The Ascension Of The Lord – Year A

Acts 1:1-11
Ephesians 1:17-23
Matthew 28:16-20

WHERE HE HAS GONE, WE HOPE TO FOLLOW

In celebrating today’s great feast, we are celebrating many things of course, many aspects of the mystery of Christ, but among them and not least, is the surprising and wholly undeserved exaltation of our own humanity.  When Jesus was born, and took our human nature to Himself, that union between His Godhead and our own nature was irrevocable. Never again would human nature be distant from the Godhead, separated from It, cast away from It.  At the Ascension, Christ returns to His Father’s throne, and takes us with Him.  That is, He takes with Him to heaven our human nature, conjoined to His Divinity within His own single Person.  

Where He has gone, we hope to follow, because in a sense we are now already there, at least potentially.  The basic conditions of this potentiality were set up at the Ascension.  What we have to do now is make the potential real, actual, true.  We have to fix our minds and hearts, the deepest part of us, on that place where our own humanity must one day be crowned, in heaven.  We have to live in this everyday mixed-up physical world with our eyes on heaven.  We have to remember that the heights to which Christ ascended, those heights constitute our destiny.  We were made for heaven.  We are bound for paradise.   We are destined for beatitude.

 
Oftentimes, we easily forget the implications of the Ascension. Just as our prayers are often distracted, so also our sense of purpose is often waylaid, we lose our focus, we forget our final point of arrival.  We forget that we are immortal, that our lives here on earth are but a brief moment of preparation for our true life, everlasting life in the world to come.  It comes down to this, I think.   We tend to live as though the Lord had not ascended.
We tend to behave as though this world were all there is.  

We can get into the way of thinking, and acting, as if life here below were a closed circle, with no way out, no distant horizon, no supernatural perspective. It seems that this can happen all the more when we experience problems and difficulties of various kinds.  Those of you who have families to look after and worry about, will know how easy it is to get into this treadmill, the daily grind, where concentrating on the task in hand stops us from looking up and beyond, up towards heaven, and beyond this world, to the foothills of  God’s mountain – eternity.

With the Ascension, Christ entered in triumph through the gates of heaven, and those gates now remain wide, wide open for ever.  They remain wide open so that the rest of humanity may follow the same path, may enter the same way.  This is one of the essential tasks of a serious spiritual life, to keep looking up and beyond.  It’s not escapism.  It’s not running away from reality.  Quite the opposite.  Not running away, but running after.  We run after Him, so to speak.  We are running a race to meet our Redeemer. We strive to keep our eyes on heaven, the open heaven.  

ZAnd because the things of this world impinge on us so constantly and so insistently, we have to make a real effort not to lapse back into the closed-circle mentality.  Divine worship, Holy Mass, prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament, all this helps us to gaze at, and maybe even glimpse, the open heaven.  Grow higher ancient doors, let Him enter the king of glory.

Fr Joseph Osho