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Today
we see hope. Today we see perfection to the end. Today we see the mother of
Jesus ascending to heaven, body and soul, at the end of her earthly life.
Today
we celebrate the solemnity of the Assumption of Mary. What a blessing that this
Holy Day of Obligation (or Opportunity) falls on a Sunday this year.
This
tradition in our faith goes back to the 6th century. It became dogma
in the Church in the mid-20th Century when Pope Pius the Twelfth
exercised the concept of papal infallibility in the apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus.
World
War II had just ended. The brutal war and Holocaust had crushed the human
spirit. The Pope delivered the good news about the Assumption of Mary on
November 1st, 1950.
The dogma teaches that the Virgin Mary "having completed the
course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory."
She was the Immaculate
Conception at the beginning of her life. And experienced the Assumption at the
end of her life. This is what our Church teaches.
I know. I know. Some
struggle with the concept of papal infallibility.
When we were going through
the belongings of my wife Mary’s parents a few years back in Spokane shortly
after her mother’s passing we found her parent’s wedding certificate.
It had been torn in half and
taped back together again.
That’s when I heard the
story.
Mary’s mother and father
were married a few years after the Pope invoked papal infallibility in the
matter of Mary’s Assumption.
Marge was Lutheran, Jack a
devout Catholic.
The story goes, shortly
after being married, in one of their first arguments as a married couple, Marge
said, “I don’t believe the Pope is infallible.”
In that moment, Jack found
their wedding certificate, and in anger, tore it in half.
Needless to say, the concept
of papal infallibility was controversial then. It may still be controversial to
some today.
A decade or so later, Marge
converted to Catholicism.
Marge was a model of servant
leadership to her children, having served for over 30 years as the director of
the chemistry lab at Deaconess Hospital in Spokane at a time when few women
were working fulltime outside of the home. All the while raising a family of three.
There is something divine
about servant leaders.
I know my wife Mary was
shaped by her mother’s example.
Perhaps the most significant
contribution the Virgin Mary made in our world was raising her son Jesus to be a
servant leader. And look what he did with it.
A servant leader serves
others and not themselves.
For the servant leader, it
is never about themselves, but about others. And Mary was the perfect teacher
for her son.
Catholic
writer Henri Nouwen said this about servant leadership shown by Jesus and
taught by his mother.
“The
servant leader is the leader who is being led to unknown, undesirable, and
painful places.
The
way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our
world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the
cross . . .
It is
not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and
humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest…
(A servant
leader goes to) “places where we would rather not go…”
A
parent’s love is perhaps the most powerful example of servant leadership.
Ask
any parent, ask any mother about the sacrifices made in this life toward the
wellbeing of a child. A mother’s love is one of the most powerful bonds known
to humankind.
In a
bittersweet moment in the movie “The Passion of the Christ,” Mary sees her son
struggling with His cross on the streets of Jerusalem, falling a second time.
She’s
terrified by what she sees, frozen with fear.
The
Apostle John encourages her to go to her son. But she cannot move.
In
that moment she daydreams of a time when Jesus as a little boy fell down,
hurting himself and how she ran to comfort him.
With
that strong memory, she goes running toward her son to comfort him in his agony,
goes running toward the cross.
As
she tenderly embraces Him, saying, “I’m here.”
Jesus
then says, “See, mother, I make all things new.”
Mary
modeled for Jesus what a servant leader looks like: to go to “places where
we would rather not go,” to selflessly serve the needs of others, to help
others carry their crosses, to love with an unending reservoir of compassion.
This
is the way of Christ. This is something we can thank his mother Mary for
teaching Jesus. And her reward from God for her efforts in this life was to
experience the resurrection at the exact moment of her death.
We
may not experience it the way the Virgin Mary experienced it. But Jesus
promised all his faithful we, too, can look forward to the resurrection someday.
All
he asks of us is that we model our lives as servant leaders to the people of
God.
This,
my sisters and brothers, is the key that unlocks the door to heaven.
