Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews

We’re presented with two strikingly different pictures of Mary in the readings today. In the first, from the book of Revelation, there is a woman clothed with the sun and crowned with stars. In the Gospel reading, there’s a pregnant girl, glorifying God and singing a subversive song. Peasant girl to Queen of Heaven: it’s an improbable contrast, unsettling both to the protestant suspicion of Mary, and to the more extreme ends of catholic devotion, which risk obscuring Mary’s humanity. 

Yet these images belong together. It’s because Mary is the Jewish girl who said yes to God’s purposes in salvation that she is also crowned Queen of Heaven. It’s her ‘yes’ that enabled the gulf between humanity and God to be healed: in that moment, when humanity and divinity are joined at the conception of Jesus, the path to reconciliation with God is opened to us all. 

And this is John’s point in the reading from Revelation set for today. In just a few short verses he takes in the entire sweep of history, from creation and the fall to the restoration of all things in God’s kingdom. 

First, we’re told, the ark of the covenant appears. Lost after the destruction of the first temple by Babylon in the sixth century BC, this was the receptacle for the tablets of the 10 commandments, the place where God’s glory dwelt: first when the Israelites wandered in the desert, and then in the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s temple. The second temple, still standing in Jesus’ day but destroyed by the time Revelation was written, contained a Holy of Holies, but it was empty. So the Ark took on an apocalyptic character: it would be restored with the temple in the end times, when God would come to vindicate his people.  So when John sees in his vision the ark of the covenant appearing in the temple, he’s announcing that those end times are here: that God has acted to save his people – and that he’s done this through the woman who appears next in the vision: the woman who bears the child who will have authority over all things is herself the ark of the new covenant. And that’s there too in the Gospels: Luke, writing about the annunciation, draws on the Old Testament imagery of the glory of the Lord covering the ark of the covenant when he speaks of the Holy Spirit coming upon Mary and the power of the Most High overshadowing her. 

And as John uses the vision of the ark of the covenant to announce that, in Christ, the kingdom of God has come near, he also draws on other strands of Old Testament prophecy about the coming of the promised saviour. Psalm 2, used in the coronation of Israel’s kings in days of old, and reinterpreted in both Judaism and Christianity to foretell the coming of the Messiah, speaks of God’s son who will be given the nations as a heritage, and who will shepherd them with a rod of iron. In Revelation, the woman gives birth to a son who is ‘to rule all the nations with a rod of iron’. This child, John is telling us, is the one Israel has been longing for, the one through whom God would deliver his people. And as God acted to save Israel in the past, so he acts through the woman, the new Israel, to save his people now. She is the one Isaiah prophesied, the personification of Zion, who gives birth to the Saviour. Crowned with twelve stars, representing the twelve tribes of Israel, her child will answer the yearning for salvation not just of one people but of the whole of humanity. 

For in yet another layer of meaning, this woman is also portrayed as the new Eve. In Genesis, one of the results of the fall of Adam and Eve is that there would always be enmity between Eve and her children and the serpent, the symbol of sin and evil. In Revelation, the battle between humanity and the serpent is finally won through the child born to this new Eve. Through this child, humanity, mired in sin since the fall, is redeemed. But this isn’t simply a return to Eden, to a time of lost innocence, an ‘undoing’ of the fall. This is a new creation; the salvation God offers isn’t an obliteration of what’s gone before, but its redemption: all is gathered up and healed in the love of God. 

John kaleidoscopes the whole swathe of salvation, from pre-history to the end of time, and piles up image upon image (there are far more in the passage than those I’ve outlined). And all this could carry the danger of making Mary seem unreal and remote: an archetype, a useful cipher for making theological points. But the Queen of heaven, crowned with the stars, is the flesh and blood woman who gave birth to Jesus, who brought him up, taught him and nurtured him, who wept at the foot of the cross and received his dead body into her arms. The heavenly glory she is given through her son comes as vindication of her earthly life of obedience to God’s call and of faithfulness to Christ.

And as we celebrate Mary, that’s the promise this feast holds out to us all. The Western Church celebrates her feast day as her Assumption into heaven; the Eastern Church her Dormition, or falling asleep: I think we need a healthy dose of Anglican agnosticism about the specifics of her passage to heavenly glory, but whatever we call it, in Mary we’re given a pledge of the fullness of life that will be ours in the resurrection. Ark of the Covenant, new Israel, new Eve – Mary holds out God’s promise of redemption to us all.

And although the circumstances of her life, her role, are unique, that doesn’t mean she’s remote from us. We too are called to follow the path of courageous obedience to God, to be bearers of Christ in a broken world. With her, we’re called to bring the needs of the world to Christ in prayer, and by our lives to point to him as the one in whom the deepest longings of humanity are met.  In Mary we’re given a foretaste of our destiny. And so to honour her is to affirm our belief in the resurrection, in the way to the Father’s heart opened up by Christ. And so it’s right and proper on this feast day that we should say, with Gabriel and with all generations, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’.