He ascended into Heaven

In the final weeks of the Easter Season, we are celebrating an important yet difficult mystery of our faith. Compared to the shocking truths we celebrate in the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, Jesus’ ascension is less accessible at face value. 

Our reflection on the Lord’s Paschal Mystery often stops with the joy of Easter Sunday. However, the Paschal Mystery of Jesus – into which we have been baptized and that is made present in the Holy Eucharist – extends to his ascension and even beyond to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In fact, Eucharistic prayers explicitly describe the Mass as the memorial of not only his passion, death and resurrection, but also his ascension.

It is good practice to reflect deeply on the prayers that make up the liturgy of the Church. For example, we are instructed by the words of “Preface I of the Ascension of the Lord” that “he ascended, not to distance himself from our lowly state,” but to lead us so “that we, his members, might be confident of following where he has gone before.”

I can imagine that for the early Church, having just endured the horror of Jesus’ arrest, torture and death followed by the bewilderment of his resurrection, that Jesus’ mysterious ascending 40 days later felt like an abandonment. This is further evidenced by the cowering seclusion of the apostles in the upper room even though Jesus had assured them, “I will not leave you orphaned” (Jn 14:18). It would be difficult not to feel exposed, vulnerable and abandoned; to feel like Jesus had distanced himself from our lowly human condition.

For us, like the first disciples, it can be challenging when we do not experience Jesus’ presence through our senses. Jesus, fully human and fully divine, ascended in his glorified body and is now seated at the right hand of the Father. Consequently, we are unable to see, to hear, to touch Jesus as Peter or Mary Magdalene did. 

Sometimes God feels distant or even absent from our daily lives. The very concrete and bodily reason for this is not because he is nowhere, but precisely because he is somewhere – at the right hand of the Father and mystically present to us in the Holy Eucharist! 

The greatest testimony we have that Jesus is who he says he is, is the empty tomb. We know Jesus is God and man because death and the grave could not hold him. This is a mysterious dynamic of our faith. The absence of “evidence,” a body, his body, is itself our verification that Jesus is Lord! We have relics of the True Cross, we have relics of the holy apostles, but not of Jesus because he is physically present at the right hand of the Father in a glorified state. 

Rather than filling us with fear or even longing, the Ascended Lord ignites in us the full power of the Holy Spirit just like he did for the fledgling Church at Pentecost. Jesus tells his disciples throughout the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John that he is returning to his Father, and the sign that will alert them will be the outpouring of the Holy Spirit!

It is by the Holy Spirit filling our hearts and bearing witness within us that we know Jesus “ascended, not to distanced himself from our lowly state,” but so that we may follow him – for he is the Way (the path) that leads to the Father’s house. 

Anytime God feels distant, faraway or absent, we should remind ourselves that he is not nowhere but somewhere. He has sent us the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, which is alive in us and gives us the confidence to follow Jesus through suffering and death and into new life. 

We await and welcome the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and at every moment of every day. “Come, Holy Spirit. Come and alert us to the Good News that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father! Come and make us confident that we can follow him for he is the Way!”