NewCreation

Homily for Solemnity of the Ascension Year A

The Solemnity of the Ascension Welcome to this, the Solemnity of the Ascension. For this whole project of learning how to pray Eucharistically, and indeed for all liturgical celebrations, today is one of the most important feasts in the life of the Church. Why? Because today is the day when finally the whole of the divine liturgy — in other words, the reality that had been going on, and has been going on, and will be going on in heaven long before anything happens on earth — finally has interacted completely with human life, to such a point that human life has now been taken up into the divine liturgy. This is, if you like, the triumphant ending. Just to remind you: the ancient liturgies, the first Temple, with the enthronement, with the atonement, and the Ascension — and the net result of these is the visions of the Most High, high and lifted up, sitting upon a throne, and that in the midst of the one high and lifted up and sitting upon the throne there is a lamb standing as one slain, and that all this happened before the creation of the world. That reality — the reality that before anything was created there was, if you like, a plan in the middle of time for God to open up the possibility of everything created becoming a sharing in the life of heaven — and this plan consisted of coming into the earthly reality as a human, conquering death, opening up for us the possibility of learning how to live through forgiveness, and then revealing where he had already always been: on the throne, at the right hand of God. And that this would open up the possibility thereafter of us becoming fully aligned with the new creation. And that full alignment happens through the giving of the Holy Spirit. In other words, the whole possibility has opened us up — of us becoming alive — and then the gift of making it possible is given at Pentecost. So that's what we're celebrating at the Feast of the Ascension: finally the human story has been taken into the life of God in such a way that heaven and the human story are now forever linked, and that we are all of us living with the possibility of our lives being realigned. St. Paul's language for this is "justified" — realigned with the new creation — and this is a gift, the gift of the Holy Spirit, which will come upon us. So let's look a little bit at the texts. The actual Gospel text we're given is Matthew, where there's no reference to the Ascension. What there is — and looking at the text now — is the Matthean version of the same thing, where Jesus claims all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. In other words, "I have become the central axis around which the relationship between heaven and earth works." The lamb slain, enthroned in the Most High, is the axis around which the relationship between heaven and earth works. Everything now flows from that, in as far as we can let ourselves find ourselves being called in to participate in the life that is opened up in that way. And that's what Jesus instructs people. He instructs them to go and baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, precisely so that they can become at last taken out of the world of futility — of creation running down in violence, in futility and vanity — and finally opened up to actually being able to share in and give glory to God. The disciples are to teach, to baptize; we are to learn and discover all the things that Jesus has commanded to us. This is our way of becoming realigned with everything that's on the inside. So that's the way that Matthew doesn't talk about any — if you like — vertical movement by Jesus at this point. His Gospel ends with the declaration of authority, which I want to say is the same thing. Jesus is saying: "I am the — if you like — the hermeneutical key. I am the cornerstone. I am the central axis by which the whole of the relationship between heaven and creation now gyrates." Most of us, however, when it comes to the Feast of the Ascension, get a little bit stuck on the vertical language. So I just want to make some points about that. In our Acts reading, what's described is really very interesting. I just want to give a little bit of context to the Acts reading. You remember that not that long before — not that many weeks before — Jesus has been crucified. At the time he's crucified, he is between two thieves, one on his left, one on his right. And you remember that there is a dialogue between Jesus and the one who we refer to as the good thief, in which Jesus says: "Today you will be with me in paradise." Paradise — the garden, the first day of creation, the opening up of everything. He's talking about what is going to be achieved in his death. And then very shortly thereafter, the veil of the Temple is ripped and Jesus breathes his last. And so for the first time we get to see what the Most High looks like on the mercy seat in the holy place. He looks like a crucified, blasphemous, seditious person between the two angels — the two seraphim beside the mercy seat — and the two seraphim look like crucified thieves, at least one of whom has realized why he's there. Move forward a couple of days, and behold: the women who come to the tomb see the two angels. They see Jesus's promise of "You will be with me in paradise" is true. The two angels — strangely, even the mocking one — ah, in the holy place. Jesus they can't see anymore, and they're told: "Why are you looking for the living among the dead?" Otherwise they haven't quite yet got it. And in this final scene, the scene we refer to as essentially the beginning of Acts, it refers to Jesus being taken up. And as Jesus is taken up, guess what — these two angels appear. And because it says Jesus is lifted up, and then he says, "And a cloud took him," and then the angels — these two angels, the same two angels, the mercy seat angels — say: "Why are you looking upwards? Don't you see that he will come back to you in the same way he was taken from you?" Meaning at the place you originally saw him going to heaven, which was at the crucifixion. Now one of the things that's curious about this — so the angels are saying, listen, don't look upwards. This is not a vertical matter. The only possible use of the vertical matter is to fulfill a psalm talking about how he would put everything under his feet. That's literally a poetic reference in relation to psalms, and we actually get that in our reading from Ephesians: "putting everything under his feet." Nice reference, but it's a poetic metaphor, okay. The angels are quite insistent: not vertical but horizontal. Look to the coming of the Lord in the same way you saw him go. The same way you saw him go was in his crucifixion. It's looking in that way that you're going to be enabled to receive the Holy Spirit. Now even more fantastic — in this, the verb that's used when it says Jesus was lifted up is actually exactly the same verb as in Isaiah 6, where Isaiah sees, in the year that King Uzziah died: "I saw the Lord, high and lifted up." Exactly the same verb. What the angels are describing is a holy place vision. The disciples are undergoing the definitive holy place vision. They are seeing the Lamb seated at the right hand of the Father. That's what the "lifted up" refers to. You can even actually tell that's the case, because at the very end of Luke's Gospel there's a much slighter account of the Ascension, where it says he came and talked with them, and then it says, "And he parted from them." And then in some ancient versions it said, "And he was lifted up from them," but it uses the verb of upward mobility — it uses the vertical verb — which suggests that whoever added that phrase, the vertical verb, was somehow unsatisfied with "and he parted from them" and instead wanted to add this level of mobility. Which means that he didn't quite get the sense of the "high and lifted up" — the "hand lifted up" — which clearly, as it refers to in Acts, is the… …same as in Uzziah — we're talking about the throne vision of the Most High and the Lamb seated at God's right hand. Now I hope you can see that the vertical bit doesn't matter very much. What really matters is how we find ourselves living that throne vision, which has now become the basic ordinary way in which humans live, with rejoicing, as the gifts of that alignment of creation and the new creation start to be made available to us by the Holy Spirit, which is coming at Pentecost — or, in the Johannine version, the same thing which happened on the first day of the Resurrection — but what is the central reality is absolutely the same: Jesus has achieved something, it's done, it's over. Something about what was in heaven, as it is in heaven, has now actually happened on earth. And because it's happened on earth, it's made it possible for humanity to be realigned with life in heaven, which is what we're called to. So when we pray this Eucharist and we think of the language of the Lamb — "Blessed are we who are called to the banquet of the Lamb" — all this is possible because of today's great, great feast: the lifting up of the Lord, the end of the working out on earth of the human, of the celestial mystery of our salvation before the creation of the world, and how this means that we're now engaged in a different exercise in being created than any of us have thought possible before — hence the joy of the good news of the New Testament. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.