The Assumption is the oldest feast day of Our Lady, but we don’t know how it first came to be celebrated. For 200 years, every memory of Jesus was obliterated from the city of Jerusalem, and the sites made holy by His life, death and resurrection became pagan temples. Jerusalem was restored as a sacred city at the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 285-337).
After the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 336, the sacred sites began to be restored and memories of the life of Our Lord began to be celebrated by the people of Jerusalem. One of the memories about his mother centred around the “Tomb of Mary,” close to Mount Zion, where the early Christian community had lived. On the hill itself was the “Place of Dormition,” the spot of Mary’s “falling asleep,” where she had died. The “Tomb of Mary” was where she was buried. At this time, the “Memory of Mary” was being celebrated.
Later it was to become our feast of the Assumption since there was more to the feast than her dying. It also proclaimed that she had been taken up, body and soul, into heaven. That belief was ancient, dating back to the apostles themselves. What was clear from the beginning was that there were no relics of Mary to be venerated, and that an empty tomb stood on the edge of Jerusalem near the site of her death.
That location also soon became a place of pilgrimage. (Today, the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition of Mary stands on the spot.) The Assumption completes God’s work in her since it was not fitting that the flesh that had given life to God himself should ever undergo corruption. The Assumption is God’s crowning of His work as Mary ends her earthly life and enters eternity. The feast turns our eyes in that direction, where we will follow when our earthly life is over.