and soul into
heaven.
Thus we have been given the grace of renewing our love for Mary, of
admiring her and of praising her for the “great things” which the
Almighty worked through and brought about in her.
In
contemplating the Virgin Mary we are granted another grace: the
ability to see our own life too in depth. Yes, because our own daily
existence, with its problems and hopes, receives light from the
Mother of God, from her spiritual journey, from her destiny of glory:
a journey and a destination that can and must become, in a certain
way, our own journey and our own destination.
It
is an important feast I would like to reflect in particular on an
image of “The
ark.”
In the Revelation we can see “God’s temple in heaven was opened,
and the Ark of his Covenant was seen within his temple”
(Rev
11:19). What is the meaning of the ark? What appears?
In
the Old Testament, it is the symbol of God’s presence in the midst
of his people. However, the symbol has given way to reality. The New
Testament tells us that the true Ark of the Covenant is a living
person: the Virgin Mary. God does not dwell in a piece of furniture,
he dwells in a person, in a heart: Mary, the One who carried in her
womb the eternal Son of God made man, Jesus our Lord and Saviour.
In
the ark as we know the two Tables of the Mosaic Law were kept. The
Law expressed God’s wish to preserve the Covenant with his People,
pointing out the conditions for being faithful to the pact with God
in order to conform to God’s will and thereby also to our own
profound truth.
Mary
is the Ark of the Covenant because she welcomed Jesus within her; she
welcomed within her the living Word, the whole content of God's will,
of God’s truth; she welcomed within her the One who is the new and
eternal Covenant, which culminated in the offering of his Body and
his Blood: a body and blood received through Mary.
Therefore
Christian piety rightly turns to Our Lady in the litanies in her
honour, invoking her as Foederis
Arca,
that
is, “the Ark of the Covenant”, the Ark of God’s presence, the
Ark of the Covenant of love which God desired to establish with the
whole of humanity, in Christ, once and for all.
The
Book of Revelation also indicates another important aspect of Mary’s
reality. As the living Ark of the Covenant, she has an extraordinary
destiny of glory because she is so closely united to the Son whom she
welcomed in faith and generated in the flesh, as to share fully in
his glory in Heaven. The greatness of Mary, Mother of God, full of
gracefully docile to the action of the Holy Spirit, already lives in
God’s Heaven with her whole being, body and soul.
God
chose her as a true “Ark of the Covenant”, as the One who
continues to generate and to give Christ the Saviour to humanity, as
the One who in Heaven shares in the fullness of the glory and enjoys
the very happiness of God and, at the same time, also invites us to
become, in our modest way, an “ark” in which the Word of God is
present, transformed and quickened by his presence, a place of the
presence of God, so that men and women may find God’s closeness in
the other person, and thus live in communion with God and know the
reality of Heaven.
On
this Solemnity of the Assumption let us look to Mary: She opens us to
hope, to a future full of joy and teaches us the way to achieve it:
welcoming in faith: by welcoming her Son with faith; by never losing
the friendship with him but letting ourselves be illuminated and
guided by his word; by following him every day, even in moments when
we feel that our crosses are growing heavy.
Mary,
Ark of the Covenant which is in the sanctuary of Heaven, show us with
luminous clarity that we are on our way towards our true Home, the
communion of joy and peace with God. Amen!
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