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Queen of Heaven

Coronation of the Virgin : 19 August 2012  : 1 Corinthians 15: 20-27 , 2 Peter 1: 16-19

"Hugh, have you noticed that Anglican clergymen with an exaggerated devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary tend to have tastes and interests that are less than masculine?" So spoke Fr Silvanus Berry, Prior of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield, and my spiritual director at the time. From what I have observed of some of the more extreme sections of Anglo-Catholicism there does seem to be some truth in the observation.

When it comes to Marian devotion I find myself taking it in my stride in a pretty matter of fact kind of a way, without being able to raise myself to heights of devotional excitement. But last year I had an insight into why some Christians are very attached to Mary.

My son Tim and I took the train out of Barcelona, and then rode on a funicular railway up a mountain to get to the monastery church where our Lady of Montserrat lives. The mountain top vista alone conveys a sense of the numinous, and when you enter the darkened church another dimension is added. You join a long que to climb up behind the high altar to eventually have a minute or two in the company of the jet black statue of the virgin, with a gold crown on her head. You say a prayer, kiss the glass case, which encloses her, and descend. Our Lady of Montserrat is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beyond compare.

So it was that when the Spanish Bishops went to Vatican 2 they were intent on her having a document all to herself that ramped up her theological and spiritual privileges. But calmer more common sense voices prevailed, and instead a section on Mary was tacked on to the end of Lumen Gentium, the famous dogmatic constitution on the Church. It is a pretty levelheaded piece of theology, which includes these encouraging words for non-catholic readers. "Let the faithful remember moreover that true devotion consists neither in fruitless and passing emotion, nor in a certain vain credulity."

This new mood of sensitivity to the wider Christian world has been a great help in trying to overcome the regrettable reality that Mary has become an ecumenical stumbling block in a divided western church. An Anglican commentary on the last Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission report on Mary put it well when he wrote:

Mary herself, whatever her present role in heaven, must be saddened to know that she is a focus for disagreement, and has been used as a badge of division between Christians. She surely will be rejoicing that efforts are being made to remedy this.

This second ARCIC report on Mary is a magnificent attempt at putting things right as it explores the deeper meaning of the Assumption of Mary, which the western church celebrated last Wednesday, and which we keep today as the Coronation of the Virgin. A difficulty is that Scripture makes no reference to the circumstances surrounding the death of Mary. Speculation about her immediate entry into heaven on her death developed out of the intense welling up of devotion to Mary that came to be a feature of the Church from the 5th century on.

ARCIC 2 recalls the Old Testament incident in which Elijah was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind, apparently before his biological death. It also points to the way in which in Luke’s gospel the penitent thief on the cross is promised an immediate place with Jesus in paradise. In other words he would be with Jesus in the life of heaven immediately, without any pause, or intermediate stage of waiting for Divine judgement.

These Scriptural precedents are used as a way in to thinking about the destiny of Mary, but in such a way that the Assumption comes to be seen not so much as a statement about her body after death, as being rather about the destiny we share with her to live in the heavenly places in the Kingdom of God. I have called this sermon "Queen of heaven", because it is a helpful way of thinking about her role as encourager and pathfinder to our arrival in the halls of heaven.

The last time we see Mary on the pages of Scripture is in the book of Acts when she is the upper room surrounded by the disciples on the day of Pentecost, as the Holy Spirit descends in power on them to form the Church. Clearly she had a place of honour in the infant Christian community, and appears to be more than just their mascot - somehow she seems to be a kind of gathering point.

The early Christian community recognised the exceptionality of Mary. There was an extra dimension to her that enabled someone who was probably barely a teenager to say yes to God’s audacious and mind-blowing initiative. As supplier of his maternal chromosomes, his parenting mentor, and putter up with his unsettling adult career, Mary’s unique relationship to Jesus had developed her as an extraordinary person of faith. In a sense she is the first and greatest Christian. The Roman Catholic Church has tried to talk about this x factor in Mary by attaching the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to her. It does not find favour with Anglicans because of its peculiar view of original sin and human sexuality.

But ARCIC 2 found a brilliant way around this stumbling block by using the doctrine of predestination, pivoting off Romans 8: 23-30, "Those whom God foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. And those whom he called he also justified and those whom he justified he also glorified." So this doctrine, more commonly associated with that Presbyterian hero John Calvin, is used to argue that in view of her vocation to be the mother of the Holy One, Christ’s redeeming work reached "back" in Mary to the depths of her being, and to her earliest beginnings. So Mary’s yes to God had been shaped and formed down the generations of her family.

It is this predestining that makes Mary the first and greatest Christian, and that fits her for the life of heaven without any need for probationary delay. And so she is able to point to the meaning of resurrection for the Christian community.

The resurrection of Jesus was the most stupendous miracle of the New Testament, God’s yes to Jesus that overcame all human no’s to him. But what did it mean for others?

According to Jewish ideas about resurrection around at the time if God’s messiah had come, had been done to death by recalcitrant human beings, and had been raised from the dead by God’s mighty energies, then this must mean that human history must be about to end as God brought in the day of judgement, had the last word on every human life, and instituted the Kingdom of God. But God had apparently changed his mind about that, had held back the trip wire of the end of human history, and had decided to let the human story go on for a little while yet.

Why had he done that, and where did that leave those who hoped in his Son Jesus Christ? Mary in a sense helped to answer that question. As one of the first Christians to die, and as the one whose intimate connection to Jesus must assure her of a place in paradise with him, it now became clear that the Church was living in an in between time, a time of patience on the part of God who would hold open the tension between the beginning and the end of the human story, so that a heavenly harvest could be gathered in of those who accepted the good news about Jesus. Mary was the pioneer and pointer to what was the goal of God’s strategy of salvation.

Jesus had opened a door through which she had now entered, and through which we are also invited to follow her. And having got there first she takes a lively interest in the rest of the Church who seek to come after her. She is in touch with her Son about the best interests of the Church on earth as it strives to become the Church triumphant in heaven. As first arrival in heaven, along with the penitent thief, and the martyr Stephen, she becomes Queen of heaven, present in an honoured way amongst the friends of Jesus, just as she was on the day of Pentecost. We shall see her there, and rejoice to be with her, just as I did at Montserrat last year.