When people are angry, suffering or afraid, they often lose their ordinary abilities at being reasonable, and can even embrace what in good times are extreme and crazy behaviors in order to endure the immediate and inescapable pain of anger, hurt or fear. Apocalyptic literature in sacred scripture provides a glimpse of such fantastic imaginations in an era of persecution. Some of the imagery is remarkably consoling; some is fantastically frightening and bizaar. All of it was originally meant to assist those struggling with the proximity of tremendous pain, fear and even likely death. The Book of the Revelation of John (aka The Apocalypse; the word “apocalypsis” is a Greek word for “revelation”) was composed in the mid-90s AD, during a local persecution of Christians on the island called Patmos. It was addressed to and circulated among the Seven Churches (Christian communities in seven principal cities) of Asia Minor. The technicolor and surround-sound images used are meant to take the book’s audience out of their painful circumstance and move them along, to survive, to believe, and to trust in God ever more fully.

Today’s first reading from Revelation begins with God in Heaven doing the most extraordinary thing imaginable: revealing the Divine Self, showing the perfect Ark of the Divine Covenant. While technically indescribably, yet no longer disguised, God can be appreciated in total fulness and glory. In this text the woman clothed with the sun is the spouse of God, the heavenly (the New) Israel. Catholics have long interpreted her as Mary Theotokos. Indeed, as spouse of God she is Theotokos, mother of God’s son, the child in her womb. The huge red dragon is an image of the ancient mythic beast often used to portray evil from the days of Babylonian mythology, through Canaanite era and into Greco-Roman mythology. In Greek mythology, Python (a great mythological snake) was sent to devour the soon-to-be-born child of Zeus. When the child, Apollo, was finally born, he in turn killed Python. In late 1^st Century Roman pagan religious politics, several Roman emperors associated themselves with Apollo, so John the Christian Seer proposed that the genuine messiah is the Real Savior against all mythic evil, including Roman paganism.

In any event, today’s feast on the Catholic calendar interprets the persona of Mary Theotokos into this imaginary vision. She and her child are saved by God’s direct intervention. A new golden era is announced “Now ... salvation ... power ... kingdom ... authority...” Mary is part of the story of salvation, the human participation of the highest and best sort, of responding “yes” to God’s offer of salvation in spite of the messiness and danger of living life fully. Mary chose to live in confident faith of God’s power to save. This episode in the Apocalypse is a vision, so it occurs outside of the time and space in which we live, in an imaginatively spiritual realm where all is in an “eternal now.” So, the mythic battle between God and Evil have occurred already and God has definitively won. There is no future battle yet to come. Certainly there is no chance that Evil might yet prevail over God’s Goodness. God already was, is now, and will always be, triumphant! This certitude was intended by John to give profound consolation to the Christians of Asia Minor in the 90s AD when they experienced a very violent period of persecution. It must have truly been effective because the early church continued to make copies of the book.

In the second reading from 1^st Corinthians, the conflict between God’s Goodness and all other inferior evil powers seems to be a future event. However, Paul is writing clearly from his current, human spacio-temporal chronology, a chronology in which the Second Coming is a future event in Earthly chronological time. Paul’s eschatology has a linear quality to it. He truly believed it to be so, but it is also a typically human approach to the mysterious reality of how and what God has done, is doing (in Paul’s present time), and is yet to do, so as to bring humanity along in this grand process of Salvation. After nearly 20 Christian centuries, we no longer await the Second Coming of the Risen Jesus in quite the same clear and historical terms as did our earliest Christian ancestors. We imagine the end times (the Eschaton) in terms of a much larger universe and a much bigger Divine Mystery always hoping for a long and blessed life before our own individual deaths.

The Gospel for today is that very romantic narrative of the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, the first action undertaken by the youthful Mary once she had the beginnings of the idea that Salvation was at hand. In a sense, this was the first human scene in the Salvation story after the Angel Gabriel departed the scene. Mary, in effect, the first evangelist, went in happy service to Elizabeth, the miraculous mother of the final Old Testament and the First New Testament Prophet, John the Baptist. Mary’s task in loving assistance to the faithful and sage Elizabeth was the first act, just as the destruction of Evil by God in today’s first lesson was the final act in the drama we might call Salvation History.

In any event, Mary’s “Assumption,” i.e., her being taken up directly to heaven without her body undergoing the corruption which death normally brings, might be considered an extraordinary act of honor, affection and gratitude towards her by God for having been faithful and courageous enough to have said “yes” at the Annunciation. The event is certainly a measure of the highest esteem in which the Church has held Mary since the early Christian centuries. Today’s remembered event is the final act of Mary’s Earthly life. Anything else that occurs in the true Presence of God in the Kingdom is beyond our physical perception! But, all this is a prayerful facet of our hope in Resurrection and Life Eternal!

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now, and at the hour of our death!