+Chapter Talk for the Ascension – May 12, 2024
Some years ago, I read a paper by Michael Casey about the Feast of the Ascension and his observations have stayed with me. I have no intention of taking away from what our homilist will present this morning but let me offer a few reflections on the Ascension. We tend to think of this celebration as a minor event in sacred history, even disruptive, but a closer look has us see it as a fundamental and ongoing experience in our spiritual lives. When Jesus ascended into heaven, his bodily presence seems to have been removed from us. One is inclined to think of how the first disciples must have felt a deep sense of loss or even of abandonment? But as the article by Michael Casey reminded me, there was much more going on.
In the last discourse of John’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples: “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. You heard me tell you ‘I am going away and I will come back to you.’ If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father; for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it happens, so that when it happens you may believe.” Jesus was telling his first disciples as he is telling us, that it is good that he is going to the Father, that his physical presence is withdrawn from us so that “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name” may come, who “will teach you everything and remind you of all” that he has ever told us.
The experience of the Ascension is something that is going on, all through our lives so that our faith may be deepened for it is in our faith that we truly know the living God. If our hearts are going to be purified, our religious experience become more and more authentic, then we must be cleansed of all that is of limited vision, that is superficial. Only when our true selves, made in the image and likeness of God, are cleansed of self-interest are we ready to live in that love that is the working and life of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is ever telling us not to be troubled or afraid of this apparent emptiness, for then the Advocate, the Holy Spirit will come and teach us everything.
In the Encyclopedia of Theology, edited by K. Rahner, in a section on the Ascension by a Lionel Swain tells us:
The accounts of Jesus’ ascension…explain why the appearances of the risen Jesus ceased: they came to an end because Jesus, finally, entered into a new kind of existence. Thus, even if Jesus appears to be absent from his church, in one sense, he is, in fact, more profoundly and intimately present to the church, in another sense. For he is now in “heaven” with God—in the heaven which, according to the biblical tradition, is a symbol not only of God’s transcendence and inaccessibility but also of God’s omnipresence. Paradoxically, being in heaven with God, Jesus is also present in the world in the way that God is present. The words of the risen Jesus to Mary Magdalen. [“Stop holding one to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them. ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”] pinpoint this paradoxical character of his ascension.”
It is the apparent bodily absence of Jesus that in fact, allows him to be far more present in each of our lives. Again, it is faith that opens our eyes to this ever-new life-giving reality, enables us to see God’s presence all around us and in every person with whom we live and interact each day.
All kinds of events and occasions arise each day that call us into this wider and deeper vision of the world all around us. Every day we have countless occasions to allow the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to take over our lives so that they are vehicles of divine grace. The path may be “narrow at the outset” as St Benedict tells us in the prologue of his Rule but “as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”