15th August, 2021

​My dear friends,

When I was in Scotland last week, I had the great pleasure of visiting Torphichen Preceptory near Linlithgow. The easiest way to describe Torphichen is as a sort of Scottish version of our own Little Maplestead in Essex. Established some 900 years ago, it was a ‘Preceptory’ or estate of the medieval Hospitallers of St John. At its centre was a monastic complex of which only part of the church now survives. Torphichen was run by a knight of St John called the Preceptor or Commander (who might be thought of as a sort of abbot, guiding and shepherding the community), assisted by three priests and a community of lay brothers. 
Torphichen Preceptory
Money raised throughout the kingdom of Scotland for the Order’s great hospital in Jerusalem was first sent to Torphichen, before being sent on to the Holy Land. The community also ran an infirmary, which was the local accident and emergency department of its day.

Like other monastic churches, the nave would have served as the parish church for local people, whilst the chancel housed the Hospitallers of St John, who went there for the services with which they punctuated every day: Matins (night time), Lauds (early morning), Prime (first hour of daylight), Terce (third hour), Sext (noon), Nones (ninth hour), Vespers (sunset evening) and Compline (end of the day). The three priests would each have celebrated Mass in the church at least once every day.

Torphichen Preceptory is owned today by the Priory of Scotland of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John. I was met by the current Preceptor, Ian Wallace, a surgeon and knight of the Venerable Order. ‘Put your hand there’ he said, indicating a stone door frame, ‘think of the generations of Hospitallers of St John who placed their hands there on their way into the church.’ The surviving medieval portion of the church had a very still atmosphere, and it felt as though the prayers offered there over the centuries had somehow soaked into the stones and left a trace that could still be discerned today. The masonry was especially fine and reminded me (perhaps unsurprisingly) of some of the Crusader masonry still to be encountered in the Holy Land in places such as the Coenaculum on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.

Ian led me up a spiral staircase to what would probably have been the set of rooms occupied by the Preceptor. With wooden shutters on the windows, tapestries on the walls and fires burning in the grates, the Preceptor would have been quite comfortable here. The walls were very thick and I wondered whether the money destined for the Holy Land had been stored in these rooms for safety, before being sent on.

Torphichen had rather a chequered history during the various wars between England and Scotland. On one occasion King Edward I of England came to the Preceptory to receive medical treatment after being kicked in the chest by his horse. The king was so grateful for the care he received at Torphichen that he later sent oak from his estates in England for rood screens, and the marks where they were erected in the church may still be seen today. The Preceptory was dissolved during the Scottish Reformation and much of its buildings were demolished, though part remains. A (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland parish kirk was built over the site of the nave of the Hospitallers’ church in 1756.

​The Priory of Scotland of the Order of St John was established in 1947. The Priory is unusual in having no branch of St John Ambulance. This is because another organisation, St Andrew’s Ambulance (now known as St Andrew’s First Aid – their website is well worth a look) was already in existence and there was felt to be little point in establishing a competing organisation. Instead, the Priory of Scotland supports St John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem and work in Malawi. It carries out many other works around Scotland such as patient transport, public access defibrillators, CPR training, and first responders. If you get lost on a mountain or fall into Loch Ness (taking great care not to startle Nessie), you are quite likely to be rescued by volunteers from St John Scotland.
Torphichen is four miles from Linlithgow, just west of Edinburgh. If you find yourself in Scotland, the Preceptory is well worth a detour and you will be receive a warm welcome from our most hospitable confrères in the Priory of Scotland. Say a little prayer in the church for the work throughout the world of St John today.
With my continued prayers and all good wishes,
​
​The Rev. Dr  ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
The Rev. Dr Robert Beaken, Essex County Chaplain and Hospitaller, at Torphichen Preceptory.
THE ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY – 15th AUGUST 2021
To prepare for this patronal festival sermon on the Assumption, I have done quite a lot of reading about the death and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Rather irritatingly for a historian like me, there are few hard facts. Instead, we are confronted with some fragments of oral stories, passed on by word of mouth for several generations, before finally being committed to writing. Some details have been lost to us. Other parts of these stories, I suspect, may over the passage of time have been a little ‘enriched’ here and there.

            Forty years ago, when I was a pious evangelical young man, I would have said ‘None of this is in the New Testament’ and dismissed these stories about the death and Assumption of Mary out of hand. Well, my love and interest in Holy Scripture has grown and deepened since then. I now understand rather more about the New Testament and the first century world from which it emerged.

For many years now, it has instead been my conclusion that we should not dismiss the stories about the death and Assumption of Mary, but rather that we should take them very seriously. I admit it is disappointing that we do not know more; but I suggest that if we delve into these oral stories about the Assumption carefully, keeping our wits about us, we shall discover some very interesting and indeed inspiring Christian nuggets.

            The first problem we encounter when looking at the Assumption is that no-one knows exactly when the Blessed Virgin Mary died. According to the Acts of the Apostles, she was present at Pentecost. She then disappears from our sight. We know that from his cross on Good Friday, Jesus commended his mother into the care of St John. There are traditions that after the Ascension of Christ, Mary lived both in Jerusalem and also at Ephesus.

            Before I started researching this sermon, my guess was that if Jesus was crucified in the year 33 AD, Mary might reasonably have been expected to have died sometime during the following decade, the 40s AD, when she would have been aged in her late 50s or early 60s – a reasonable lifespan for the time.

            I encountered one tradition which claimed that Mary died eleven years after Jesus, around the year 44 AD. But there are other, differing traditions, which we should take equally seriously. There is a tradition that Mary was still alive in 52 AD when Dionysius the Areopagite was converted by the preaching of St Paul in Athens. Dionysius is said to have later travelled to Jerusalem, where he met Mary, and indeed to have attended her funeral.

A further tradition is that Mary died around 63 AD, when she would probably have been in her late 70s, having earlier met St Luke or his helpers, to whom she told the stories of the birth and infancy of Jesus. According to this tradition, St Luke wrote his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles before Mary’s death, which may be why her death was not mentioned in Acts. There is a further tradition that some of the twelve apostles were still alive when Mary died. As quite a few of them are believed to have lived on into the 60s AD, this again potentially pushes the date of Mary’s death further on into the first century AD.

Well, you pays your money and takes your choice. All three dates – 40s, 50s and 63 AD – are entirely possible.
People saw things differently in the past. Had we been alive in the first century AD, we might have wanted to find out more about the life of Mary after the Resurrection, but the first generations of Christians had other concerns and preoccupations. We should recall that the early Church suffered several severe persecutions. On 25 July we kept the feast of St James, the first of the twelve to be killed in about 45 AD because of his Christian faith. It seems entirely plausible to me that if the Jewish authorities were trying to stamp out Christianity, Mary would have been high on their list of people to be arrested, exploited and possibly executed.

The persecution of the early Church would go a long way to explain why we know so little of Mary after the Resurrection: quite probably, she simply went to ground, in order to avoid being recognised and arrested. One tradition has it that St John took Mary away from Jerusalem to live in Ephesus precisely for this reason.

At some point, the Blessed Virgin Mary underwent bodily death like her son Jesus. The fragmentary oral traditions tell us that Mary’s death was surrounded by strange and miraculous events. According to one version, Mary had died but was later seen alive again, being carried off to Heaven by angels, rather like the assumption of Elijah in the Old Testament. In another version, Mary died and was buried, but three days later St Thomas the Apostle visited her tomb and found it empty.

It would be lovely to know more, but I am afraid we don’t, and we must simply make the best of what we have.

As a historian, one of my working assumptions (no pun intended) has long been that subsequent events sometimes cast light backwards and help us to understand the past. In the fifth century AD, the Byzantine Empress Pulcheria conceived of the idea of constructing a large church in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She approached St Juvenal, the patriarch of Jerusalem, asking where the body of Mary was buried. Juvenal replied that no-one claimed to have Mary’s body, adding: ‘Although there is no account of the circumstances of Mary’s death in Holy Scripture, we know about them from the most ancient and credible tradition.’ He sent Pulcheria some grave wrappings from Mary’s tomb, which the Empress placed in the church of St Mary at Blachernae, Constantinople.

It seems to me that had there been any contrary rumours about the remains of Mary still existing somewhere or other, the Christian Byzantine Empire, with its enormous resources of men, money and intellect, would have left no stone unturned in its efforts to find Mary’s body and pay it due honour. The fact that it did not, it seems to me, to cast light backwards and to support Mary’s Assumption into heaven.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I suggest, has two main meanings. Firstly, it is not difficult to see in these stories of Mary’s death and Assumption into heaven echoes of the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ. This, I believe, is deliberate. Christ defeated evil, sin and death once and for all upon the Cross. Jesus himself was the first fruits of his Resurrection. We might see the Assumption of Mary as a sort-of second fruits of the Lord’s paschal victory.
In her death, as in her life, Mary draws our attention to her son. It occurred to me the other day that the Assumption was rather like a lovely picture frame surrounding a beautiful painting. One has to be very careful when it comes to choosing frames for pictures – choose the wrong frame, and it can spoil our enjoyment of the picture – but the right frame helps us to enjoy and understand a painting by drawing our eye to the detail and thus to the message the artist has sought to convey. We might see Mary’s Assumption as the sort-of frame around the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: it draws our attention to the saving work of her son, Jesus Christ.

Secondly, the Assumption speaks significantly to us about the importance of Mary herself in the drama of our Christian salvation. Let me explain with a ‘word-picture.’ Over the centuries Mary has been honoured with many different titles. One of these which appeals to me greatly is ‘the Ark of the Covenant.’ The original ark of the covenant in the Old Testament was a chest of acacia wood, covered within and without with gold, containing the two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments, Aaron’s priestly rod and some of the manna from heaven. The ark was placed in the holy of holies in the Temple in Jerusalem and was held to symbolise the indwelling presence of God with His chosen people, the Hebrews.

Early in Christian history, Mary began to be seen as a sort-of second and greater Ark of the Covenant. The original ark was covered inside and out with gold. Mary’s immaculate purity and faith came to be seen as her ‘gold.’ The original ark contained things given or used by God. For nine months, Mary’s womb contained the Son of God himself. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity took his human flesh from Mary. As I have said before, if we had seen Mary and Jesus walking along a street in Nazareth, we would have said “Ah, a mother and her son”, because they would have looked very much alike. Jesus fulfilled the Jewish Law, and through his death and resurrection he brought about the New Covenant. His New Covenant is greater than the Old Covenant, because under Jesus Christ, salvation is freely offered to all who simply believe and trust in him. By extension, we may say that Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant, is much greater than the Old Testament ark, because she is the Theotokos, the Mother of God.

For this reason, when reflecting on the Assumption, Christian writers have concluded that Mary’s body was such an important part of the Christian story that God did not want it to undergo decay. Instead, God resurrected Mary and assumed her into the kingdom of Heaven, never to be parted from her son Jesus Christ. In her death, as in her life, Mary draws our attention to the saving work of her son.

Forty years ago, when I was a pious evangelical young man, I believed that one had to try to love Jesus Christ with one hundred per cent of one’s love. I still believe that today. The difference is that then I was probably anxious that, if I were to love Mary, the love I gave to her might somehow be deducted from the love I wanted to give to Jesus. So, for example, if I loved Mary with 3 per cent of my heart’s love, I would consequently only be able to love Jesus with 97 per cent of my love.
Over the decades since, I have come to experience and to understand that one may love  Jesus with 100 per cent of one’s love, and at the same time, in a slightly different way, one can also love Mary, with no confusion or diminution: it is simply the way God works in and through us. It is not so strange: after all, a man may wholeheartedly love God, his wife, and his children, with slightly different types of love, all at the same time. The different types of love enrich each other.
​
I said at the start that if we looked carefully at the stories of the Assumption, we should find some very interesting and inspiring Christian nuggets. One of the most significant of these, I suggest, is the discovery that by loving Mary during our pilgrimage through life, we come to enjoy a deeper and more profound personal love for her son and our redeemer, Our Lord Jesus Christ.