SOLEMNITY OF THE ASCENCION OF THE LORD “B”
MAY 23/24, 2009
Today’s celebration of the Ascension of Jesus, like his Resurrection from the dead, is as the expression goes, “hard to get our hands around.” We have nothing in our experience to relate it to. Culturally we make a big deal out of Christmas because its focus, the birth of a child, is something familiar to us. Perhaps one way to understand the Ascension of Jesus is to begin with Christmas.
Christmas celebrates, as we profess each Sunday in the Creed at Mass that God in his love united his divine life with our human nature by being born of the Virgin Mary, and experiencing all that it means to be human, ultimately took on death itself. Beginning with the Incarnation of Jesus as our starting point, Pope Benedict XVI in reflecting on today’s celebration reminds us: “The Ascension of Christ means that he no longer belongs to the world of corruption and death, which conditions our life. It means that he belongs completely to God. He, the eternal Son, has taken our human being to the presence of God; he has taken with him flesh and blood in a transfigured form. Man finds a place in God through Christ; the human being has been taken into the very life of God. …The Lord’s Ascension means that Christ has not gone far from us, but that now, thanks to the fact that he is with the Father, he is close to each one of us forever. Each one of us may address him familiarly; each one may turn to him. The Lord always hears our voice. We may distance ourselves inwardly from him. We can live with our backs turned to him, but he always awaits us, and is always close to us. (Benedictus. Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI. Magnificat /Ignatius Press, 2006 pp. 155.)
Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension complete and perfect God’s union of love with us. The Ascension reminds us that our life, to borrow the words of the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, now is “charged with the grandeur of God.” This should, in turn, direct how we live our lives today.
The late Pope John Paul II in a series of 129 talks delivered between September 1979 and November 1984 and given the working title “The Theology of The Body” spelled out the implications of Jesus’ incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension from the perspective of how his life is to shape our lives as believers. The basic truth of “The Theology of the Body” as given to us by the late Pope is that because of Jesus our physical bodies, are more than just their scientific biological classification as “homo sapiens.” Rather because of Jesus’ assumption of our humanity in the mystery of Christmas and in today’s celebration of the Ascension as Jesus raises that same humanity to the fullness of heavenly glory, our bodies can, and ought to be, understood as a “sacrament,” in the same way as we speak of the seven official sacraments of the church. A sacrament, as many of us remember from the traditional definition we learned, is an outward sign, instituted by Christ to give grace. We cannot see God. As pure spirit, God is totally beyond our vision. Yet, God’s mystery has been revealed in human flesh in Jesus. As Pope John Paul himself states, “Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology..through the main door” (TOB 23:4). There is, in fact, no other way for a human being to encounter the mystery of God in its fullness than through the human body: through Christ’s body and our own. Created in the image and likeness of God our human life is now the means through which God lives and acts in our world and in our relationship with other people. Now, just like Jesus, we are to be the “revelation” of God!
The feast of the Ascension thus carries with it a missionary mandate to proclaim Jesus and his gospel as noted in today’s Gospel. We carry this mandate out St. Paul reminds today through the particular vocation each of us has in the church. To Paul’s list of “apostles, prophets, evangelists and teachers” I would add, parents, teens, young adults, singles, married, widowed, in a word everyone is now an “ambassador” of Christ. A well known story about a statue of Christ that stood on a pedestal in the center of a small European town and which had been seriously damaged by the effects of the town’s bombing in World War II so that it no longer had any arms is said to have had this message inscribed on a piece of wood tied with rope around its neck: “You see this statue of Christ. He has no hands now but yours.” Indeed, that is what every Mass equips us to do: to be the hands, the feet, the eyes, the ears, the voice, the heart, the person of Jesus to everyone we encounter. And as we do so Ascension reminds us of the words of Jesus at the end of St. Matthew’s gospel, “I am with you always until the end of the world.”