"The Assumption" by Monsignor Ronald Knox

The Assumption | Mgr. Ronald Knox | From Pastoral and Occasional
Sermons | August 15th | Ignatius Insight




A cave Jeremias found there, in which he set down tabernacle and ark and incense-altar,
and stopped up the entrance behind him. There were some that followed; no time
they lost in coming up to mark the spot, but find it they could not.—2
Machabees 2:5-6.



After this, God's heavenly temple was thrown open, and the ark of the covenant
was plain to view, standing in his temple.—Apocalypse 11:19.



The Son of God came to earth to turn our hearts away from earth, Godwards. The


material world in which we live was, by his way of it, something immaterial; it
didn't matter. We were not to be always worrying about our clothes being
shabby, or wondering where our next meal was to come from; the God who fed the
sparrows and clothed the lilies would see to all that. We were not to resent the
injuries done to us by our neighbours; the aggressor was welcome to have a slap
at the other cheek, and when he took away our greatcoat he was to find that we
had left our coat inside it. Life itself, the life we know, was a thing of little
value; it was a cheap bargain, if we lost life here to attaIn the life
hereafter. There was a supernatural world, interpenetrating, at a higher level,
the world of our experience; it has its own laws, the only rule we were to live
by, its own prizes, which alone were worth the winning. All that he tried to
teach us; and we, intent on our own petty squabbles, our sordid struggle for
existence, cold-shouldered him at first, and then silenced his protest with a
cross.



His answer was to rise from the dead; and then, for forty days in the world's
history, that supernatural life which he had preached to us flourished and
functioned under the conditions of earth. A privileged few saw, with mortal
eyes, the comings and goings of immortality, touched with their hands the
impalpable. For forty days; then, as if earth were too frail a vessel to contain
the mystery, the tension was suddenly relaxed. He vanished behind a cloud; the
door of the supernatural shut behind him, and we were left to the contemplation
of this material world, drab and barren as ever.



What was the first thing the apostles saw when they returned from the mount of
the Ascension to the upper room? "Together with Mary"—is it
only an accident that the Mother of God is mentioned just here, by name, and
nowhere else outside the gospels? The Incarnate Word had left us, as silently
as he came to us, leaving no trace behind him of his passage through time. No
trace? At least, in the person of his blessed Mother, he had bequeathed to us a
keepsake, a memory. She was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, the new Eve
of the new Adam. That body of hers, still part of the material order of things,
had housed and suckled God. As long as she lived, there would still be a link,
a golden link, between this lower earth and Paradise. As long as she lived; and
even if it was God's will that she, Eve's daughter, should undergo the death
that was Eve's penalty, the penalty she had never incurred, her mortal remains
would still be left with us, an echo from the past, an influence on our lives. We
men, since we are body and soul, do honour even to the lifeless bodies which
have housed the dead; Napoleon rests in the Invalides, Lenin at Moscow. The day
would come when there would be pilgrimages from all over the world to the shrines
of Peter and Paul at Rome, of James at Compostela. Was it not reasonable to
hope that somewhere, at Jerusalem, perhaps, or at Ephesus, we should be
privileged to venerate the mortal remains of her through whom salvation came to
us? Or perhaps at Bethlehem, Bethlehem-Ephrata, this new Ark of God would rest,
as the ark rested of old; "And now, at Ephrata, we have heard tidings of
what we looked for" [1] —the old tag from the Psalms should still
ring true.













































God disposed otherwise. Jewish tradition recorded that when Jerusalem was
destroyed by the armies of Babylon, the prophet Jeremias took the ark of God
away from the city, and buried it in some secret cleft of the rock; it was
never seen again. Never again, except by St John, in his vision on the isle of
Patmos; he saw the ark of God, but in heaven. And so it was with this new Ark
of God, the virgin body that had been his resting-place. When and where she
passed away from this earth, or in what manner, nobody can tell us for certain.
But we know where she is. When Elias was carried up into heaven, the sons of
the prophets at Jericho asked Eliseus if they might go out in search of him;
"it may be", they said, "the spirit of the Lord has carried him
off and left him on some hill-top or in some cleft of the valleys." He
consented grudgingly, and when they returned from their fruitless errand,
greeted them with the words; "Did I not tell you not to send?" [2] So
it is with the body of the blessed Virgin: nowhere in Christendom will you hear
the rumour of it. So many churches, all over the world, eagerly claiming to possess
the relics of this or that saint; who shall tell us whether John the Baptist
sleeps at Amiens, or at Rome? But never of our Lady; and if any of us still
hoped to find that inestimable treasure, the Holy Father has called off the
search, only the other day. We know where her body is; it is in heaven.



Of course, we knew it all along. For myself, I have never doubted the doctrine
of the Assumption since I heard it preached forty-four years ago, in an
Anglican church over at Plymouth. You see, we get it all wrong about body and
soul, simply because our minds are dominated by matter. We think it the most
natural thing in the world that soul and body should be separated after death;
that the body should remain on earth and the soul go to heaven, once it is
purged and assoiled. But it isn't a natural thing at all; soul and body were
made for one another, and the temporary divorce between them is something out
of the way, something extraordinary, occasioned by the Fall. In our blessed
Lady, not born under the star of that defeat, human nature was perfectly
integrated; body and soul belonged to one another, as one day, please God,
yours and mine will.



Long ago, in those fields of Bethlehem, Ruth had gleaned in the footsteps of
her beloved; and he, secretly, had given charge to the reapers to drop handfuls
of corn on purpose, so that she might fill her bosom the sooner. So he, whose
reapers are the angels, would leave for his blessed Mother a special portion of
those graces that were to enrich mankind. The child-bearing which brought, to
us others, redemption from the fault of our first parents should bring, to her,
exemption; the empty tomb, which assures us that our bodies will rise at the
judgment, was for her the earnest of an immediate resurrection; Christ the
first-fruits, and who should glean them, but she? For that, heaven is the richer,
earth the poorer. We can go to Lourdes, and offer adoration in the place where
her feet stood; we cannot press with our lips some precious reliquary
containing the hand that swaddled Christ. In a world so dominated by matter, in
which matter itself seems to carry the seeds of its own destruction, there is
no material object left that can link our destinies with hers.



And yet, is the loss all loss? When the dogma of the Assumption was defined a
friend of mine, a very intelligent Mohammedan, congratulated me on the gesture
which the Holy Father had made; a gesture (said he) against materialism. And I
think he was right. When our Lord took his blessed Mother, soul and body, into
heaven, he did honour to the poor clay of which our human bodies are fashioned.
It was the first step towards reconciling all things in heaven and earth to his
eternal Father, towards making all things new. "The whole of nature",
St Paul tells us, "groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do
we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves although we have
already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for
that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery."
[3] That transformation of our material bodies to which we look forward one day
has been accomplished—we know it now for certain-in her.



When the Son of God came to earth, he came to turn our hearts away from earth,
Godwards. And as the traveller, shading his eyes while he contemplates some
long vista of scenery, searches about for a human figure that will give him the
scale of those distant surroundings, so we, with dazzled eyes looking Godwards,
identify and welcome one purely human figure close to his throne. One ship has
rounded the headland, one destiny is achieved, one human perfection exists. And
as we watch it, we see God clearer, see God greater, through this masterpiece
of his dealings with mankind.



(A sermon broadcast from Buckfast Abbey, Devon, on the Feast of Our Lady
Assumption, 15 August 1954.)



ENDNOTES:



[1] Psalm 131:6.

[2] 4 Kings 2:16, 18.

[3] Romans 8:22-3.










Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links:



• IgnatiusInsight.com Author Page for Monsignor Ronald Knox


• The Modern Distaste for Religion | Ronald Knox


• The Mind of Knox | David Rooney

• The School of Ronald Knox | An Interview with David Rooney

• The Monsignor and the Don | An Interview with Fr. Milton Walsh


• Monsignor Ronald Knox: Convert, Priest, Apologist | An Interview with Fr. Milton Walsh


• Experience, Reason, and Authority in the Apologetics of Ronald Knox |
Milton Walsh | From Ronald Knox As Apologist


• The Four Marks of the Church | Ronald A. Knox


• Review of The Belief of Catholics | Carl E. Olson


• Ronald Knox, Apologist | Carl E. Olson


• A Lesson Learned From Monsignor Ronald A. Knox | Carl E. Olson

• Converts and Saints | An Interview with Joseph Pearce










Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was the son
of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester and it appeared that he, being both
spiritually perceptive and intellectually gifted, would also have a successful
life as an Anglican prelate. But while in school in the early 1900s Knox
began a long struggle between his love for the Church of England and his
growing attraction to the Catholic Church. He converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-nine, became a priest, and
wrote numerous books on spiritual and literary topics, including
The Belief of Catholics, Captive Flames:
On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes, The Hidden
Stream: The Mysteries of the Christian Faith , Pastoral
and Occasional Sermons , and many more. Visit Knox's IgnatiusInsight.com author page for more information about his life
and work.