Ascension

When I was young, one of the things that struck me as so very unattractive about a religious vocation was the likelihood of having to move periodically from place to place, the way that priests in religious communities seemed to be transferred and reassigned with considerable frequency at that time. I admired – but did not envy or desire to imitate – missionaries, who dutifully left their homelands for faraway places to fulfil the Risen Christ’s final command to his disciples.

Obviously, I had a strong craving for stability. So I dreaded ever having to move or even having to say good-bye to someone I cared about who was moving. I admired – but did not envy or desire to imitate – my grandparents, who had left behind in southern Italy all that was familiar and dear to them to cross the Atlantic as immigrants in America. Nowadays, I admire – but again do not envy - those who courageously leave their homelands in Central America and elsewhere in search of a safer and better life in the U.S. 

Over the years, of course, I have moved around a lot more than I had ever expected. Meanwhile, modern technology has admittedly made such separations somewhat easier, somewhat less final than they were for my immigrant grandparents or past generations of religious missionaries. But I still find farewells and departures – whether my own or that of some friend or colleague - extremely stressful. So I can easily imagine how distressed Jesus’ disciples must have been at the prospect of his departure. The fact that they kept looking intently at the sky as he was going, until two men dressed in white appeared to tell them to stop – that, I think, suggests how they felt. If saying good-bye is, in fact, one of the most stressful of human activities, then this was the good-bye to end all good-byes! Meanwhile, the message from the two men dressed in white was no less compelling, helping the disciples to recognize how they – and we – remain connected with Jesus, despite our obvious separation.

Some of us are old enough to remember the simple but effective way the Church used to ritualize Jesus’ departure when, after the Gospel on Ascension Day, the Easter Candle – our very visible symbol of the presence of the Risen Christ – was ceremonially extinguished. The point, of course, was that Jesus is now gone, and that we are left behind.

Historically speaking, the Ascension commemorates the end of that short period when the Risen Christ appeared several times to his disciples after his resurrection. With the Ascension, those appearances ended. And the disciples were indeed left behind, but left behind with a mission - to continue what Jesus had started. In this case, left behind does not mean alone, since Christ continues in his Church through his promised gift of the Holy Spirit. “I am sending the promise of my Father upon you,” the departing Jesus said to his disciples [Luke 24:49]. So the break is not so complete as it seemed, our separation not so definitive. Jesus may have moved away, but somehow we are still connected. In fact the Ascension, the going away, is a sort of prerequisite for the next act, the history of the Church, the beginning of which we will celebrate next Sunday on Pentecost, the great work of the Holy Spirit in which Jesus remains very much involved with us here.

Of course, one obvious question is where has Jesus gone?  He is, as we say Sunday after Sunday in the Creed, seated at the right hand of the Father. The Ascension is, therefore, the great feast of Jesus’ heavenly enthronement. But, while ascended and seated in glory, Jesus is still really with us here, through his parting gift of the Holy Spirit and in the sacraments the Church celebrates by the power of the Risen Christ and his Holy Spirit. And we too are also in some sense with him there. And so we will pray today, celebrating the most sacred day on which your Only begotten Son, our Lord, placed at the right hand of your glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself. In having his Son’s human nature enthroned at his side in heaven, God now has at his side the whole human world which his Son embraced in himself and experienced to the full.

So the Ascension is about us, as well as about Jesus – not just about our being left behind, but about what is in store for us now, thanks to Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, and (no less importantly) about what goes on here and now in the meantime. As Pope Saint Leo the Great famously said, back in the 5th century, “he had not left his Father when he came down to earth, nor abandoned his disciples when he ascended into heaven” [Sermon 2 on the Ascension]. So we rejoice in what the Ascension means for Jesus – his royal reign in heaven, his continuing presence on earth in his Church, and his promise to return to unite heaven and earth. And we rejoice just as much in what all that means for us. 

Meanwhile Jesus, invites us to approach him – as the epistle says - with a sincere heart and in absolute trust [Hebrews 10:22]. Confident that he lives forever to intercede on our behalf [Hebrews 7:25] and will in due time return again, we remain behind to continue what he started, to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth [Acts 1:1-11].

Homily for the Ascension of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 2, 2019.