Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero, OHC
The Feast of the Ascension, Year A - Thursday, May 18, 2023
I am sure must if not all of you have seen depictions of the Ascension in paintings, such as the one by von Kulmbach at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which the amazed and confused crowd looks up and all that can be seen at the top of the painting is Jesus' feet dangling through the clouds. And there’s the one by the Italian Andrea Mantegna in which Jesus is surrounded by cherubs as he is ascending. These two paintings and hundreds of others like them contrast heaven "above" and earth "below," with Jesus hovering in between.
Our ideas today about space and time are different from those in the first century, when there was a three-tiered understanding of the universe- earth in the middle, hell down below us, and heaven somewhere up above the clouds. It's tempting to contrast the out-of-date cosmology of St. Luke with the updated cosmology of contemporary physics. But I think that is misguided and not helpful. I don't expect the writer of the Gospel to have known modern cosmology. He described the Ascension within the context of the best cosmology of his day, an imperfect cosmology, which has since been supplanted by our own imperfect cosmology. It's misleading to privilege any cosmology, whether ancient or modern, as a final picture of the world for all time.
We do best to ponder the stories meaning and how we are to experience it. Before we do so, though, we must ask, “which story”? The same writer wrote slightly different versions of the story. In the Gospel, he places the Ascension just after the resurrection appearances; maybe a day or two after Easter. In the Book of Acts, he places the Ascension “forty days” after Easter. Now, I seriously doubt that the writer forgot what he had already written in his gospel when he began to write the Acts of the Apostles. But it is an indication of how these details are to be thought of symbolically rather than factually. The story serves as the bridge between the two books. It closes the book concerning the life and ministry of Jesus (the Gospel of St. Luke) and opens the book concerning the life and ministry of the early Christian church (the Acts of the Apostles).
Throughout the scriptures the number “forty” symbolizes a period of fullness or completion. In the days of Noah, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights; the Israelites traveled in the wilderness for 40 years before they reached the promised land; Moses was atop Mount Sinai for 40 days and forty nights; and Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness. So when the author writes that Jesus appeared to the apostles for forty days after the resurrection, he is indicating the completion of something. The apostles are now to let go of the old way of knowing Jesus so that his empowering presence can now be experienced in a different way – from his physical presence with them, to the divine Presence of Christ with and within them.
St. Luke seems to be using symbolic space and time to describe a reality that could not at that time be expressed otherwise. A closer reading of the twenty or so allusions to Jesus’ Ascension in the New Testament seem to indicate that the writers understood the crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and even the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as a single multifaceted mystery that the apostles seem to have experienced in chronological stages.
So, knowing what we know today, it is not helpful to think of Jesus having ascended "up" as in really far away above our heads in space. It is a beautiful story pointing to a deeper meaning. We might better understand Jesus' Ascension not as a change of location, but as his movement to a deeper dimension of reality. Jesus moved in the Ascension from being present in the realm of space and time to being present in the realm of eternity, in the transcendent heavenly realm, and as he tells us in the Gospel according to Matthew, to be with us always, “to the end of the age.” And how are we to experience the Ascension today? I leave you with the words of Thomas Merton:
“[The Ascension] is the feast of silence and interior solitude when we go up to live in heaven with Jesus: for he takes us there, after he has lived a little while on earth among us. This is the grace of Ascension Day: to be taken up into the heaven of our own souls, the point of immediate contact with God. To rest on this quiet peak, in the darkness that surrounds God. To live there through all trials and all business with the ‘tranquil God who makes all things tranquil.’”
¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+
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