Ascension Sunday, Year A
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11
Second Reading: Eph 1:17-23
Gospel Reading: Mt 28:16-20
As the apostles watched, Jesus “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” He had promised to remain with them, and the angels told them that he would return, but they could no longer see him as before.
Why, then, is the Church’s mood so ecstatic? “God goes up with shouts of joy; the Lord goes up with trumpet blast!”
When unbaptized people come to the Church for instruction, the priest asks them, “What do you ask of God’s Church?” and they reply, “Faith.” Then he asks, “What does faith offer you?” and they answer, “Eternal life.”
Eternal life is an entirely different kind of life from the human life we have by nature. To distinguish them, let us do what St. John did, writing in Greek: call natural human life bios and supernatural life zoë.
Only God has zoë by nature. However, God the Son became man so that we too “might have zoë, and have it to the full.” Yes, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him may not die, but may have zoë.”
To possess zoë is the whole point of being Christian. This is what faith offers us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes the saints to hammer it home. God the Son became man so that we might become “sharers of the divine nature.” The Son of God became the Son of Man “so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” The Son of God “became man so that we might become God.” The only son whom God begets, “wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”
Now we can understand the significance of Jesus’ Ascension: “the irreversible entry of his humanity into divine glory, symbolized by the cloud and by heaven, where he is seated from that time forward at God’s right hand,” says the Catechism. “There he who exists as Son of God before all ages, indeed as God, of one being with the Father, is seated bodily after he became incarnate and his flesh was glorified.”
The Ascension is the triumph of the Incarnation, the triumph of Jesus’ humanity. It is our triumph too, for Jesus said, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”
“Left to its own natural powers [bios], humanity does not have access to the Father’s house, to God’s life [Zoë] and happiness,” the Catechism explains.
Christ gives us this access through the sacraments. In baptism, we are reborn with zoë as members, or organs, of his Mystical Body. At Mass, our new life is nourished with his body and blood, so that “by the mystery of this water and wine,” we may “come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
No wonder the Church celebrates the Ascension with such joy and triumph! As members of the Church, Christ’s body, we, who by nature are merely human, are now called to live forever with God’s life, in the heart of the Trinity, where the head of the body is already seated in glory!
No wonder St. Paul prays so earnestly that God may give us “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” as we come to know him, so that we may realize the richness of our inheritance as saints and the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.
“God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand,” far above all other rule, authority, power, and dominion. “He has put all things under his feet and made him the head over all things for the Church, which is his body.”
Father Hawkswell teaches The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights in both print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver. org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre (4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and on Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is “The Beatitudes.”
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