Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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In the name of God, the Lover, the Beloved and the Love ever flowing.
The Ascension marks a new era in the history of salvation. Jesus’ ascension into heaven takes the enfleshed, embodied reality of the human experience within the Trinity, within the godhead.
The Ascension also marks the advent of the universal Christ. The Christ who is present to all times and all place. The Christ who is no longer constrained to the unicity of time and place of an earthbound, human body.
One can see that advent of the universal Christ as represented by the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles at Pentecost. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
With the Ascension, God now has within godself a lived experience of what it is to be a human creature. And a very complete experience it is, including, but not reduced to, deep suffering.
We, the creatures, have a knowledgeable, empathetic advocate in the person of Jesus who combines his human and his divine natures. Our human experience is intimately understood by the divine.
The empathy that is so central to Christian living – “love your neighbor as yourself” – is now more deeply ingrained in what God is. In God’s empathy, God goes: “yes, I know how that feels.”
That is an amazing God indeed. “What a wonderful God we have,” as a Holy Cross brother of times past used to say.
The ascension of Jesus into heaven is yet another place of intersection between the human and the divine. The incarnation was another one.
It is a place where the horizontality of human experience, its immanence, meets with the transcendence, the verticality of divinity.
And with the ever-present Holy Spirit (coming up, or is it down, to a church near you in ten days), that intersection expands everywhere, all the time. There is no atom, no quark that is not imbued with the Presence of God.
But back to the singularity of the ascension. In that moment, the apostles realize that the body and soul of Jesus need not be next to them for the Son of God to be very present to them. The text says: “And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” (Luke 24:52)
However, it takes two angels to bring them back to the now God-infused horizontality of their human experience: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” (Acts 1:11)
It can be tempting to be a spectator of God’s transcendence. We are transfixed by God’s awesomeness. We can be awed to the point of forgetting to be a witness to God’s immanence. We can forget to turn to fellow creatures and care for them, care for God in them.
We can and should contemplate God’s awesomeness. But we should be able to get up from our contemplation to “chop wood and carry water” for ourselves and for those in need.
A prayer commonly attribute to Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) points us in the direction of witnessing to God here and now:
God of love, help us to remember
that Christ has no body now on earth but ours,
no hands but ours, no feet but ours.
Ours are the eyes to see the needs of the world.
Ours are the hands with which to bless everyone now.
Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
And I add, ours are the flesh destined to embody God’s love in the world today and every day.
We are to marvel at our amazing God, in heaven as on earth. And we are to turn to our fellow creatures and attempt to be a blessing of love to God’s creation, in emulation of Jesus, no less.
And we are not meant to fixate on the time and place of the Redeemer’s return. Doing that can end up being an escape from our clear and present responsibility to God’s body as revealed in all creation (human, animal, vegetal, mineral, terrestrial and sidereal).
“This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11b) i.e. it’s all a mystery, don’t try to determine what is beyond your ability to figure out.
In the climate-changed, decreasingly bio-diverse, war-torn world of today, I may eagerly want God to provide us all with an immediate escape strategy. Come, Lord Jesus!
But no matter how much I may desire that; I am still to be God’s hands and feet here in the in-between times.
May the blessings of Jesus’ incarnation, life, passion, resurrection, and ascension strengthen us to be active witnesses to his love here and now.
Amen.
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