Some
things can’t help but spread. Laughter
would be one, hiccups definitely another.
True goodness is the same way, and that’s true in any field: the
greatest musician isn’t the diva or divo who tuts about their accompanist’s
tempo, but someone who makes everyone around them play better when they pick up
their instruments; just as a great athlete doesn’t hog the ball, but raises the
play of the whole team. Virtue’s the
same way too: the virtuous person is contagious with goodness and walks around
lighting fires of zeal and coating everything with a soothing balm of hope and
patience. And if that’s what virtue
does, then that’s what resurrection does too.
Resurrection is the fruit of the greatness of Christ’s love, it’s what
happens when a human life was lived so perfectly, so holily, so virtuously that
someone dared to love us enough not just to die for us, but loved us so much
that not even death, death at our hands, could keep him from being with
us. The fiery furnace of Christ’s love
erupts in resurrection. And it spreads.
It spreads to Mary, which is what our feast in particular celebrates today, and
it spreads more broadly still; it spreads to us, which is what we celebrate at
each and every Mass.
Some of
the Corinthians Paul was writing too didn’t believe this; didn’t believe in the
resurrection of the dead. They believed
in Christ’s resurrection it seems, they could celebrate that, but they limited
God’s love: raising one man from the dead?
That was enough. They thought it
was an anomalous exception, like a single stone thrown into a lake, that soon
returns to rest, resolutely immobile.
But, no: the resurrection ripples out, and the ripples raise us up. Death has been conquered; the seemingly
immobile rock has been rolled away.
Paul
describes Christ’s resurrection as the first fruits; that’s the beginning of
the harvest and the best of the harvest, but to be the beginning means there
must be more to come. He is ready to be
nourishment for us. We are being readied. We are works in progress, trying to be bread
for the world, but finding ourselves coming up short. And that’s part of why we
need Mary; why we need this Feast of the Assumption. We need an example of what does ripples can
do: Mary too was raised. Mary was assumed
body and soul into heaven before her body could see decay, because of her Son’s
love for her. The ripples raised her up and that kindles our hope that they
will raise us up too.
Why does
Mary get this special honor? Surely, her lack of attachment to sin is
important. But, also, Jesus loved in a fully human way, and that means having a
special love for his mother. That doesn’t mean he loves anyone else less (that’s
not how love works), but there’s still something special about his love for his
mother. I remember hearing more than one interview with an athlete or musician who
comes from poverty and suddenly gains a huge contract and then, when asked, “What
are you going to do with all that money,” replies, at least in part, “Build a
house for my mother.”
Jesus does
that and even more. At the moment of her death (right before or right after, we
don’t know), he embraced her. And there’s a beautiful symmetry to that, because
Mary was the first to embrace Christ in his incarnation. In her pregnancy, Mary
embraced Christ in probably the most profound way one human being can embrace
another.
Pope
Francis once said that every verse of scripture is first gift and then demand,
and I think we could say the same about the Church’s feasts. We start our
celebration of the Assumption by marveling at Christ’s embrace of Mary, when he
brought her to be with him in heaven, and we let our celebration, our wonder,
our joy at that build up our hope that such an embrace awaits us too. But then
we look at Mary. We look at how she embraced Christ. We look at how she went
out to embrace her cousin Elizabeth. We hear of the topsy-turvy world of which
Mary sang in our gospel reading, a world that prioritizes the lowly and the
hungry. And we ask: if we dream of being embraced at our death the way Jesus
embraced Mary, how are we preparing for that? How are we embracing Christ now?
In prayer? In the poor served? With our resources, for whom are we building a
home?
Christ’s
embrace is not something that can be earned. We don’t build up enough “I helped
people” points to buy our way into his to-be-embraced list. But we are invited
to prepare for that final embrace here and now. To let ourselves be caught up
in the waves of his selfless loving resurrection, because it’s exactly those
waves on which we will be lifted up, if we just stop clinging to the false
security of the shore of whatever it is that prevents us from living the kind
of lives of open embrace that we see in both Christ and Mary, the embraced embracer.
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