Ascension Day
The Ascension is one aspect of the broader mystery of the Resurrection, one of the final acts of the Easter drama. No longer is Jesus bodily present among his disciples. The church is now living in a new reality. While the readings for Ordinary Time, which will soon resume, describe this new reality, today's readings focus on Jesus' exaltation. Easter stories showed Jesus trying to assure his followers that they were really experiencing him and not some illusion. He walked with them and ate with them. The one who had died was now alive. In the readings for today we behold him in all his divine glory, taking his place in heaven next to God.
The focus of this feast is the heavenly reign of Christ, not the details of the ascension itself. The challenge it sets before us is spiritual, not scientific. Are we faithful to his teaching in our lives, and do we carry its message into our world? It is not enough to stand awestruck looking heavenward. We must now be his witnesses "to the ends of the world." His presence now is different, but no less real. He is present to us in both consoling and challenging ways. He supports us sacramentally at key points in our journey to him, like birth, marriage and death. Through the weekly Eucharist, he is present with us on our journey.
Most of us think of Our Lord's Ascension as a finale to the greatest show on earth. Our Lord had spoken his lines, performed his wonders, played the principal role in the tragic drama of Crucifixion. He had made his audience gasp with the startling brightness of his Resurrection and now with his Ascension, he was taking his final bow, except that, instead of a curtain, it was a cloud that swept across and hid him from human sight! (Ac 1:9).
To think of Our Lord's Ascension as a finale is to miss the point altogether! Our Lord did not go back to heaven, in the same way that an actor goes back to the dressing-room, leaving the rest of us to make our way home. There is a very real sense in which we, you and I, ascended to heaven with Our Lord and it is this mass-ascension that we might think about now.
When Our Lord ascended to heaven, he took his human nature with him. This means that a human nature like ours has broken the barrier between earth and heaven. 'In Jesus, the Son of God,' says St Paul, 'we have the supreme high priest who has gone through to the highest heaven.' (Heb 4:14). But it's not just a human nature like ours. It's a human nature representative of ours. All human beings ascended with Christ, in promise at least. He died for us, rose for us, ascended for us, so that we could ascend with him. In his Ascension, he blazed a trail that we can follow. Provided we ready ourselves for 'take off' his going up is a guarantee that we will go up too. We are familiar with guarantees that go with cars, shoes or whatever. They last six months, or a year! The guarantee going with Christ's Ascension lasts for all eternity: 'I am going now to prepare a place for you.' (Jn 14:2). St Paul is so sure of that guarantee that he does not hesitate to describe Christian people as having access in the here and now to the dwelling place of God: 'This is the anchor our souls have, reaching right through inside the curtain where Jesus has entered as a forerunner on our behalf.' (Heb 6:20).
The former Archbishop of Tuam, Joe Cassidy, has a lovely, familiar image to convey the central message of the Ascension. If you stood in a queue outside the cinema, if you had your seat booked and if you had a friend standing inside the door with the tickets, you'd be pretty sure of getting in. The Christ of the Ascension has booked a place in heaven for us. He paid for our seat with his blood. He sits at the right hand of the Father, waiting for us, praying for our arrival, says Cassidy.
As Christians, we don't live or die direction-less. We live and die in the knowledge of where Christ has gone. He told us in John (Jn 12:32) that when he was lifted up from the earth, he would draw all people to himself. He began the process on the cross and completes it in the Ascension. The cross and the Ascension are part of one great, sweeping, salvific movement, part of the same escalator. The progression is heavenward all the time. There will always be darkness in life and the inevitability of death. But we, children of the light, can look up through the darkness, towards the Christ who had gone ahead of us, 'not to abandon us but to be our hope' as the Preface of today's Mass assures us. He has set there a goal we can aim at. And we know it's a goal we can reach. Our hearts are full of hope that, with the help of the Lord who has gone before us and in the words of the opening prayer of the Mass, 'we may follow him into the new creation'.