Sermon on Ascension Day 2012

ASCENSION DAY

or

Sunday After the Ascension – 2012

Peter Wilkinson

‘Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?’  This was the question the Angels asked the disciples when our Lord returned to the Father.

They told the disciples that our Lord was truly ‘up there’.  They also implied that the Disciples must now get to work under the new conditions Our Lord had inaugurated until He returned in glory.

To-day, if some theologians don’t deny the event entirely, they will say that we must no longer think of God as ‘up there’, or ‘out there’, but only of God ‘within us’, or as ‘the ground of our being’.

These two points of view – of the Angels at the Ascension, and of some modern theologians – are not necessarily contradictory. They only become so when one point of view is emphasized to the exclusion of the other.

Taken together, these two viewpoints are part of the paradox that lies at the very heart of our Catholic Faith. God is both ‘up there’ (the technical word is transcendent: i.e., He is external to the universe which He has created); and God is also ‘down here’ (the technical word is immanent: i.e., He is within the universe, His creation, and the source of the law by which it has its being and continued existence).

The traditional teaching about the Ascension of our Lord is a confirmation of this basic element of the Faith.  Our Lord, having finished His visible work on earth, inaugurated a new method of ministry.  Having taken our human nature from conception, to birth, to death, and on to Resurrection, He has now taken His glorified human body and soul into the immediate presence of the Father. Henceforth our Lord is the King, the Lord of the cosmos and of history; and He is the Priest, who ever lives to make intercession for us. The final age of the world has now arrived. And He is present in the Church on earth in the hearts of His people by His Holy Spirit, who helps us in this time of distress and trial, as we enter the struggles of the last days. He is both ‘up there’ and also ‘within us’.

Two results follow for us:

1.  We must think, speak and act as if Christ’s life were living within us – as indeed it most certainly is!  Everything we do must reflect the fact that we are saturated through and through with His life and love; and our thoughts, words, and deeds must reveal our association with Him.

2.  On the other hand, since we are united to Him as living members of His mystical Body, and He dwells in Heaven at the right Hand of the Father –  remember the Easter Day Epistle, ‘you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God’ – our hearts and minds must live up there.  Why do you think the beginning of the great Eucharistic Prayer begins with the command ‘Lift up your hearts’?  Lift them where?  Remember the reply, ‘We lift them up unto the Lord’ – the original Latin is more blunt, ‘Habemus ad Dominum’, ‘We have them with the Lord’.  And where is He? In Heaven, where we really live. We are citizens of that country. Here on earth we are only temporary visitors on a pilgrimage home through various trials and tribulations. At the Eucharist, with Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven, we are back home.

The question is, How do we maintain our correct status while living in both worlds?  Certainly not by forgetting our real home and behaving as if this were all. Rather, by making our surroundings here as reminiscent as possible of home, our heavenly home.  Soldiers in temporary stations or on campaign will set to work when they can and plant gardens, and generally make their environment as much like home as possible.  So we can set about building a little bit of heaven around us here, and cultivating a garden of heavenly virtues, – especially faith, hope, and charity, – by relying upon, and co-operating with, the power of Christ, who has already returned to us in His Holy Spirit, and who receives us at His table in His Kingdom. How? The Kingdom is already present among us because every time the Eucharist is consecrated, the King is present. And where the King is, there is the Kingdom.  The Eucharistic presence of Christ the King constitutes the Church as the Kingdom of God.

As the hymn says,

       His manhood pleads where now it lives
On heaven’s eternal throne,
And where in mystic rite (the Eucharist) He gives
Its presence to His own.

or

Blessed, praised and adored be Jesus Christ
on His throne of glory in Heaven,
And in the most holy sacrament of the Altar,
And in the hearts of all His faithful people
In His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.