Feast of the Assumption 2026

Traditions about the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary—or, as the Dowager Vicar might say, her dormition—arose as responses to an obvious question left unanswered by the New Testament: what happened to Mary, the Mother of our Lord? She is last seen in the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles, gathered with the disciples in the upper room, themselves still reeling from Christ’s post-resurrection appearances to them and his ascension into Heaven. After that, she disappears. 

Nor does she appear in the earliest Christian writings: St Paul never mentions her directly, which has led some scholars to argue that she had died by the time he started writing in the late 40s. But it might also indicate that special attention and devotion to Mary hadn’t yet emerged in these first few decades after the death of her son. 

Speculations about her early life were already circulating by the second century, the earliest evidence for any opinions on the subject of Mary’s death only appear in the late fourth century, and in the fifth century, various different accounts began to proliferate as interest in Mary in general increased among Christians. Over time, a consensus emerged that after Mary’s death she, like her son, was resurrected and assumed into heaven. This obvious similarity between Mary and Jesus is, of course, deliberate.

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Setting aside the question of historical veracity—dodgy, at best—let’s consider the theological point being made here.

The obvious reading has to do with the person of Mary herself. The Church wanted to emphasise her specialness, and not satisfied with her merely having birthed the Son of God, added more to the myth of Mary. This idea that Mary’s body did not suffer the usual corruption of animal corpses, is thus part of a larger trend around the fourth and fifth centuries, which also includes the idea that Mary was herself—again, like Jesus—without sin. In this case, the theological point being made is simply that Mary was and is special. 

This is a perfectly reasonable account of things, and I am myself very sympathetic to Marian devotion: the Vicarage is full of images of our Lady [I did a quick count, and there are at least 10 icons and statues.] and the Rosary—with its fifty Hail Marys—has always been an important part of my own spiritual practice. But the version of Marian devotion that increases the distance between her and us leaves me cold, and—more importantly—makes little sense of the Mary we find in the gospels. 

So another view of the Assumption is this: that it is a doubling down on the lesson of the Ascension of her son: which is that we are—as whole persons, bodies and well as souls—welcome in the Kingdom of God. It is, in other words, an affirmation of the goodness of our humanity and createdness and embodiedness, and thus a repudiation of theologies that denigrate these in favour of a purely spiritualised or, indeed, intellectualised gospel. And Mary’s Assumption is, if not strictly necessary, then it is at least helpful because it shows that Jesus’s Ascension was not sui generis, and that it is not only the humanity of divine persons that is welcome in heaven, but ours too, the rest of us mere mortals. 

This interpretation of things emphasises our similarity with Mary and her solidarity with us, rather than her uniqueness. For those of us who find it difficult to relate to Jesus, who is after all God incarnate, we are given Mary, who is uncomplicatedly human. We are told that she is welcome in the kingdom of God, being the first follow Christ there: and she invites us to join her. 

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This business of joining Mary takes on another dimension when we consider our reading this morning, containing as it does the Magnificat. 

Mary begins on an autobiographical note, giving thanks for what great things God has done for her, the handmaiden of low estate. But then her attention is turned outwards, and the Magnificat goes on to become a revolutionary anthem, overtly and repeatedly taking the side of the poor and vulnerable, whom she clearly takes to be her people, using the same word—low—in both cases:

He has put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

He has filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he has sent empty away.

It is a remarkable thing anyway, but more remarkable still to consider that Mary was likely around fourteen- or fifteen years old when she is supposed to have said this, which is the longest speech given by any woman in the New Testament let alone a girl, no older than Greta Thunberg was when she first spoke out. 

Some people find it easy to dismiss the moral and political ideals of teenage girls. Maybe we would be less so if we remembered that the mother of God was once such a teenage girl with such ideals, such a moral vision that we have—two thousand years later—still not adequately fulfilled.

Anyway, all of this is to observe a corollary of Mary’s solidarity with us, which is that it is first solidarity with the weak and vulnerable and poor. And to join her must therefore be to join them, not least in their struggles. Or to put things more bluntly: we fail to be Mary’s people if we fail to share her concern for the weak and vulnerable, the poor and needy. 

This is another sense in which the doctrine of Mary’s Assumption—like that of Jesus’s Ascension—repudiates a spiritualised gospel: they remind us that the Christian faith is concerned with the world no less than it is concerned with heaven: after all, the Lord’s Prayer ties these together, “thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”. 

Of course, this cannot be news to anyone who has read the New Testament, which is unsubtle in its concerns about power and wealth, and the injustices that arise, in our world, out of asymmetries in power and wealth. In that sense, Mary is simply one spokesperson among many. But she is an especially compelling one, perhaps because of what her solidarity with the suffering entailed: she who, full of Christ, saw the plight of the world, and gave to it nothing less than her son. And God knows it cost her dearly.

And it may well cost us dearly too, to live Marian lives of sensitivity to injustice and suffering, and solidarity with those who suffer unjustly. And so, on this feast of Mary’s, let us pray that we may have her courage to live such a life, to join her in following Christ, body as well as soul.