Mary’s death was unlike any other, Mary: Day 262

Mary’s death was unlike any other

St. John of Damascus insists that Mary’s death was so different from ours that we can hardly call it a death at all.

How does Mary, the source of the One who is Life, pass through death to life? How can she obey the law of nature who, in conceiving, surpassed the boundaries of nature? How is her spotless body made subject to death? In order to be clothed with immortality, she must first put off mortality, since the Lord of nature himself did not reject the penalty of death. She dies according to the flesh, destroys death by death, and through corruption gains incorruption and makes her death the source of resurrection. Behold how Almighty God receives with his own hands the holy soul of our Lord’s mother, separated from her body! He honors her truly—the one who was by nature his servant, yet was made his mother, in his unsearchable abyss of mercy, when he truly became incarnate.

What, then, shall we call this mystery of yours? Death? Your blessed soul is naturally parted from your blessed and undefiled body, and the body is delivered to the grave. Yet it does not remain in death, nor is it subject to decay. The body of the one whose virginity remained unspotted in childbirth was preserved with- out decay and was taken to a better, more divine place, where there is no death, but eternal life.

The glorious sun may be hidden momentarily by the opaque moon, but even when covered this way, it still shows, and its rays illumine the darkness, since light belongs to its essence. The sun has in itself a perpetual source of light, or rather it is the source of light as God created it. In a similar way, you, Mary, are the perennial source of true light. And if for a time you are hidden by the death of the body, without speaking, even so, you are our light. So I will not call your sacred transformation death, but rather a rest, a going home. —St. John of Damascus, First Homily on the Dormition

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Why was Mary’s death more like a rest and a homecoming? How can the prospect of my death become more like hers?

CLOSING PRAYER

From a prayer of St. Anselm: O glorious Virgin, you submitted to death, but you could not be held for long by the bonds of death, because you alone, O Virgin, bore him who was the death of death, and of grave the sting!

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