Falling Asleep of the BVM – 15th August 2021: St. Luke 1, 46-55
Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
Today the church universal commemorates a feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This celebration is kept by the Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican traditions.
On this date the Orthodox speak of the Eternal Sleep of the Mother of God, and Blessed Mary is referred to in Orthodoxy as Panaghia – (All holy). The Roman Church celebrates what they now call the Assumption, a dogma that is barely 200 years old as currently understood. In Greece this date is always a public holiday (and for those outside Greece, who may not know it – there are many for whom today is their ‘name day’ such as those named Panaiotis (Panos for short) or Maria.
On this date, theologically, the Anglican tradition is more akin to the East than to Rome, and for centuries since the Reformation we have commemorated the Dormition, the ‘falling asleep’ of the BVM.
Blessed Mary is human mother of the incarnate Jesus, the fully human Jesus. We must remember however that in Christian theology this same Jesus is also fully divine, so Mary is mother of Jesus, but at the same time Mother of God, as Jesus of Nazareth is both fully human and fully divine. It is on account of this that Blessed Mary is worthy of the titles ascribed to her by the Church. So she is Panaghia (All Holy) in all three traditions, even if only the Orthodox use this distinctive Greek title.
In the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin, we learn something through her, as the Theotokos, Bearer of our Lord and God, about our own calling to inhabit and participate in the divine life. In this feast today there is a message about the continuity of our everyday earthly lives, into the life that does not come to an end. In our faith we believe that when we die our lives are not ended, but transformed, changed. As we have worshipped God in Christ here on earth, so when we pass from earthly life to heavenly life, we are infused with the company of all faithful believers, living and departed.
As Anglicans we may not necessarily have been exposed to a high profile of Blessed Mary, and if you are nurtured in some parts of the Anglican tradition you might even be forgiven for thinking that the Anglican Church ‘doesn’t do Mary’. Yet this would be an entirely wrong assessment of our own tradition. To neglect Blessed Mary would be a willful rejection of scriptural witness, and very specifically the first two chapters of St. Luke’s gospel where we are informed of ‘Mary’s first introduction into the divine story’ to use a phrase of the great Anglican priest and theologian, Austin Farrer. (Interpretation and Belief, SPCK 1976, p107).
Although the reformed Church of England excised all excessive cultic worship of Mary that had accrued in the mediaeval western church, and never adopted the Roman Catholic dogmatic statements of her Assumption into Heaven, nor the official title ‘Immaculate Conception’, nonetheless our annual holy calendar marks the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 2nd February, the Feast we know as Candlemass; the Annunciation on March 25th; her visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth on May 31st; her Dormition today on the 15 of August; September 8th on which we commemorate the Birth of Mary; and December 8th when we mark her conception.
Our liturgical year is marked with commemorations of Mary, thanks be to God, for God chose her to be the means by which the mystery of the birth, life, and death of Christ became possible in the divine economy. The womb and the tomb give birth to our renewal as children of God.
The great Anglican hymn writer and ‘non-juring’ Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas Ken (1637-1711), wrote a beautiful hymn which begins “Her Virgin eyes saw God incarnate born”. He was one of the seven Church of England bishops who refused to publish James II Declaration of Indulgence (hence the title ‘non-juring’). Bishop Ken was no supporter of Roman Catholicism, yet he penned this beautiful hymn about Blessed Mary. The final stanza runs as follows,
Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced,
Next to his throne her Son his Mother placed;
And here below, now she’s of heaven possest,
All generations are to call her blest.
Mary has her especial place in the divine economy of our salvation in Christ. Austin Farrer says, ‘when we think of Mary, or of any saint departed this life, we are thinking of an actual citizen of Paradise.’ (ibid p101). As the church, we are the Body of Christ, and so Mary is a co-citizen with us in that Body, and thus we do not expel her from our Anglican theology, nor from our liturgical and prayerful practice. Her place is well described in one of the prayers of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, the influential 17th century Bishop of Ely, then of Winchester.
‘Commemorating the all holy, immaculate, more than blessed Mother of God and ever virgin Mary, with all saints, let us commend ourselves and one another and all our life unto Christ God: unto Thee, O Lord, for unto Thee is due glory, honour and worship’. (Preces Privatae of Lancelot Andrewes, Methuen 1958, p85.) These are none other than the great titles ascribed to Mary by the churches of East and West alike.
As Anglicans we may not grant Mary the high profile in the way the Orthodox and Roman Catholics do, but we fool ourselves if we think her imprint is not present in the life of our church; if we think that her place in the Body of Christ is not unique, and therefore worthy of honour; if we think that she is simply incidental to the work of salvation that God is doing in Christ. Again, Austin Farrer offers us a worthy reflection on this.
‘If she is loved, it is because she is; she has her place in the Body of Christ and it is a place no other creature can share. Christ is worshipped for what he uniquely is in each of his sainted members; the relation of Mary to Jesus is an endless subject of fruitful contemplation, and her will is a handle to take hold of the will of God. Her glory is that she is the virgin mother of God; what more can be added to it?’ (Interpretation and Belief, p123).
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