We’re often asked why Jesus had to come at all. After all, God can do anything. He could flood the face of the earth. Or He could whisk us all to Heaven at this very moment, basking in Heavenly light. He could appear in a cloud and demand our attention, bringing us to our knees in awe and fear.

Instead he came here personally, as a human being. And let himself be rejected. Why all the effort?

Israel never knew how to clean up its act. They stumbled, over and over again. God threatened to disown them, over and over again. But they begged and pleaded for forgiveness, and God granted it to them. God allowed them to stumble in order to show His infinite goodness. And with that, also prove that they needed him. Jesus didn’t come during a time of prosperity—it was an era of silence from God, in a dry spell of prophets. He arrived when hope was lost. In that darkness, He became Light itself. He arrived after Israel had learned they couldn’t do it alone.

I was reminded of this recently, when watching an interview on the Torah. In a similar fashion, they asked why God took so long to present the Ten Commandments. It’s not something I’d thought of before, since it seems to appear pretty early on. But when you consider the whole of history, and all that had happened before this event… it doesn’t.

Moses descends from Mount Sinai
with the Ten Commandments
Ferdinand Bol, 1660-1662

(Can you tell I’ve been into sacred art lately?)

There was a whole lot of history before Moses descended from Mount Sinai: Adam and Eve. The Tower of Babel. The flood. It’s even after Egypt itself, after the Israelites had been slaves for 400 years. Certainly they’d needed guidance during that time, and especially when they were vying for their freedom.

Despite my curiosity, the answer was one I should’ve known—the Israelites first had to learn they needed the Commandments. And they had to spend some time in darkness before God could save them.

They were doing pretty poorly on their own. Killing their siblings? Building a tower to reach Heaven? They were lost and searching for answers, trying (and failing) to seek this mysterious God. But God’s people had to fail. They needed guidance, but they first needed to discover this need on their own. It was only when they were whining and wandering the desert did God intervene with Hope.

He did it on Mount Sinai, and He did it again in Bethlehem.

With the Feast of the Assumption this week, naturally I’ve been doing some reading. This former Baptist took a long time to even consider that Mary had been taken up into Heaven. There’s no Biblical evidence. The book doesn’t even mention her dying (strange, isn’t it?), let alone any supernatural type of departure from this earth.

But when you think about it… why not? There had been others taken up into Heaven. Elijah was. Enoch was. If these men loved God so much that they bypassed the corruption of death itself, why wouldn’t God do the same for the woman with the world-changing task of bearing the Son?

The seemingly small detail that pushed me closer to believing the Assumption was the lack of relics. The early Church went crazy over them. They’d claim body parts of saints, or a lock of hair, or anything to bless their churches. Curiously, there are no Marian relics the Church recognizes as authentic. And it wasn’t until I stumbled upon this neat little history that I understood why.

Emperor Marcian asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem to bring the relics of Mary to Constantinople to be enshrined in the capitol. The patriarch explained to the emperor that there were no relics of Mary in Jerusalem, that “Mary had died in the presence of the apostles; but her tomb, when opened later… was found empty and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven.”

Also, this is really cool. All the artwork of the Assumption has Mary basking in Heavenly light, riding a cloud skyward as her admirers gather beneath her.

It sure is pretty, isn’t it?

Peter Paul Rubens, 1612

But that’s not it at all. Truth is, the Blessed Mother died. There are more than a couple spots that claim to have her tomb. But in the quiet, still way of God—much like the arrival of Jesus Christ himself—Mary went Home, body and all.

Now that’s something I can believe.