Feast of the Assumption
REVELATION 11:19 + 12:1 and 6-10
The temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant. And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and a severe hailstorm.
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.
Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness.
And there was heard a loud voice in heaven: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah.”
This is not really a text, but rather a kind of potpourri, in which verses from different contexts have been put together. It is a desperate and futile attempt to find in the New Testament some reference applicable to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, to exalt her and justify her dogmas.
The symbols that appear in this mixture of fragments do not refer to Mary – and in this all specialists agree – but the liturgy seems to feel authorized to dispense with exegesis.
Recalling a basic concept, we will say that the entire Book of Revelation is a book of symbols, not a prophetic description of realities. In the texts we read today, to abbreviate, it is about the people of Israel, the Old Covenant, symbolized by the Ark and the Woman, who must give birth to the Messiah despite the opposition of the forces of evil (the dragon), which will continue to harass those who follow the Messiah, thus posing the fundamental purpose of the Book, which is to encourage Christians of the late 1st century in the face of the terrible persecutions of the Roman emperors, especially that of Domitian (81-96 AD).
The application of these texts to Mary, the mother of Jesus, is therefore completely arbitrary and constitutes an intolerable manipulation.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:20-26
Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him; then the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.
For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he “has put everything under his feet.”
Paul seems to interpret the passage from Genesis, the sin of Adam, in a historical sense. From the sin of Adam (Paul never speaks of the sin of Eve, nor of the two, since the transmission is something reserved for the male) comes the sin of humanity and its misfortune (sinner before God from birth by inheritance of his first progenitor).
From here, especially through the work of Saint Augustine, comes the notion of original sin and here is founded a disastrous conception of Redemption = “paying the eternal Father the debt of Adam.”
We have put “Father” in lowercase to differentiate it from the first sense of the word as Jesus used it, which is Abbá, which we will call Father, with a capital letter.
But it is clear that here it does not have the sense of Father, since to forgive sin it demands to collect a price, a very high price, nothing less than the blood of his Son (and not of Jesus, son of Mary without more, but of the second person of the Trinity –by definition equal to the Father– incarnated).
All this set of horrible blasphemies, which renounce the essence of the Good News = “Abbá”, have constituted a matter of habitual teaching in the Church.
Thanks to God, exegesis has destroyed the historicity of the Genesis account and with it the notion of original sin as guilt and as inheritance, which has led us to better understand the concept of redemption.
The fundamental difference is who pays and who collects.
· The father seemed to be the one who demanded a price for forgiveness, much like the sacrifices of the Old Testament, through which it was believed that Yahweh’s wrath could be appeased by the soothing aroma of the sacrifice.
· Now the Father is the one who pays, and it is sin that collects the payment, being the tyrant from whose hands the slaves must be rescued.
But even so, the concept of redemption remains quite distant to us, because there are no longer any captives to be redeemed and because it is too closely associated with the notion of bloody sacrifice to appease the wrath of God, a concept from which, thankfully, we have already escaped.
Leaving this topic aside, let us focus for a moment on the beliefs of Paul (I am not speaking of faith or the Word of God but of his beliefs) in that curious gradation of the saved: first Christ, then Christians, finally the others, whom he calls “the last” without our being able to know to whom he refers. We do not know where Paul might have gotten this doctrine from.
In any case, there is a beautiful profession of faith:
“when Christ delivers the kingdom to God the Father, after destroying every rule and every authority and power.”
It speaks of a triumphant end. Humanity will be liberated from the power of sin and even from the power of death and will become, finally and completely, “of God.” That is truly a Christian hope: that Abbá cannot fail, because He is Father and is Almighty.
And having arrived here, how we long for the simplicity of the parables!, how we lament that the so-called Christian theologians have moved away from the genre proper to Jesus, devoting themselves to complicated speculations that do not seem reliable to us and, in addition, to some of us seem completely sterile!.
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J