Penetrating deeper into the mystery of God

The Feast of the Ascension

Acts 1:1-11; Eph 1:17-23; Mk 16:15-20

At first blush, the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord can very easily dismissed as one of the secondary feasts, perhaps simply a memorial, a feast that we can do without. For those of us who have been brought up believing that world which is dictated only by rules of physics, where matter cannot be created and neither destroyed, the image of a person leaving planet Earth on a cloud can seem too fantastic to believe. To others who concede that science is not the be all and end all of the world, it might be hard to understand how feast can ever have any relevance or implications to our daily life.

However to think simply in these terms would be to reduce today's event to nothing more than a myth, which is a great pity indeed. The Feast that we are celebrating today, in fact, cannot be separated from the Resurrection of Christ. To dismiss today's feast as a myth or to conclude that it has very little to do with daily life, or even to think that it is simply a the departure of Jesus from the world - his final farewell, would be to refuse being open to the Holy Spirit.

As someone described it, to refuse to be open to the depth of the feast of the Ascension would be - as it were - to carefully seal the tomb again, to look for the living among the dead and to return to one's former life before Easter.

To be fair, the Ascension has a good news and a bad news. The bad news is that it is not easy to understand, but the good news is that it is much easier to live than to understand. Therefore I will be suggesting three words to help us live the mystery of the Ascension in our lives.

The first word is CONTINUITY.

Our life is characterized by parts and partitions. We like to categories everything - and everyone into nice little boxes with labels on them. We divide our time, our money, our territories. However in this feast, Jesus erases once and for all the great division that separates heaven from earth. In ascending to the Father, he takes with him all humanity, making the Earth and extension of Heaven, so to speak.

As we have read in the First Reading from the Book of Acts, and in the Gospel, Jesus leaves this world. However it is not a separation from Jesus but rather a more intimate and continuous communion of him with us. It is a turning point in history, the inauguration of a new relationship, of a new era.

Just as two thousand years ago, God pierced through and penetrated our reality when God became man in the little humble village of Bethlehem, now the inverse happens. Through the Ascension of Jesus, our humble reality as human beings pierces through and penetrates all that belongs to God.

We are therefore expected to experience this inversion of reality. Jesus has not left us or abandoned us; rather he is ever more present with us. The Earth is continuous with Heaven and like wise the rest of our life is continuous with the life of Christ. The church is not any holier a place than the T-station or than the supermarket because now everywhere is brims with the power of the risen Christ.

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God," says Gerard Manely Hopkins in his beautiful poem. When we realise this, we no longer become concerned with dividing our time: some time for us and some time for God, with dividing places, where some is God's and some is ours, but rather, our whole life becomes one continuous prayer, our whole day becomes one continuous liturgy, one whole celebration of an unending mass!

The second word is EMPOWERMENT.

When a teacher leaves the classroom and puts one of the students in charge of the class until she returns, that child no matter how weak fragile is suddenly empowered. The teacher shows her trust in the child, she believes in him and the other students see the figure of their teacher in their fellow student.

This is the effect of Jesus's ascension into heaven he trusts his disciples and no matter how weak and fragile they are, they have Christ's authority which makes all the difference. Just as he empowered them, he empowered us. Just as he trusted them, he trusts us to continue his mission. He has given us authority which means that we are not speaking or doing things in our name but in the name of Christ. Because authority, as we know, always means service.

The third word is the virtue of HOPE.

I am sure you can all recall how early last February Elon Musk launched his Tesla on a rocket into space. He says that his only hope for civilisation is to colonize Mars! Not a very encouraging claim as far as I' concerned! I will not go into the merits of whether he will succeed in colonising Mars or not. What we must be concerned with instead is that our hope does not rest simply in science and technology.

In the first reading, the angels promised the disciples that they will see Christ return just as they saw him leave. His Ascension into heaven, his making earth a continuation of the kingdom in heaven - as we recite every day in the Lord's Prayer - and his giving us the authority to continue his mission here on earth gives us a new hope. It is the hope that the Kingdom of God is already among us and we simply need to make it present. It is the hope that even when things just do not seem to be going right, when something seems missing and we don't know what it is: in our lives, in our families, in our society, we can be sure that Christ will make himself present again and restore all things in himself.