Session 3: "The Woman Clothed with the Sun" — Mary, the Assumption, and the Eschatological Mother

Session 3 — The Blessed Virgin Mary

"The Woman Clothed with the Sun" — Mary, the Assumption, and the Eschatological Mother

Opening Prayer

LEADER: Let us begin by asking the Holy Spirit to be with us tonight.

ALL: Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love.

LEADER: Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created.

ALL: And you shall renew the face of the earth.

LEADER: O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful,

ALL: Grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever rejoice in His consolation, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

LEADER: Tonight we close our time with Our Lady by praying with the Church of all ages, looking up to where she now reigns:

LEADER: Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy,

ALL: our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

LEADER: To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;

ALL: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

LEADER: Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

ALL: O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. Amen.

Scripture Assignments

Assign each passage to a woman in the group before beginning.

Passage 1: Genesis 3:14-15
Passage 2: Luke 1:39-45
Passage 3: Acts 1:12-14
Passage 4: Revelation 12:1-6, 13-17

Who Was This Woman?

We have spent two sessions with Mary on earth. Tonight we look up.

The Mary we have been with is the girl in Nazareth saying yes to an angel, and the woman at Calvary standing while her Son died. Tonight we meet a third Mary — the one who is, at this very moment, alive in glory, body and soul, crowned, interceding for us, and fighting on our behalf in a war most of us do not realize is going on.

This is not a different woman. This is the same Mary, in her fullness. The girl who said let it be done unto me did not stop existing when her son rose from the dead. She did not retire into iconography. Scripture is clear that she was with the apostles in the upper room when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, and the universal tradition of the Church, both East and West, holds that when her earthly life was complete, she was taken — body and soul — into heaven, where she now reigns as Queen.

If that sentence has ever made you uncomfortable, you are not alone. Catholic women raised in Protestant backgrounds, or women who came late to the Church, often feel a kind of vertigo when the conversation turns to Mary in glory. Queen? It sounds like too much. It sounds like the kind of devotion that crowds out Jesus.

But here is the thing the Church wants you to see tonight: Mary's exaltation does not compete with her Son's. It comes from His. She is glorified because He is glorified, and she is the first creature in whom His resurrection has reached its complete fruit. What He is by nature — risen, bodily, in glory — she is by grace. She is what every saved Christian will one day be. Where she is now, the rest of us are going.

And what she is doing now, in heaven, is not resting. She is fighting. There is a dragon in the book of Revelation, and the dragon hates her, and the dragon hates her children — which, the book tells us, means us. Tonight we close our time with Our Lady by looking honestly at the war we are in, and at the woman who is, right now, leading the charge against the enemy on our behalf.

This is the Mary the Church gives us. Not a sentimental Mary. A glorified Mary. A combatant Mary. The Woman, crowned, who crushed the serpent's head and is still crushing it.

Teaching Block 1 — The First Promise: The Woman and Her Seed

To understand what is happening in Revelation 12, we have to go all the way back to the third chapter of Genesis — to the moment, immediately after the Fall, when God speaks His first words to the serpent.

And the Lord God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, you are cursed among all living things, even the wild beasts of the earth. Upon your breast shall you travel, and the ground shall you eat, all the days of your life. I will put enmities between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. She will crush your head, and you will lie in wait for her heel."
Genesis 3:14-15 — CPDV

This is the verse the Church Fathers called the protoevangelium — the first gospel. In the very first announcement of judgment on the serpent, God promises redemption. He promises a woman. He promises her seed. And He promises that this seed will crush the serpent's head.

Read it slowly. Notice that God does not say the man and his seed. He says the woman and her seed. That is strange. In every other place in the Old Testament, "seed" belongs to the man. The seed of Abraham. The seed of David. Hebrew anthropology of fatherhood and lineage runs through men. But here, in the first promise of redemption, God says the seed of the woman. He is foretelling something the universe has never seen before: a child born of a woman alone. A child whose origin is from her, not from a man.

That child is Christ. And the woman is Mary.

The Church Fathers saw this immediately. What Eve bound by her unbelief, Mary loosed by her faith, writes St. Irenaeus — and you heard that line in Session 1. But it goes deeper than the fiat. From the moment the Fall happened, God's plan for the redemption of the world was a plan that ran through a woman. Mary is not a late addition to the story. She is named, in shadow and prophecy, in the same breath as the first announcement that the story would end in victory. I will put enmity between you and the woman. The Mary we have been studying for three sessions was prefigured in the third chapter of the Bible.

And notice this: enmity. God does not promise that the woman and the serpent will simply be on opposite sides. He promises that He will put enmity between them — that He will make the woman an enemy of the serpent, a permanent, structural enemy, of His own making. Mary is the woman God put at war with the devil from the beginning of salvation history. The war began in Eden. It is not over.

Discussion Question 1: From the very first promise of redemption, God's plan involved a woman in active enmity with the serpent. Many Catholic women have been taught a Mary who is gentle, meek, and quiet — and she is all of those things — but she is also, from Genesis 3:15 onward, a woman at war. How does it change the way you see Mary, or yourself, to know that opposition to evil is part of what God made you for as a woman?

Teaching Block 2 — Mary at Pentecost and the Birth of the Church

Between the Cross and the Assumption, there is a moment in Mary's life that most Catholics have never thought about. After the Resurrection, after the Ascension, before Pentecost — Mary is with the apostles. In one room. Praying.

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mountain, which is called Olivet, which is next to Jerusalem, within a Sabbath day's journey. And when they had entered into the cenacle, they ascended to the place where Peter and John, James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Jude of James, were staying. All these were persevering with one accord in prayer with the women, and with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
Acts 1:12-14 — CPDV

Read that list again. Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James. All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and His brothers.

She is named. Among the names of the apostles who will go out and turn the known world upside down, Luke pauses to name Mary the mother of Jesus. She is there when the Holy Spirit comes. She is there when the Church is born.

And we should not be surprised by this. Mary is the woman the Holy Spirit first came upon — at the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. That overshadowing produced the body of Christ in her womb. The overshadowing that comes at Pentecost produces the Body of Christ in the world — the Church. Both times, Mary is there. Both times, the Spirit moves through her presence to bring forth Christ in the world. She is, in this sense, the woman at the threshold of every new act of God in salvation history.

This is what the Church means when it calls her Mother of the Church. Her motherhood is not just biological, ending at the Cross when she received John. Her motherhood is theological — she is the woman whose fiat opened the way for the Word to become flesh, and whose presence in the upper room opened the way for that flesh to become a Body in the world. She did not stop being Mother when her Son ascended. She became Mother on a scale we are only beginning to grasp.

And here is the bridge to what comes next — because Mary's role does not end at the Resurrection of her Son, and it does not end at Pentecost. It continues. The Catholic tradition holds that when her earthly life was complete, she was taken up — body and soul — into the glory of her Son. This is the dogma of the Assumption, defined formally by the Church in 1950 but believed, taught, and celebrated by Christians East and West for over fifteen hundred years before that. The Assumption is not a Catholic innovation. It is the Church's witness to what every Christian heart already suspected: that the woman who gave the world its Savior was not allowed to see corruption.

She is, right now, alive in glory. She is what we are all going to be.

Discussion Question 2: Mary is named in the upper room with the apostles when the Church is born — and then she is with us still, alive in glory. Most Catholic women relate to Mary as a historical figure or as a devotional image, but rarely as a living woman who is present and active in their lives right now. How would your prayer life change if you genuinely believed that Mary is alive — that you can speak with her, ask her for things, receive her help — the way you can with any living person? Is there something in your spiritual life right now that you have not asked her about?

Teaching Block 3 — The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the War for Her Children

We come now to the passage that closes the Marian arc of the whole Bible.

And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon was under her feet, and on her head was a crown of twelve stars. And being with child, she cried out while giving birth, and she was suffering in order to give birth. And another sign was seen in heaven. And behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven diadems. And his tail drew down a third part of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman, who was about to give birth, so that, when she had brought forth, he might devour her son. And she brought forth a male child, who was soon to rule all the nations with an iron rod. And her son was taken up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into solitude, where a place was being held ready by God, so that they might pasture her in that place for one thousand two hundred and sixty days.
Revelation 12:1-6 — CPDV

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs and the agony of giving birth.

And then:

Another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns... And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.

The Church reads this passage in two ways at once, and both are true. The woman is the Church — the Bride who brings forth Christ in every generation, persecuted by the enemy, fleeing into the wilderness. And the woman is Mary — the singular woman who gave birth to the male Child who will rule the nations, the woman whose offspring the dragon hunts. The Church does not choose between these readings. It holds them together. Mary is the icon of the Church, and the Church is the family of Mary.

But here is what every Catholic woman needs to see tonight, plainly: the dragon is Satan. The book says so a few verses later — the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan. This is not metaphor or symbol of generic evil. This is the same serpent who spoke to Eve in the garden, the same enemy God promised would be at enmity with the woman, the same accuser who has hated humanity since the Fall and who has, now, focused his rage on a specific woman and her specific Child.

And the dragon does not give up when the Child is taken up to God. Read the rest:

And after the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who brought forth the male child. And the two wings of a great eagle were given to the woman, so that she might fly away, into the desert, to her place, where she is being nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. And the serpent sent out from his mouth, after the woman, water like a river, so that he might cause her to be carried away by the river. But the earth assisted the woman. And the earth opened her mouth and absorbed the river, which the dragon sent out from his mouth. And the dragon was angry at the woman. And so he went away to do battle with the remainder of her offspring, those who keep the commandments of God and who hold to the testimony of Jesus Christ.
Revelation 12:13-17 — CPDV

And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child... Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.

Those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.

That is you. That is every woman in this room. That is every Catholic Christian, every baptized soul, every member of the Body of Christ. The dragon is at war — present tense, not past tense — with Mary's offspring. And the woman in heaven, crowned with twelve stars, is at war with the dragon.

This is the spiritual reality the Catholic tradition has never lost. We are not living in peacetime. We are living in a war that began in Eden, came to its turning point at Calvary, was opened up to all of us at Pentecost, and is still being fought right now — with real casualties, real strategies, real combatants. And on our side, leading the charge, is the Woman God promised in Genesis 3:15. She is Stella Maris, the star of the sea, by which sailors navigate in storms. She is Auxilium Christianorum, the help of Christians. She is the Queen who, when the dragon comes for her offspring, does not flinch.

This is why the Church arms her children with her. The Rosary is not a sweet devotional. It is a weapon. The Memorare is not a polite request. It is a soldier's prayer, made to a commander whose word can stop a charge. Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. That language is not hyperbole. It is the testimony of the Church across two thousand years of women and men who have called on her in real combat and have not been left to fight alone.

You have a Mother who is, right now, fighting for you. The dragon hates her, and he hates you, because you are her offspring. You are not on the field of battle alone. The Woman is with you, and the Woman has already won — and you shall bruise his head. The crushing has been promised since Genesis 3:15. It has been accomplished at the Cross. It is being applied in the lives of her children, one by one, until the day every dragon and every lie and every accusation is thrown finally into the lake of fire.

Until then, you are her daughter, in a war, with a Mother who is not going to lose.

Discussion Question 3: The book of Revelation tells us that the dragon — Satan — is actively at war with the offspring of the Woman, which means he is actively at war with you. Most Catholic women do not live as though spiritual warfare is real and personal. Where in your own life have you noticed the enemy at work — in patterns of thought, in temptation, in attacks on your sense of who you are in Christ — and what would it change to know that Mary is fighting beside you, not just abstractly but as a real mother defending a real daughter?

This Week

Pray the Memorare once a day this week, slowly, out loud. Address Mary as a real mother — not a symbol, not a statue, not an idea — and bring her one specific battle you are fighting. Ask her to fight it with you.

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother. To thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me. Amen.

If you have never thought of Mary as your mother before, this is your week. Take her home with you, the way St. John did, into the very ordinary spaces of your life — the kitchen, the car, the moments alone before sleep. She will not refuse you.

Closing Prayer

Gather prayer requests and close out.