Homily:
The Ascension of the Lord – Cycle B
Friends,
today we celebrate this great feast of the Ascension: the final, culminating
act of our redemption. This is not, of
course, the crucial act: that was Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Rather, it is the culminating act: the
ultimate reason for which Jesus took on our human flesh; and that is, to
re-unite our humanity to God. This, of
course, is a joyful thing. I mean, just
think about your humanity for a moment.
Think about what happens when you don’t take a shower or a bath for a
couple of days. Think about changing
diapers on babies or when they spit up on your shoulder. Our humanity—as we experience it in this world,
at least—is a messy (and, quite frankly, often gross) thing. Yet the Divine Son of God, the Second Person
of the Holy Trinity, took on our humanity, in all its grossness, suffered all
of the worst things that it can experience in this world, and glorified it in
his resurrection so that it could be restored to its perfect communion with the
Holy Trinity: which is to say, into an existence of perfect and eternal bliss.
Yet,
in our Scriptures today, the greatness of this event does not seem to be the
message. The message, rather, seems to
focus on the mission that Christ gives to his apostles. In the first reading from the beginning of
the Acts of the Apostles, we hear Jesus speaking about the Holy Spirit that
Jesus will send to empower them to be his “witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea
and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Then, in our reading from the Gospel of Mark, we hear Jesus giving them
his specific command: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every
creature.” Notice at the end of that
reading, after it describes Jesus’ ascension, it doesn’t say “And the disciples
sat around and marveled that Jesus has taken our human nature to be re-united
with the Holy Trinity.” Rather it says
that “they went forth and preached everywhere”.
So why would the Scriptures spend so few verses on the Ascension and so
many on the mission?
This
is because the Easter season is not only about celebration, but about
preparation. If you heard my homily last
Sunday or any number of occasions over these past 40-some days, you’ll know
that I’ve been encouraging us to consider this time of Easter as a time of
preparation to be re-sent out on mission.
This is what the original “Easter Season” was, as the Acts of the
Apostles records for us, saying: “He presented himself alive to them by many
proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during forty days and speaking
about the kingdom of God.” What was
this, but a preparation for being sent out to be his “witnesses … to the ends
of the earth”? Therefore, as I have
said, if our celebration of Easter is going to be anything more than an excuse
to eat our favorite foods that we gave up for Lent, and if our celebration of
Pentecost is going to be anything more than a brief flash of red at church
before going back to the green of Ordinary Time, then we, too, should have been
preparing to renew our efforts to fulfill this great mission to proclaim the
Gospel.
But
this begs the question… And what is the
“gospel” (that is, “what is the “good news”)? The Gospel is exactly that of which I spoke
at the beginning of this homily: that “God so loved the world that he gave his
only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have
eternal life.” “Wait, that’s not what
you said at the beginning of the homily.”
Well, yes it is. The Life,
Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ is what “giving his
only Son” looked like; and restoring our humanity to its original glory so that
it may dwell with God in eternal bliss once again (meaning that each of us with
a human nature can also dwell with God in eternal bliss) is the ultimate result
of this “good news”.
Notice,
for a moment, what the “gospel” isn’t: it isn’t that Jesus came to show us how
to be good persons and, therefore, we are eternally grateful to him for it. It is that our broken, messy, and often gross
humanity has been perfected (that is, glorified) in Jesus Christ; and that,
through him, we, too, can achieve and enjoy that perfection.
Friends,
if you need any sign that this gospel is needed in today’s world, you don’t
have to look too far. Did anyone watch
the Met Gala last week (or at least see news reports about it)? If you did, what you saw was disfigured
humanity on display. Not in any raucous
bad behavior, mind you, but in how fashion designers proved infinitely capable
of desecrating beautiful things while believing that they were improving upon
them. This kind of thinking—that we can
perfect ourselves by our own ingenuity and, thus, have heaven right here—is our
greatest modern plague; and it usually results in things looking more distorted
(and, therefore, less perfect) than they were in the first place. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer for
anyone who has gone down this dead-end road.
Unfortunately,
however, many people around us do not even know that there is anything more for
which to hope than this disfigured humanity and our attempts to perfect it by
ourselves. Thus, we must be re-sent out on
mission. Just like Jesus’ first
apostles, we, too, are called to be his “witnesses … to the ends of the earth”
to bring this good news: that life is not just about how good you can make it
in this world, but that it’s destined for something so much greater, as Jesus,
in his ascension, has shown us. We are
witnesses when we live as Saint Paul exhorts us to live in today’s second
reading when he says: “I … urge you to live in a manner worthy of the calling you
have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with
one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit through
the bond of peace…” In this way we will
model authentic human community, built on love, and, thus, attract those
seeking a perfect humanity so that they might find it in its fullness through
union with Jesus Christ.
Therefore,
my friends, in this final week of the Easter season—that is, the final week of
preparation to be re-sent out on mission—let us pray fervently for a renewal of
God’s Holy Spirit in us: so that we can be Church—and, therefore, witnesses—for
Christ once again.
Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – May 12th
& 13th, 2018
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