Reflection: We Have Ascended with the Lord

The Feast of the Ascension of the Lord is also our Feast because we have ascended with the Lord!The Feast presents an opportunity to assess the relationship between our profession of faith and our daily life.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - Throughout the Western Church we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord today. In some Dioceses in the United States, the Feast is transferred to Sunday.

The great western Church Father and Bishop Augustine proclaimed these words on the Feast:

"Today our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven; let our hearts ascend with him. Listen to the words of the Apostle: If you have risen with Christ, set your hearts on the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; seek the things that are above, not the things that are on earth. For just as he remained with us even after his ascension, so we too are already in heaven with him, even though what is promised us has not yet been fulfilled in our bodies."

The insights contained in this passage from Augustine tell us something wonderful about this Feast and what it means. The Feast of the Ascension of the Lord is also our Feast.

When we went down into that Font of Baptism we were incorporated into Jesus Christ. Therefore, (also in the words of that great Saint Augustine speaking on behalf of the Lord), "Where the Head is, there is the Body, where I am, there is my Church, we too are one; the Church is in me and I in her and we two are your Beloved and your Lover."

In other words, we have ascended with the Lord!

Through His life, death and resurrection, all that separated us from God has been definitively dealt with, we have been redeemed and are being re-created anew in Him as we cooperate with grace. We have also been incorporated into a communion of love with God the Father, in the Son and through the Holy Spirit which is lived out sacramentally in the Church.

Yes, we can only "see" all of this with the eyes of faith, but faith is, in the words of the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, "the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things to come."

The Ascension does not mark the end of Jesus' relationship with the Church but the beginning of a new way of His relating to, through, with and in that Church, with us and for the world that He came to save.

This Church is the new Israel, a new people now being re-created in Him and sent into the world to continue His redemptive mission until He comes again. We are members of His Body. Through us, Love Incarnate still walks through time.

The Christian faith is about living and proclaiming this new relationship in Christ with the Father, through the Holy Spirit; in Christ with one another; and in Christ with the world that still awaits its full redemption. Through Baptism we have been incorporated into Christ and we live "in Him" for the world. This truth is meant to reorient our whole way of being and our whole way of living.

The Ascension of the Lord is not about an end of the ministry of Jesus on this earth, in the sense of a final act. Nor is it some kind of "intermission", to be concluded upon His Bodily return, which will most certainly occur. Rather, it is about a new beginning, a new way of being, now.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the early Christians in Galatia: "No longer do I live but Christ lives in me and the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God..." That way of living now in Christ is meant to become our daily reality as well.

Christians can live differently because we live now "in" Jesus Christ. We can love differently, because we love "in" Jesus Christ. We can "be" differently.

We should ask ourselves the question, "How are we doing?" The Feast presents an opportunity to assess the relationship between our profession of faith and our daily life.

St. Paul wrote to the early Christians in Corinth in his second letter, and encouraged them to take just such an examination: "Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? ...unless, of course, you fail the test. I hope you will discover that we have not failed"

Philosophers speak of "ontology" as the essence of being; that which makes something what it is. In that sense, there is an "ontology" of a sort to the meaning of the Feast of the Ascension. We have also ascended with Him and are now called to live on earth the very realities of heaven. That is the foundation of this Feast.

We cannot go back to "same old, same old" now that He has ascended.

This Feast can also give us insight into the interior meaning of the great Feast of Pentecost which we will soon celebrate. The very "breath" of God has been breathed into this Church - and into each one of us - in order to capacitate us to be made "new" in Christ, transformed in Him and thus to be empowered to engage in this ongoing work of redemption.

That work will not be complete until the One who ascended returns and hands the re-created cosmos back to the Father. After all, that is "the plan", the "mystery" now revealed in Jesus Christ.

Let me conclude with the words of the great Apostle and mystic Paul, who reflects for the Christians in Ephesus, and for us, on this plan:

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him. In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved. In him we have redemption by his blood, the forgiveness of transgressions, in accord with the riches of his grace that he lavished upon us.

In all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favor that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.... In him you also, who have heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with the promised holy Spirit, which is the first installment of our inheritance toward redemption as God's possession, to the praise of his glory." Ephesians 1:3-14

We have ascended with the Lord. Let us celebrate - and live - the Feast.

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