Thursday August 15, 2024

To live in God’s grace, we have to cooperate with it by saying no to temptation.

Good News Reflection for:

Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
August 15, 2024

Today’s Prayer:

Merciful Father, fill my life with Your Holy Spirit, and may Your light shine into my miseries. So, filled with Your love, like our Blessed Mother, may I take Jesus Christ’s Good News to my neighbors around me. Amen.

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Today’s Readings:

Revelations 11:19a;12:1-6a, 10ab
Ps 45:10-12,16
1 Corinthians 15:20-27
Luke 1:39-56
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081524-Day.cfm
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-august-15-2024-day

The meaning of Mary’s Assumption

The readings that are used on this special feast day can help us understand Mary’s holiness and how it affected her physically. They answer the question: How could she pass directly from earth to heaven without experiencing the corruption of death in her body?

Mary was the only human after Adam and Eve who was conceived without inheriting Original Sin. We celebrate this on December 8^th, remembering her “Immaculate Conception”. God the Father arranged this so that Jesus the Son — who was completely holy and fully God — could reside within her human body during pregnancy and then live in a very holy family.

This gave Mary an advantage of grace that you and I do not have. Adam and Eve had it, but when faced with temptation, they chose to disobey God. God had given them deathless life, but they chose a life that included corruption.

As the new Eve, Mary faced temptation but chose to remain obedient to God. Thus remaining full of God’s grace, she was able to live in complete holiness and never experience within herself the corruption of sin and death. When she reached the end of her time on earth, God’s divine life raised her from the earth and immediately resurrected her earthly body into her glorified body.

For us to live in God’s grace, we have to cooperate with it by saying no to temptation. Since we fail at this, Jesus died on our behalf so that we can get to heaven anyway, as long as we don’t completely turn away from God’s grace. He gave us the Sacrament of Baptism to free us from the inheritance of Adam and Eve’s Original Sin. But there’s much more to the Christian life than that. We should never be satisfied with the minimum. God wants to give us much more grace!

We have the Holy Spirit. We have God’s divine life within us so that we can do what the holiness within us wants us to do. Sinning makes us miserable. We don’t actually like sinning, because our true nature, made in the image of God, desires to do what is good.

So where does the Blessed Virgin Mary fit into this? God gave Mary a ministry that did not end when she was transferred from earth to heaven. Her calling was — and still is — an eternal vocation of sharing the gift of grace that she received from God. Thus, she is able to care for us like a real mother and help us grow in our love for Jesus and in our desire to resist temptations.

Praying the Rosary can give us a direct connection to Mary’s fullness of grace. It’s not just a string of repeated words. Nor is it just a set of meditations on the life of Jesus. It opens our spirits to the Holy Spirit through the assistance of Mary’s prayers. In the Rosary, our souls join hers in magnifying the Lord. When so magnified, his love draws others closer to him through us, and thus we join Mary in her ministry of giving Jesus to the world.

Reflect further on this with our WordByte called: “How do we know Mary never sinned?” @ https://wordbytes.org/faqs/was-Mary-sinless/.

© by Terry A. Modica, Good News Ministries

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