Ascension Thursday
Like many of our great feast days, the mystery of the Ascension offers multiple facets to our contemplation. First and foremost, it the Ascension that the One we love above all others, the very foundation and fulcrum of our existence, Jesus Christ Our Lord, is henceforth glorified at the right hand of the Father, above all creatures, never more to suffer, never more to die. Jesu, Amor noster. Jesus, our love has received the eternal reward for His sacrificial death, and that thought is one that gives us reason to exult; it should ground our hearts in great peace, never more to be perturbed.
Secondly, we know that, not only is the Lord in glory, but that He remains with us, in the Church, in the Sacraments, especially in the Most Holy Eucharist, and His living presence among us urges us on ever more to conform our lives with the eternal life He now lives in glory.
And that brings us to the third aspect of the feast, which is that our Blessed Lord will come a second time. Jesus, our Love, is also the object of our desire. Jesu, Nostrum Desiderium. We long for His return, for the angel told us that He will come, the same way He went, in glory and majesty. Our love for Him today moves us to long for His return tomorrow, and our Christian existence is in constant tension between those two poles, ever since the Son of God rose to the heights of Heaven.
The Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that Our Lord has penetrated behind the veil: This we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, which reaches into the interior behind the veil, where Jesus has entered on our behalf as forerunner, becoming high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek (Heb 6:19-20). Unlike the anchors of ships that are cast downward, Jesus is an anchor that is thrown up into Heaven, and which provides us with the firm certitude that He is the one who gives that reliable stability to our lives. He holds us strong from on high, lest we fall or turn back. Let us keep our eyes fixed on Him without fail.
From that throne on high, Our Blessed Lord draws all men to Himself, as He Himself said He would: When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself (Jn 12:32). At the same time, He also tells us: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him (Jn 6:44). And so we may ask: why doesn’t the Father draw all? Quite simply, the Father draws those who let themselves be drawn. He loves those who let themselves be loved. God is almighty, but there is one thing He Himself refuses to do, and that is to force someone’s heart. The door to the heart is opened only from the inside. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me (Ap 3:20). As St Augustine said, my love is my weight, amor meus, pondus meum. If I love Jesus, I am drawn to Him. If I open my heart to Him, the Father draws me into His Heart.
Just before rising to Heaven, Our Lord told the apostles: You will be my witnesses (Act 1:8), here and to the ends of the earth. There is no part of the earth in which you will not take the witness to my life and love. I in turn will accompany you with signs, with wonderful miracles of grace, that will give proof of the divinity of your mission. Those miracles have never been lacking in the Church, from the very beginning, as is seen in the Acts of the Apostles, and all the way into the 21st century, as can be seen in the lives of the saints that continue to be canonised by the Church. Those miracles are necessary to confirm the divine mission of the Church, but there are also many other signs of grace that are much more frequent, and they point to the divinity of the Church and her mission. These are the fruits of ordinary sanctity which can be seen in the lives of the faithful, in so many priests and nuns who dedicate their lives to the Gospel and to souls, in the lives of so many mothers and fathers who accept all the children God sends them, and rear them in the fear of the Lord and the respect for His holy law.
This witness is so important in a world which St Teresa of Avila had already said was going up in flames. Indeed, the world is being reduced to ashes as we speak. It is so cold that it is burning. Intense cold produces severe burns. Today the world is ice cold, hearts are frigid, egotism reigns supreme, faith perishes, morals are lost, and all that we used to hold as sacred is going up in flames. What the world needs is to approach the real fire of the Heart of Jesus, the fornax ardens caritatis, the burning furnace of charity, in order to receive the calor Verbi, the heat of the Divine Word.
In such a world, it is easy for the Enemy to wave any flag to draw attention away from the eternal truths that have been revealed to us by God. At the moment, there is much talk of ‘aliens’ or ‘extra-terrestrials’ who are purported to be intelligent beings from distant planets and galaxies who are coming to bring us some higher knowledge of reality and help us fix our problems on earth. Be on your guard. God sent His Son to teach us all the Truth. He sent His Holy Spirit to maintain us in that truth. God created myriads of angels who serve Him day and night along with the holy souls of the saints who have gone before us. Any intelligent power in the universe that is not from God can only be from God’s enemies, that is to say, from the fallen angels, the demons, who seek to deceive humans in every possible way. Let us not be led astray. Our Lord had warned us: Many will come in my Name, many false prophets will rise. They will even perform extraordinary signs and wonders. Do not go astray.
Among the saints, St John of the Cross expressed this truth in an admirable way. He writes (Ascent of Mount Carmel): ‘In giving us, as He did, His Son, who is His only Word – He has no other – God has spoken it all to us, once and for all, in this only Word; He has no more to say’. And again: ‘God has become mute and has no more to say: what He used to say partially, to the prophets He has now said totally, in His Son, giving us His Son, who is our Everything….’ And he puts these words in the mouth of the Eternal Father: ‘If I have already said all things to you in my Word, my Son, and if I have no other, what kind of answer could I give you now, or what could I reveal that would surpass this? Set your eyes on Him alone, because in Him I have said it all to you… and you will find in Him even more than you are asking, more even that you desire… He is my total locution and vision, my total revelation and the whole of my reply. This I have already spoken to you, giving him to you as Brother, Companion, Master, Ransom and Reward’.
In other words, God’s revelation is complete; it is not partial. He did not hide part of the truth from us. If God has revealed everything to us in His Son, then we are to expect no more revelations from any other source. There is only one ‘alien’ who has come to our planet, and that was over 2,000 years ago. But He did not come as an alien. He came as one of us. God became man so that man could become God, that is to say, so that we could be adopted into God’s family. He came and taught us the truth, and He left us with the message to change the world.
Unfortunately, we all have a tendency to allow ourselves to be distracted and we easily give ear to strange novelties. Perhaps this is why, as the apostles stood there ecstatic as Our Lord disappeared in the clouds, the angel jolted them out of their wonderment: Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven (Acts 1:11). The apostles had let themselves be distracted by the extraordinary manner of Our Lord’s disappearing from them, and they had already forgotten the Lord’s command. The angel’s words meant: go, preach the word, touch hearts, you are the light of the world; you have received the fulness of God’s revelation; it is complete. Do not wait for or expect any other. Only Jesus is the Way. He who has come will come again. In the meantime, you have work to do. Never forget that you were not made for the earth, but for Heaven, the true Heaven. Not some imaginary galaxy very far away, but the Heaven where the Triune God reigns and where all the angels and saints are waiting for us.
In some way we are already in possession of that eternal destiny, because since the day of the Ascension, our humanity already sits on the divine throne in the Person of Christ, and the Divine Anchor is pulling us upwards. As St Leo tells us in a homily for this feast, ‘the Ascension of Christ is our promotion’. Where the Head has preceded, the body must follow. So let us lift up our eyes to our King, to our God; let us follow Him beyond the clouds, beyond the veil. Let us allow Him to transform us into apostles who are able to go and take the saving truth to others. May the Mother of the King, Our Lady Queen of Heaven, help us all. Supported by her prayers and following her example, we cannot go astray. If we hold tight to her Rosary, she will hold us, and no one that she holds will fall.
