A homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, May 12, 2024
Acts 1:1-11, Eph 1:17-23, Mk 16:15-20
Souvenez vous que nous sommes dans le sancte présence de Dieu.
A Christian meme made its way around social media recently, depicting Jesus ascending to Heaven on a cloud, with the caption “Ascension Thursday: When Jesus Christ started working from home.”
I have it on good authority he has great bandwidth at his place.
But even as we acknowledge through this holy day that the Son is where he belongs — on his throne at the right hand of the Father — we also must recognize that God is not far, never far from us.
God is near.
God is here.
During my years at Christian Brothers Academy, we started every class with a reminder that we are always in the holy presence of God. I still remember the version of the acknowledgment in French, as taught by Madame Jacqueline Stockbridge, one of the first women teachers at CBA.
Souvenez vous que nous sommes dans le sancte présence de Dieu.
(It’s one of the few French phrases that stuck in my sieve of a brain, alas….)
The theology of the Ascension is dually simple yet staggeringly complicated.
Scriptures are vivid.
Likewise, our faith, as expressed by the Apostles’ Creed —
[H]e ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
— and the Nicene Creed —
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
— puts Jesus on or in a cloud, and up he rises by his own divine power. He ascends. He disappears from his disciples’ sight, as the evangelists recount, and then they are reassured — apparently by an angel or other messenger of the Most High — that their Messiah will be back for them.
Parenthetically, the particulars of the Ascension are what differentiate his unique entry into Heaven from his mother’s. Mary was transported — we use the term “assumed” — directly to Paradise through the intervention of God because she was born without sin and therefore not subject to human death. She needed a lift.
The Scriptural depiction of the Ascension ties a neat bow on the Nazarene’s 33 years on Earth. Jesus was tortured, executed, rose from the dead in triumph, and then returned to the Father who sent him on his mission. The Son came down from Heaven and went back up to Heaven.
Makes perfect sense.
As people of the first century and before them understood, Heaven was above the sky, which itself was a sea of sorts, according to the first chapter of Genesis. Heaven, to many, is a tangible place much like Earth, except Heaven is 100 percent good and holy and peaceful and beautiful. It’s God’s Kingdom of pure love and justice, with dwelling places — apartments? condos? mansions? — for all who follow The Way. Jesus said so.
Members of the Jesus Movement of the late 20th century pointed their index fingers to the sky to show the Son is the One Way to Heaven.
Up.
There.
Simple and relatable. Easily embraced, even to this day. And that’s perfectly fine.
But if we throw in two millennia’s worth of deep theological ponderings and fervent heartfelt prayers, we may consider the Ascension less a going and more of a resuming. A resuming of a divine form, a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient form that permeates everyone and everything. An ascending to a higher plane of existence beyond the limitations of a carbon-based life form … and of our human capability to fully comprehend.
True man for 33 years; true God for eternity, for infinity.
We proclaim that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, and we take up the yoke of his Two Commandments, to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
And as our omnipresent Emmanuel, Jesus is always with us and in us, even as his Second Coming as the judge to separate the sheep from the goats is still pending.
Jesus ascended into Heaven, yet he is with us always, binding us to him and linking us to each other through the love in action that flows from God through us.
Hmm…
So if Jesus is in Heaven yet also here, does that mean Heaven is here?
If not, could it be?
Could we play a part in making it happen?
What would we need to do?
Hmm…
All things are possible with God, if we surrender to God’s will.
