Surely all generations will call her blessed

A sermon for Assumption, from Fr Russell Goulbourne.

Can you believe it: 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the first flight of the Airbus A380, the first upload to YouTube, and the launch of Google Maps.

Can you imagine life without them now?

No less momentously, 2025 also marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of the so-called Seattle Statement by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). The statement draws together the fruits of five years’ work, formulated in a document entitled ‘Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ’.

It’s momentous because it is the first major statement on Mary agreed by a formal international dialogue between two Christian world communions – in this case Anglicans and Roman Catholics.

Getting any Christians – and not just Christians of different communions – to agree about Mary isn’t easy. Because the sad truth is that for centuries Mary has been the source of much division between Christians.

For some Christians – including some Anglicans – Mary gets in the way of Christ. And those Christians find the feast we’re keeping today – the feast of the Assumption of Mary – particularly difficult because there’s no account in the Bible of what happens to Mary at the end of her earthly life, and because it seems to exalt Mary at the expense of Christ. Indeed, as one sceptical priest friend of mine once put it to me: “The Assumption is the most aptly named dogma of all.”

And so the ARCIC statement of 2005 is all the more remarkable because in it Anglicans and Roman Catholics agreed: (1) that being faithful to the Bible necessarily means giving due attention to Mary; (2) that Mary is a model of holiness, faith and obedience for all Christians; and (3) that Mary was prepared by grace to be the mother of our Redeemer, by whom she herself was redeemed and received into glory.

And in that last statement we hear a concise account of the truth that we celebrate today and that has been celebrated since the earliest days of the Church: that Mary was redeemed by her son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, and received by him into glory.

As the first person to say yes to Christ and to love Christ – and to love him completely and utterly – Mary has the singular privilege of being the first person to experience the thing for which we all hope, as fellow pilgrims with her: the joy of resurrection life in God’s presence. We see in Mary a pledge and a foretaste of the kind of heavenly life that we ourselves hope for as our destiny with God. As we celebrate the Assumption of Mary into heaven – her being received into heaven, body and soul, at the end of her earthly life, and having a share in the resurrection life – we’re celebrating the hope which we as Christians all have: that one day we too will be received into glory and will share in the resurrection life.

Mary is the icon of what redeemed life in Christ looks like – and as we look at that icon, so too we see Christ. For Mary – in her earthly life and in her assumption into heaven – points unfailingly to Christ. That’s why one of the names for Mary in the Eastern Church is the Hodegetria, meaning ‘the one who points the way’. Mary shows us how to love and be faithful to Christ – and in today’s feast she shows us where love and faithfulness will, by God’s grace, lead us too. The Assumption of Mary points us to the new life in Christ which overcomes all our death, and in which God is willing us all to share.

The good news for us – the good news for us to proclaim to all the world – is that the destiny of Mary – this young woman who first gave her life to the Lord and who enjoyed the faithful promise of her Son – can be the destiny of each and every one of us, if we follow her example of love and faithfulness – such is the dream of God, such is the longing of God, for each and every one of us. Mary becomes the model for us and the pattern of our life: she heard the word of God and kept it; and the destiny that is hers will, we pray, be ours too. What is hers is our hope: that the promise of Jesus, already fulfilled in her, will be ours too.

In Mary we see the fullness of all that Christ came to bring – God descending to become one of us, bringing divinity into our humanity, and in the resurrection and ascension bringing humanity into the heart of God. What we’re celebrating today is nothing less than the Christian promise of redemption, which is the very heart of the Gospel: the risen and ascended Christ, who promised his disciples that he was going to heaven to prepare a place for them, takes his mother into heaven, where she is glorified in him – and that shows us in a concrete way the hope that we all have, through baptism, for our own bodily resurrection.

We celebrate the Assumption of Mary because we celebrate the risen life of Christ – and because Mary shows us what it means to take God at his word and trust in God’s promises – because Mary shows us what it means to be a Christian.

And that’s why all generations will call her blessed.