Mass readings for the Feast of the Ascension:
Acts 1.1-11 Psalm 47 Ephesians 1.17-23 Luke 24.44-53
We make a mistake if we focus on the Ascension in terms of its “mechanics.” How does Jesus ascend to God the Father in heaven? What is the spiritual or physical mechanism that makes that possible?
Well, to try and answer that is to delve into mystery; and we’re then talking about something akin to the incarnation itself: how does God become a man?
We don’t really know, now do we? Yet we confess that this is a fact with respect to Jesus. And we say we know this is true because of the testimony of those who knew him as his first disciples, as his Apostles, those who were witnesses to his death and resurrection. They came to that conclusion, reasoning it out based on the evidence. “This man,” as one Roman centurion is recorded saying, “truly was the son of God.” And that is what is significant, that is what is important because the incarnation facilitates the rescue of fallen humanity; it is the essential action that effects our redemption.
Generations of Christians have been so persuaded of the truth of this based on the ancient testimony, but also in their own experience of Christ in their lives. They’ve experienced grace, miracles, the Holy Spirit, the Peace of God which passes all understanding. That is, they’ve had something occur in their lives that validates the ancient witness.
Now, how does a human being enter bodily into heaven?
We don’t know, yet we confess that Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. That is, Jesus lives not just spiritually, but physically, in the presence of the creator of all things, the source of all that is, the fount of love, the source of truth.
He is there, and that is what is important because the ascension is the elevation of fallen humanity, redeemed and made new by Christ, and now existing eternally, perfected by God.
And we know this how? Well, we have some witnesses true, but more reliably, Jesus said this was where he was going. And if you’ve decided he is the son of God; well, how can you think otherwise than he told the truth about where he was going?
And, of course, we have in some way come to the realization that this must be true. Something in our experience tells us that he must be there. We’ve had an epiphany, a personal revelation, or even a rude awakening to the reality of it. Something has told us that we can be better than this fallen state, this frail physicality; that there is something to which we can aspire, and that we can attain it if we let God into our lives and allow Christ to transform us.
Christ has given us an everlasting example: he gave of himself in every sense including the surrender of his life for us. So, by grace we find the faith and strength to do likewise and surrender our life to him, and so find the way to where he is. As we say, where the head has gone, the body follows, and if we are of his body, we will follow him into glory.
For Christ to descend he needed to take on our corruptible flesh; for us to ascend we must take on what he brought down that is incorruptible. Remembering that Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh, the Logos of God, the rationality of the divine mind dwelling with humanity; we can see that it is in striving to have minds and hearts of a divine character, concerned only with truth and authentic love that we can rise.
This means we must be people of reasoning in faith not rationalizing from our fears and desires. We can only attain that by an earnest and humble petitioning for the grace needed to accomplish this: to know the Logos (that is, the Word of God), love Christ, and to serve Him.
Yet the impulse of our fallen selves is to let the flesh guide us; to rely upon mere human feeling that is, frankly, untrustworthy. Apart from Christ we are fearful creatures who look for relief from our anxieties in this world. Now for some, the relief is in intoxication: drugs, alcohol at the worst; but even in looking to escape through the extasy that comes through sex or the endorphin rush of athletics, or the adrenalin rush of life-risking behaviours that runs the gamut from driving fast to base-jumping.
I’ve spoken before about how some of us pursue power, usually through wealth, as a means of security.
But really for most of us, we have no access to real power, and we are not so foolish to look for a solution in drugs or thrills. So, we look for a comforting explanation of life and our place in it, something to soothe our troubled minds.
The Gospel is the true explanation, but its demands are so counterintuitive to what our fears tell us. So, we go after other explanations, ideologies, that have some capacity to explain the chaos, the cruelty and injustice we see around us, but they are nonetheless ultimately false.
We’ve seen what comes of surrendering to emotion and allowing feeling to rule our response to events and crises in recent years; and I cannot help but speculate on what has become of those who so viciously attacked others in then, as now, slowly, the truth of things is coming to light.
You may be aware that the media both here in Canada and abroad is finally recognizing that the summer of outrage over “mass graves” found at residential school sites, that saw churches burned, vandalized, that saw Catholics vilified as practitioners of genocide, were baseless.
A year on, and no proof of any of this has been produced. The First Nations leadership in those communities that became the focus of all this, finally are being heard, because to be fair, most of them made no such accusations against Catholics, against Canada. They want the process of healing and reconciliation to move forward, but not in the kind of atmosphere created by the activists and media that wanted people to see a complex history reduced to a distorting simplicity that could only divide and build resentment within our national community.
Yet astoundingly, just last week a national party-political leader repeated the accusations, and pushed the charge of genocide again. Does he want more churches burned this summer? Does he want Canadians to renew their anti-Catholicism? Why did he do it?
I cannot know for certain, but as I understand such personalities, to understand our history any other way cannot be admitted by the person captive to ideology. In the mind of the ideologically trapped, the bad guys must always be the bad guys, they must always be the cause of our troubles, the source of our suffering. And so, and this is troubling, there is no defense for those accused as the villains of our society. Critical race theory that judges people by the colour of their skin is impervious to actual evidence that points to other factors that really need to be addressed by our society, such as family stability and educational attainment. For the cultural Marxist, religion is always delusion and a fraud. For the radical feminist, abortion is the foundation of women’s dignity, and so, women cannot have equality without retaining the prerogative of choosing whether their children will be born or killed in the womb. And it has to be so because to admit that maybe this isn’t the case would shatter their personal identities, remove from them the heroic role of champion of justice.
The gospel tells us we are fallen, all of us. It tells us we victimize each other, and do so in a tragic ever repeating cycle of violence and exploitation that can only be stopped by our conversion to faith in God as we know him in Jesus Christ. We must be enlightened so as to break out of the darkness of the tragedy of human history so as to be part of what the celebrated poet Dante described as the Divine Comedy of our salvation.
And so, we pray that God indeed will give us a spirit of wisdom, and of revelation as we come to know him, so that with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know the hope to which he has called us all.
Amen.
Links:
How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves
Jagmeet Singh: What happened to Indigenous people in Canada is genocide