Breaking Open the Word - Ascension of the Lord, Year A
Ascension of the Lord, Year A – May 24th, 2020
L’Ascension by Gustave Dore
This Sunday we celebrated Christ’s ascension into Heaven, a glorious feast that can nevertheless tend to be overlooked, as it is “sandwiched” between two of the greatest solemnities of the year: Easter and Pentecost. While the Church may not celebrate today with quite as much external “pomp and splendor” as she does the Resurrection or the coming of the Holy Spirit, a close reading of the liturgy reveals that the Ascension is far more important than we might initially think!
One might be tempted to think that this feast has nothing to do with us – isn’t it all about Jesus and His return to the Father? Well, yes and no. It is about the triumphant Son’s return to His Heavenly Father, but He returns with something He didn’t have before: a real, living, glorified human body. When He re-enters Heaven, in other words, He brings humanity with Him into the very heart of the Trinity. The Saints are fond of speaking about the humanity of Christ as the “ladder” which we climb to Heaven. The Opening Prayer for today asserts that since we are the Mystical Body of Christ, we are called to follow where our Head has gone before us. Jesus’ Ascension is not Him leaving us behind, but rather Him forging a path for us to follow into the bosom of the Father. What’s more, in Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI emphasizes that the Ascended Lord is actually more present to us than He was before ascending. Now His humanity, taken up into Heaven, shares in the omnipresence of His divinity and can be present in all times and places, especially through the Holy Eucharist.
To sum all this up: the Ascension is the climax of the Paschal Mystery, of God’s entire plan of salvation! There is a beautiful little “liturgical Easter egg” that highlights this truth. In Evening Prayer II of the Ascension, the Church asks her children to sing an antiphon that begins, “O Victor King …” As it just so happens, the ancient chant melody for this verse is only used in one other part of the Church year: Advent, the season of the Incarnation. At Evening Prayer during the last days of Advent, each day is assigned one of the “O Antiphons” – “O Wisdom,” “O Radiant Dawn,” etc., sung to this very melody. By putting a new “O Antiphon” in the Divine Office for the Ascension, the Church is showing us that this mystery is, in fact, the fulfillment of the Incarnation itself!
Today’s Second Reading further underscores what this glorious day means for us as Christians. The entire passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a prayer that his readers would understand the greatness of their Christian vocation. St. Paul heaps superlative upon superlative, as if he can’t stop marveling at the glory of what God has done for us in the Paschal Mystery of Christ. Through a gradual process of spiritual maturing and growth, each of us comes to have “the eyes of [our] hearts” opened to the sheer goodness of God. This is the power of the Saints – they have grown into an absolute certainty and trust in God’s goodness, and so they can accept whatever happens to them as “coming straight from the loving hands of God,” as St. Paul of the Cross would put it. This is certainly a powerful act of faith, yet one that we as Christians are called to make: out of every evil in the world, God brings not just good, but a greater good. To believe otherwise would be to say that evil is more powerful than God Himself! On the Last Day, God’s people will be able to look over their lives and all of history and rejoice even in the sins He permitted them to commit, because He somehow managed to make the “Plan B” even greater and more glorious than “Plan A.” And so, even now, we repeat in faith the words of the Easter Exsultet: “O felix culpa” – “O happy fault!