One Assumption Too Many?

Today is a public holiday here in Portugal. A “holy day” in fact, as August 15th celebrates the supposed Assumption of Mary the mother of Jesus into heaven, though,  today there will definitely be more people enjoying the holiday on the beach than in church. It’s interesting that this claim about Mary only entered into Roman Catholic dogma as late as 1950 (three years before I was born), and it does seem to assume rather a lot about Mary and her position in relation to Jesus our Saviour. Is she somehow, superhuman and Queen of Heaven? Is that what the Bible really shows? Using Genesis 3:15 and Revelation 12 to defend this view of Mary does seem to require considerable stretching of the imagination.

Interestingly, yesterday evening, in a small group, we were considering the roots of idolatry in relation to the gospel and faith in our lives, and, it seems to me that veneration of saints, or lighting candles before statues, does not really figure as important in terms of idolatry as a lot of other things we do in life. An idol or, “the sin beneath the sin”, as the specific chapter in Tim Keller’s book “The Gospel and Life”, is subtitled, is basically whatever consumes our heart and displaces God in our life. It’s what we think about most when we wake up first thing in the morning. It’s what we get nightmares about. It can be the stuff of materialism, it can be work, it can be family, it can be sex. And every other way I mess up in life, every mistake, every lie, every false step, can be traced right back to that basic idolatry or displacement of God by something else. John Calvin said that the human heart is an “idol factory”, which I thought is a particularly contemporary description, given that he said it 600 years or so ago. We’re for ever inventing new and different ways of blotting God out of our lives.

How important then to ask Him every. “Search me, O God, and know my heart; and see if there is any wicked way in me (literally any way of grief, any idol, anything that will offend, you my God), and lead me in the way everlasting”  Psalm 139:24