The Ascension (2006): Heaven is a who, not a what.

The New Testament speaks of Jesus “descending” to the earth in the incarnation, and of his “ascending” again to heaven after the resurrection.

This is because, at the time of Jesus, the Jews understood creation to have three fixed levels: the heavens, the earth and the underworld. They considered that God lived above the heavens.

Therefore, the way they would describe the visible coming of Jesus would naturally be to say that he “descended”, and the way they would describe his visible departure from us would be that he “ascended.”

But God does not live in a remote corner of the physical universe.

A rocket blasting off from Cape Carnaveral, even if it were to fly at maximum speed for billions of years, would never crash into God’s house!

Therefore, when we speak of and pray over the Lord’s ascension into heaven, we must understand that the term “ascension” does not mean in the first place movement in a physically vertical direction.

Even although the New Testament does actually speak of Jesus being lifted up in a cloud, he was simply teaching the apostles that he was returning in his visible, risen body to the Father, to heaven - as they understood it.

After they could see him no more, it was not because he was reaching ever higher altitudes beyond the earth’s atmosphere. The angels even say to the apostles, “why are you standing staring into the sky?” That is, “you will not find him by straining your eyes or by powerful telescopes.”

So how are we to understand the ascension?

The ascension is the logical consequence of the resurrection.

Jesus did not come back to the same life he had before he died, as did Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter. They died again; Jesus will never die again.

His risen life is immortal, an immortality which invades his body. Immortal life is another way of speaking of that kind of life which is proper to God; it is the fullness of the divine life of the Trinity.

Another name we give this Trinitarian life is quite simply heaven.

By the resurrection, then, heaven enters fully into the risen body of Jesus. As St. Paul puts it, “the fullness of divinity dwells in Christ bodily.”

But if heaven dwells in Christ, then Christ is heaven.

The ascension is therefore simply the completion of the resurrection. By being raised, Jesus himself becomes heaven.

Why, then, did he not remain visible to us in his risen body?

Remember the Transfiguration, when Jesus was transformed in glory before Peter, James and John on Mount Tabor?

These apostles then saw an anticipation of his full-blown risen glory. Recall what happened.

Peter wanted to stay there because it was so wonderful. But Jesus did not let him, because Peter still had a long journey to travel before he would be fit permanently to see Jesus in glory.

Peter still had to be purified of his pride and arrogance, of his treachery and greed.

Peter still had to fulfill in his own body his share in the sufferings of Christ, and his mission to witness to Christ and lead his flock, the church.

Peter still had to be perfected in love, and perfect love is holiness, and only such holiness can see God.

Remember also that during the forty days, Jesus did not appear to the apostles in the same glorious way as at the Transfiguration. He came in such a way that their sinful mortal eyes could see him and so strengthen their faith in the resurrection so that their witness would not be grounded on fantasy.

They ate and drank with him, touched him and talked with him. Jesus made himself accessible to them in this way to ground their faith in the resurrection in reality.

He did not overwhelm them with blazing glory; that would probably have killed them, for no man can see God as he is and survive.

Likewise for us, the time is not ripe to gaze on the glory of the risen and ascended Christ.

This is our mortal time of test and trial, as it was for Peter and the billions of Christians who have gone before us and will come after us.

This is the time for us to be purified in heart, soul, mind and body, the time to be made perfect in the holiness of love, so that we will be capable of gazing on Christ.

This is not the time for us to be gazing into the sky, but to be attending here and now with self-giving love to our vocation and our responsibilities, inspired by our faith in the risen Lord.

Our desire to see the risen Christ will be sincere to the degree that we now live and act according to the love and wisdom of his commandments and his cross.

So many people are often curious to see wonderful things, but once they have seen them, they simply boast about it as if they were more wonderful than what they have seen.

In a sense, then, Jesus protects us from our own cynicism by not putting us in the situation where we will abuse the vision of his glory, lest, once we have seen it, we return to our sins and that glory no longer means anything to us.

The human being tires so easily of even the most sublime things!

Does this mean, then, that Jesus is absent to us?

Because he is not visible does not mean he is not present. “I am with you always, even to the end of the age”, he said to his apostles.

This presence is not a figure of speech. It is real, very real, more real than we are real ourselves.

And this is no more so than in the sacrament of his real presence, the Holy Eucharist or Holy Communion. How can we commune with someone who is absent?

Jesus Christ, risen and ascended, is truly present in a substantial way in the consecrated bread and wine. As Pope St. Gregory the Great put it: the visibility of Christ has passed into the sacraments.

Our eyes, before death and because of sin, are only able to cope with seeing “Christ the sacrament” in his seven forms, of which the greatest is the Eucharist.

If the Eucharist is the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ –and it is!- and if that body, blood, soul and divinity have ascended into heaven in such a way that heaven is in Christ – and they have!-, then it means that, when we receive the Eucharist, we receive heaven itself in sacramental form; it also means, and more so, that we are received by heaven.

In and through the Eucharist, we have ascended beyond the material universe itself and are truly and really present to the real Jesus, that is, the Jesus in whom the Father and the Spirit dwell, in whom is the joy of all the saints who have gone before us, who is the glory of the angels.

And we do not stand alone with them, but with everyone else who today receives the Eucharist, and with every holy soul in purgatory who knocks at heaven’s door.

In the Eucharist, then, we die, rise and ascend with Christ in a sacramental way.

Christ ascends into the Eucharist.

This side of the grave, the Eucharist is therefore heaven.

Jesus does not ascend away from us, but “into” us, through the Eucharist.

Through it he therefore transforms us into himself, into heaven. As the Book of Revelation says, “God’s dwelling place will be with human beings.”

Ascension is not, then, alienation or deprivation, but eternal fulfillment, eternal homecoming and the perfection of eternal love in the risen and life-giving body of Jesus the Savior.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, May 28^th, 2006

Annunciation, DC: 11.30 am