Ascension Sunday, Year C
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11
Second Reading: Heb 9:24-28; 10:19-23
Gospel Reading: Lk 24:46-53
“As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them,” who said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
As we proclaim in the Creed every Sunday, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” When he does, he will take us with him, so that where he is, we may be too, as he promised the night before he died.
Why does the Church celebrate Christ’s Ascension with such solemnity?
The Ascension is not a “dis-incarnation,” as if God became man, saved us, and then returned to being God again. Christ, fully God and fully man, ascended to heaven not only as God, but also as man, as the apostles saw him go.
Consequently, there is now, at the very heart of the Holy Trinity, a man like us. As the poet Dante said in his Paradiso, he saw in the depths of God “one Who looked exactly like me. And then I knew the love that moves the sun and all the stars.”
Quite simply, we can say that since the Ascension, humanity is something we have in common with God.
Under the Old Covenant, God was hidden from us by the curtain that screened the sanctuary, the “holy of holies,” from the rest of the temple in Jerusalem. However, that curtain was torn in two “from top to bottom” – by God himself – at the moment Jesus died.
Now we can confidently “enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain; that is, through his flesh.” As Jesus told Philip, he himself is “the way.” We can enter the sanctuary in him, for, through baptism, we are attached to him like a body’s organs to its head.
Meditate on it. “He who exists as Son of God before all ages,” who is himself God, “of one being with the Father, is seated bodily after he became incarnate and his flesh was glorified,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
A man, one of us – although with a glorified body – is seated at God’s right hand; that is, in a position of authority, far above any other rule, power, or dominion. He, “our great high priest” and eventually our judge, appears there “on our behalf.” Through him we can approach God “in full assurance.”
“Left to its own natural powers, humanity does not have access to the Father’s house, to God’s life and happiness,” the Catechism says. “No one has gone up to heaven,” Jesus told Nicodemus, “except the one who came down from there” – himself.
Now we have this access. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself,” he said. “We too shall go where he, our head and our source, has preceded us,” says the Catechism.
In the Creed, then, we confidently proclaim our belief in “life everlasting.” God will “divinize” us, the Catechism says – make us divine, like himself – and will welcome us into the bliss of the Holy Trinity’s life and love.
The Catechism says that God became man so that we might share in “the divine nature,” as we pray in the Offertory at Mass; so that God, “made man, might make men gods”; “so that we might become God.”
These are not overstatements.
Let us rejoice that “God has gone up” with “the sound of a trumpet”; “sing praises” to Christ, “King of all the earth”; and pray that through his Ascension, we may “follow him into the new creation.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-34 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 35, “The Beatitudes,” will be available in YouTube form starting May 29.