Ascension Sunday, Year A
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11
Second Reading: Eph 1:17-23
Gospel Reading: Mt 28:16-20
We sometimes wish we could have lived in the time of Jesus, when we could actually see, hear, and touch him. We wonder why he did not stay with us more than 40 days after his Resurrection (as we hear in the First Reading).
Apparently Jesus did not think it important for us to see him with our physical eyes. In fact, when Thomas demanded physical proof that Jesus had risen from the dead (as we heard a few Sundays ago), Jesus said to him, “You became a believer because you saw me. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.”
In other words, we have the advantage: in fact, we are “blessed” precisely in not having seen him.
Jesus left us, Pope Leo the Great said, so that faith “might be more excellent and stronger.”
After the Ascension, the apostles experienced the “blessedness” Jesus had spoken of to Thomas, for “their faith did not fail, their hope did not waver, and their love did not grow cold.”
Instead, they lifted “the whole contemplation of their mind to the godhead of him who sat at the Father’s right hand.”
Bodily sight no longer hindered them from directing their minds to him who “had never quitted the Father’s side in descending to earth, and had not forsaken the disciples in ascending to heaven.”
When Jesus was among them bodily, they could touch his body; but by his body “he is less than the Father,” Pope Leo said.
Now, with their “better instructed faith,” they “began to draw closer to a conception of the Son’s equality with the Father,” realizing that “in an ineffable manner” he had begun to be “nearer to the Father in respect of his godhead, after having become further away in respect of his manhood.”
They began to realize that “he who descended is the very one who ascended high above the heavens, that he might fill all men with his gifts.”
“Do not cling to me,” Jesus told Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”
What did he mean?
He meant, said Pope Leo, “I would not have you come to me as to a human body, nor yet recognize me by fleshly perceptions: I put you off for higher things; I prepare greater things for you; when I have ascended to my Father, then you shall handle me more perfectly and truly, for you shall grasp what you cannot touch and believe what you cannot see.”
Similarly, the angels chided the disciples at Jesus’ Ascension: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come again in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” He will come to judge the living and the dead “in the same flesh in which he ascended,” Pope Leo said.
Until then, his presence among us is a sacramental presence.” At his Ascension, “sight gave way to doctrine.” In prayer – our “living relationship” with God – we “raise our hearts’ eyes unimpeded to those heights where Christ is”; we raise minds not “pressed down by earthly affections.”
Now, with the eyes of our hearts “enlightened,” as St. Paul says, we see the hope to which he calls us and the riches we inherit as his brothers and sisters.
We saw the joy among the Poles at the election of Pope John Paul II, among the Germans at the election of Pope Benedict XVI, and among the Argentinians at the election of Pope Francis. How much more should we all rejoice at Christ’s Ascension, when a man, one of us, took his seat at God’s right hand!
“Christ’s Ascension is our uplifting,” said Pope Leo. We should not regret that Jesus has left us, then, but, like the apostles, be filled with joy.