How to explain the experience of Jesus’ after his resurrection?
There is the drastic reality of his physical presence, wounds and all; he is
disarmingly familiar, but there is also, mysteriously, something much more,
what we might call a transformed physicality. He walks through a
door, eats a piece of fish with his disciples then disappears;
he suddenly shows up again wishes peace, then opens the wound in his side
for Thomas to touch, andvanishes again. This coming and going happens over
and over again and then after forty days, these appearances no
longer occur. At this juncture the Ascension describes the event of his
exaltation and enthronement as Israel’s Messiah, seated at God’s right hand; he
is at last victorious Lord of the world; and he commissions his followers to
act on his behalf and inaugurate this new epoch of his reign.1
It seems a bit incongruous, but I keep thinking of a scene from a
Neil Simon comedy. The actress Anne Bancroft is just back from the supermarket;
cradling armloads of groceries, she struggles to open the door to her
apartment. Once inside her jaw drops, the place is in shambles, ransacked;
drawers opened, valuables missing. A few moments later her husband played by
Jack Lemmon comes in, he looks around and says, “What happened?” “We’ve been
robbed,” she says. “Robbed? What do you mean?” “Robbed,” she yells, “You know,
first it was ours, now it’s theirs. Robbed! Gone, disappeared.”
My brothers, we have not been robbed. Jesus has not disappeared
into the ether, only to be seen again in a heaven far, faraway. Ascension is
instead the great feast of intersection, interconnectedness. Jesus’ Incarnation
has come full circle – the One who took our flesh in Mary now takes all of it
with him into the bosom of the Father, God’s most loving desire for us is now
in its ascendancy. And as the Vespers hymn expresses it, the angels, those
bodiless adorers, are baffled and trembling as they see their turf invaded by
our lowly humanity. “Flesh has purged what flesh had stained, and
God, the flesh of God has reigned.”
What the Ascension of Jesus makes clear is that our flesh is very
precious to God, this wounded, embarrassed body that we are. Jesus loves our
humanity; he has embraced our flesh longing to rescue it and bring it home to
his Father. Today is the festival of the
future of our flesh, a sign of things to come for all of us and for all
creation, a great sign of hope, for it reveals the destiny God intends for each
of us. Our homeland as human beings is heaven, and the Ascension of
Jesus is the first moment of our own definitive disappearance into God. In the meantime, we are not left down here left waiting and
wondering. Jesus has
assured us, “I tell you the
truth, it is better for you that I go?” His bodily departure is better
for us, because, through the gift of his Spirit, he will be with us always and
everywhere, not time-bound, or Palestine-bound but “always, until the end of
the age.” Jesus has not gone anywhere, he’s gone everywhere.
“Heaven is not light years away, but closer to us than we are to
ourselves.”2 Certainly, there is more to come, a Paradise with joy beyond
telling. But as those two men in Acts insist, we often run the risk of
looking in the wrong direction. Jesus is not up there somewhere. Mysteriously,
wonderfully for faith-filled eyes, Jesus is seated at God’s right hand and most
fully present with us here. The “withdrawal
of Jesus is not so much an absence” as it is more superabundant presence3 made possible by the
Spirit. We are continually being drawn more deeply into a new life of
friendship with God; beckoned into a beyondness, invited
into the ordinariness of Mystery, the
ordinariness of incessant intimacy with Christ Jesus, at once hidden,
discernible only to the eyes of faith but very, very real. This is where we
live.
Jesus will be seen clearly when we act with compassion in his
name and create a community of friends, where rivalry and pretension are things
of the past. And even though our love may
be uneven, we hope to live again with Jesus in heaven, because in reality even
now in him our body is already there. We hope to find ourselves with him and
with those we love, even with those we may have found it difficult to love; all
of us a heaven of souls in bliss. This is imaginable if ever we have loved
anyone, and we would understand it ever better if we were to love more and to
believe that the kingdom of God is among us and depends on us.4
There’s a lot of talk now about what “the new normal” will be.
Seems to me, what’s normal is never new but the same old astonishing reality –
what’s been normal all along – that things are continually falling apart, that
change is constant and inevitable, that life is, of course, fragile and
precarious, always was, but that best of all, truest of all, most normal of all
- God in Christ is always, always right here with us in this mess. The only
place he has disappeared is into our precarious humanness now as always. In our
prayer no matter how dry or desolate, in our fear no matter how overwhelming,
God is with us – especially when we make the least effort to love and forgive
as he does. Jesus has not gone anywhere; he’s gone everywhere. And
most especially when we are privileged to gather for this Holy Eucharist,
with our hearts and voices joining those of the angels and saints, we are in
heaven with him, better still, we become heaven in him.
[1] See NT Wright in The
Resurrection of the Son of God.
[2] Robert Barron.
[3] Luke Johnson, Sacra Pagina: Luke.
[4] See Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p. 239.
Ascension in an Initial V
Niccolò di Ser Sozzo (Sienese, active 1348– died 1363)The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Used with permission.
