Absolute freedom for all eternity? That's quite an Assumption.

The ancient Christian tradition that the mother of Jesus, not a deity but a human woman, did not actually die but merely fell asleep (the Dormition of the Eastern Church) and was taken body and soul into a state of beatific union with God (the Assumption of the Western Church) has been passed down the generations since the time of the people who actually knew her.

Most of the world-wide Christian community generally holds to some version of this idea because it is rooted in belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ and in the Christian understanding of free will. That is to say that, for one who freely loves God (the idea of freely ‘loving’ a God who coerces you into it makes no sense) and is as close to God as Jesus' mother was, then death is a non-event.

To begin at the beginning: God. God is outside everything - that's the definition of God.

God and I are not two of any class of thing – Herbert McCabe OP. 

(Not getting that is only Richard Dawkins' first mistake...)

Only by positing that God is 'outside everything', i.e. neither part of nor like the material/cosmic system, can one begin to see that God is in a position to be the existential origin and ground of everything, including all conditions for all acts, that is, including freedom. (Words: ‘Freedom’ is not a stand-alone thing but a description of your condition when you do something – not a predicate but a condition of an act.)

So, to unite oneself with God means to unite oneself with the very creator of freedom, the essence and ground of freedom, and thus to become wholly free. This is part of what we understand Jesus to have meant when He said that He – the Divine – is the way, the truth and the life.

We do in order to become. To be Christian means to do whatever we can in order to become as like Jesus as we can – to become as totally united as possible with Christ the God-become-Man, and hence totally free and fully alive; so free, in fact, that death has no part to play.

That’s how it was with Our Lady. Redeemed by Christ from her unfreeness before she was even conceived (the Immaculate Conception), she was totally free to respond Fiat in loving response to the God who so loved her that he offered her His Own Word to be her beloved Son.

Both Mary and her Son were so utterly free that death could not have either of them.

But, you say, Jesus died. Well, certainly He died – He was human, wasn't He? (Whoops. Is. He's not dead.) But read on...

He didn’t have to die, being God and being free, but He chose to go the whole human hog, so to speak: to live our whole human life which naturally (sic) includes dying. That was His 'obedience' to His Father:

'Go and make it possible for them to glimpse something of the fathomless love of the Almighty for them by becoming one of them. Be fully human. Live as they live. Experience human love, longing, hurt, laughter, joy. And die, because they have to die, and so your human experience will be precisely their human experience in its totality. Then, when they look at you, they will see both themselves and Me.'

And die He did. The same unremarkable, violent death-by-torture as meted out to thousands of other losers and criminals and inconvenient so-and-sos in the socio-political set-up of that time and place. The manner of His death shocks us now but back then it was nothing special. Most people never even noticed.

However… His extraordinariness, His uniqueness as experienced personally by those who had met Him and the stunning, life-changing, tangible fact of meeting Him alive again after His very public death, made it blindingly clear that He had chosen death in order to be fully human. 

‘Atonement?’ Is that the word? 

Well, look. Total up all our human foul-ups starting from the day we evolved from the quadrupeds, from the trivial to the abominably ruthless; from the extra cake I know is a greedy one-too-many to the merciless massacre of innocents with machetes and chemical weapons; from occasional drink-driving to genocidal slaughter. All of it. Billions upon billions of crimes and sins. Too much. The mind cannot cope.

Now consider the willing submission to death-by-torture of the perfectly free and perfectly good creator-and-sustainer-of-absolutely-everything, the God-who-became-human just so that we could glimpse and begin to understand the otherwise unknowable source of all existence, who loved us into life solely in order that we could be loved and could love in return. The Ultimate Loving Good voluntarily became human and freely accepted the most horrible ‘suffering unto death’, to make His point: fathomless love.

Love is His meaning – Julian of Norwich. 

I would say that that degree of freely given love ‘atoned’ for human evil-doing, no?

But did Christ have to die that terrible way? 

His death was inevitable, wasn't it? What with His being human and perfectly free to be perfectly good. He could have lived any-when… now, even... but, whenever, His complete freedom with its concomitant radical virtue would have been an outrage to someone with the power to kill Him off: a scared, radically challenged political authority, or some violent crime boss who looked into His eyes and knew he was seen for what he was. Oh, someone would have gone gunning for Him. Yes, it might have happened differently from the events back then in Jerusalem, but it would surely have happened because darkness will always extinguish, as far as it can, the light which terrifies it.

‘Be one of them, in every way, Son.’ 

One of us in every way except sin – because He couldn't sin. Sin means freely making a choice, when offered a tempting reason to do so, to diminish oneself or another. And why would He, being the essence of goodness and of love for all created beings, choose that? It simply wasn't part of the Son of Man’s make-up to choose to sin, because, being wholly God as well as wholly human, He was (Is! Is!) free to make the right choices. He couldn’t sin, and so death couldn’t hold Him. It just… follows.

Death is the one thing that finally and utterly deprives us of freedom. 

But if we were truly, radically free, that would mean, by definition, that even Death could not have us, as it could not have Christ and it could not have his Holy Mother. Their total and radical freedom robbed Death of its victory over them.

Being radically free would solve our Death problem, too. If only. If only there was a way…

Christ offers Himself to us as the solution to that problem, inviting us to see unity with Him as the way: the way to total freedom from making all the wrong choices which harm ourselves and others, the way to eternal joy, love and fulfilment.

I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.

 If you love me, you will keep my Commandments. 

Love one another, as I have loved you.

Yes, the same offer made to the Apostles, Jesus' friends, the offer of eternal life in union with our loving God, is made to us. And all we have to do is try to become free and thus sinless and utterly loving, like Jesus.

That’s all we have to do – try, all the time hoping in Jesus, having faith that He wants, intends and is helping us to do it.

Not to mention His totally free, immaculate and utterly Blessed Mother who, Assumed into Heaven in defiance of death, is willing us on to freedom and joy in union with her Divine Son, because by His Will, she is our Mother, too.

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.