Some people say that Ascension is the
hardest feast of the Church year to preach on.
Not Trinity Sunday, not Good Friday, not a funeral: the Ascension. And I’m not making excuses here, but it’s the
only feast on which the primary action of God, in Christ, that we celebrate
seems to be his moving away from us.
We’re on earth, and he ascends: to heaven. And that’s not the primary movement given to
us to proclaim at any other time: the Christian story is consistently one of
God reaching out to us, God coming to visit and redeem his people, of us
turning away, but of God’s grace eventually conquering our stubbornness and
repentance moving us to accept the glorious eternal embrace offered. Except today: when the movement is of Christ
ascending.
One temptation is to basically preach a
“Yes, but” homily. Yes, Christ ascended,
but think about all the ways he’s present still. And we have three weeks of feasts coming up dedicated
to those. Next week, we have Pentecost,
which follows almost straight on from the Ascension in the book of Acts: the
celebration of the Spirit coming down upon the Church to dwell in our
hearts. “Yes, Christ ascended, but the
Spirit dwells in our hearts, how much more intimate a presence is that!” The following week, we celebrate Trinity
Sunday, the divine community of love into which we’re invited through
baptism. “Yes, Christ ascended, but he
left us baptism through which we share the life of the whole Trinity!” The week after that, we have Corpus Christi,
the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ.
“Yes, Christ ascended, but he’s present to his Church still through the
Eucharist, given to us to consume!”
And all those thing are wonderful and
true, and we’ll get to them. But,
they’re not compensations for the Ascension.
The Ascension isn’t bad news we need a “Yes, but” after, because the
Gospel and the Church’s feasts aren’t “yes, but”s but “yes”es, undiluted Good
News. And we can see that by paying
close attention to how our Gospel names the movement in the gospel we just
heard. He doesn’t say “then Christ left
them” or “then Jesus ascended,” but “then the Lord Jesus was taken up to heaven
and took his seat at the right hand of God the Father.”
God takes Jesus to Himself in heaven. God expresses his love for his son by taking
him to Himself, to His own embrace, and Jesus continues to live up to being his
Father’s Son by delighting in being close to him, and by sharing in His reign,
without ceasing to be human. The
Ascension shows us that grandeur of God’s dream for humanity, that being authentically
human can mean being that close to God, and sharing in God’s reign. In the
Ascension, God continues to show us what love looks like. On the cross, Jesus showed us the passive
passion of sacrificial love: being slain for our sake, out of love for us. In the resurrection, he showed the active raw
power of love: trampling over death that he might return to be with us again
and show us sin and death were vanquished by his love for us. In the ascension, God shows us a more tender
love, the love of taking your beloved to yourself in embrace, and of voluntarily
sharing your power, your authority, your reign with the one you love.
And I think this is a beautiful image
for this weekend’s celebration of Mother’s Day. The closeness of God the Father
and God the Son is part of how God chooses to show us what love looks like.
Flowing from that, we can see how the love between human parents and children
can also show us what love looks like in a way that, at its finest, can point
us back to the reality of that divine love, for which and from which we are
made. But, we also know that human families don’t always look like that Divine
Image. None do perfectly, of course, but some actually look more like contrast.
I think this image of Ascension can powerfully proclaim what the ultimate image
of love is in a particular way this weekend to those for whom Mother’s Day is
hard. Children grieving deceased mothers; mothers grieving lost children.
Mothers and children dealing with estrangement, or separation. Women and
families wishing for new life and not receiving it; women and families dealing
with difficult or crisis pregnancies. God’s love is fully shown on the cross,
just as it is in the Ascension. Whatever stage of the journey our experience of
motherhood and childhood looks like right now, we know the end point of our
journey, it’s being fully accepted into the new family that spends eternity
together in joy, worshipping the God of Love.
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