The Ascension and You
Ascension Scripture Readings
As always, we need to be acutely aware of the gospels’ context before we can fully appreciate what’s being communicated to us through them. Each of the gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—comes from a unique environment. Mark, as the earliest gospel, provides the converts from the Greek-speaking world—the Gentiles—with a background for their belief in the Resurrection. Matthew, the next gospel to be composed, provides the converts from Judaism not only with background for the Resurrection but also a faith foundation and confirmation based on the Hebrew Scriptures. Luke—from whom today’s gospel reading is taken—goes a step beyond, making his background to the Resurrection the prelude to the gift of the Holy Spirit, who empowers the proclamation of the Good News to the world by the Church. Finally, John, the last and latest of the gospels, takes what’s been taught and written by the others and raises it to a higher level by providing the reader with a personal experience of the encounter with the Father in the Son by the power of the Spirit. John’s is therefore the mystical gospel.
Setting today’s gospel reading from Luke in that context, we find that, for the author, this is the moment of transition between the revelation of the divinity of the Christ in the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and the proclamation of that faith to the world at large by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the mission of the Church. If we look at this passage closely, we find no indication of a change in place or time from Jesus’s original appearance to the disciples on the day of Resurrection itself. The tradition of Jesus appearing for forty days after his passion is a later interpretation. The number forty, after all, was used throughout the Scriptures symbolically as an indication that an event had reached its completion. Think of the duration of Noah’s flood, the wandering of the Israelites in the desert, the sojourn of Moses on Mount Sinai, and Jesus’s temptation in the desert, for example.
In the gospel today, Jesus is addressing his disciples after his Resurrection and outlining for them the kerygma or teaching of the Apostles. We find in that outline the four stages of this kerygma: first, teaching about the passion and Resurrection of the Messiah; second, teaching about the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures to Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection; third, teaching about the response to the Good News, which is metanoia—a change of mind and heart—and fourth, the description of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, his words and deeds by the eye-witnesses. This section ends with Jesus cautioning the Apostles to remain in Jerusalem until they’ve been fully invested in the power of the Holy Spirit. Only then are they to leave Judea and take the gospel into the Greek world. Luke insisted that Jesus’s ministry was exclusively to the people of Israel, while the mission to the Gentiles would only be accomplished by the Church.
The last segment of our gospel passage is the conclusion of Luke’s gospel. It’s a liturgical moment. Jesus leads the disciples on the road to Bethany by the Mount of Olives and the garden of Gethsemani. It’s there that he, exercising his messianic role as high priest of the New Covenant, raises his hands and blesses them. Luke says that he then parted from them, using the words “he was taken up to heaven.” The Greek word for “taken up” is the same one used in the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures to describe how incense and burnt offerings were taken up to God. Again, we’re in a liturgical context where Jesus’s offering of himself is acceptable to the Father. It’s not necessary to imagine a divine elevator raising Jesus up to the sky. Rather, this provides a conclusion to the liturgy that is Christ’s life, his death, and his Resurrection.
Let’s consider, for a moment, the deeper meaning of being “taken up to heaven.” Of course, heaven is not a place—a location—to which there are directions like “up.” Heaven is, rather, a state or condition of being. Various places in our Scriptures as well as in our liturgy describe the risen Jesus as sharing in the glory of God. Indeed, a few verses earlier in this chapter, we encounter Jesus’s question to his disciples where he says, “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things before entering into his glory?” [Luke 24:26] What these passages are describing is how, at Jesus’s Resurrection, he stepped outside of space and time. This is hugely important because it’s a description of the way God himself relates with the spacetime continuum of his creation. As God is unbound by space and time but yet interacts with it nonetheless, so the Resurrected Christ manifests his return from the dimension of spacetime to the transtemporal existence he shared with the Father from all eternity. That is his entry into glory. Why did God bother investing his eternal Word in our spatiotemporal world? It was for only one reason and that is to show us the way.
“Heaven,” the “Kingdom,” and “Glory” are all just ways of expressing life in God’s presence free from the bonds of space and time. The Ascension of Jesus into God’s presence after his Resurrection shows us in real terms what awaits us believers after our passion and death. That is the true “promised land” that God assured his faithful people would be theirs through his covenant with them. Jesus came to us to show us the way, the truth, and the life. It’s another instance where the gospels apply not only to Jesus but to us as well. Where Jesus has gone, we believers shall surely follow. In Jesus, we share in the glory of God, which is his presence. We’ll see how that’s accomplished next week when we celebrate the Solemnity of Pentecost.
Since the Ascension in Luke’s Gospel is the pivot point from Jesus’s ministry to the Hebrew people to the Church’s ministry to the nations, it’s now our turn. We’ve had six weeks of celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus, so now what follows is our mission to the world. It means proclaiming the gospel as the Apostles did, only not necessarily in words and theological concepts. Feel free to leave all that to the experts. Instead, our task as people of faith is to bear witness to the presence of God—God’s glory—in us and in our world. It means loving as Jesus loved, unreservedly and unconditionally. It also means being witnesses against those who would dehumanize and inflict suffering on others from hearts filled with greed and malice. We know who they are. We don’t need to be afraid of them. We’re more powerful than they. We’re ascending into glory. The love of God, living and active within us is raising us up. As Saint Paul wrote, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” [Romans 8:7] Love shall prevail.
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