It constantly amazes me how individualistic many Catholics, including clergy, maybe especially clergy, have become. The Ascension is a perfect example of this. What do I mean? I mean that, like tent revivalists, Catholic preachers sometimes get hung up on "going to heaven." They insist heaven is up there somewhere in the sky. Hence, reaching heaven becomes a matter of personal effort, which mostly consists of rejecting "the world" and living what I can only describe as a kind of spiritualized life.
By "the world" they mean something different than what is meant when that term is employed in the New Testament, especially in the Johannine corpus. Instead, they mean everything on earth, they mean life and what is required to live it, everything pertaining to God's good creation, which tells of God's work through Christ by the power of their Spirit bringing to its beautiful completion, a work in which God, in his goodness and through grace, invites us to participate.
In one of his early works, The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams explored the bizarre dichotomy some Christians make between what he terms "compromising activities" and "pure realities." Such people insist that engaging in every day activities, rather than being the very stuff of salvation, compromises us somehow before God. In reality, it is the other way around; focusing on "heaven" disconnects us from the world and those things through which our salvation is brought about. All one needs to do to see that this is antithetical to Christianity properly understood and lived is to read one of the four Gospels. It is in the Gospels that we read about Jesus engaging fully in the everyday life of the world.
Because the Incarnation of the Son of God is its point of origin, Christianity in its essence is incarnational, something that happens not only in the world but through the world, in space and time. This is what distinguishes Christianity from Gnosticism and the Eastern religions. Our salvation is worked out precisely in and through our day-to-day activities, not somehow over and above them.
Each year on Ascension I am struck by what one of the men dressed in white says to the astonished apostles as they stand there looking up at Jesus as he disappears into the cloud: "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven" (Acts 1:11). Notice the word "men." It is a translation of the Greek word Ἄνδρες, which transliterates as andres. Andres is plural for people of the male gender. My point? The women who followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, who did not abandon him during his passion and death, and who were the first ones to experience his resurrection, were probably already getting on with Christ's mission.
In Luke's account of this as written in the Acts of the Apostles two key things happen prior to Jesus's Ascension: he promises to send the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5) and the apostles inquire about the final establishment of God's kingdom (Acts 1:6-9). As to the latter, Jesus tells them God's reign will be fully established at some indeterminate point in the future. He doesn't bother correcting their mistaken notion about what the establishment of God's kingdom will consist of. It is something they will come realize over time as they carry out the mission entrusted to them. As to the first, it is the Holy Spirit who will empower them to bear witness to Jesus and begin making God's kingdom present throughout the world. It is by means of the Holy Spirit that Jesus remains present in us, among us, and through us until he returns. The Holy Spirit is nothing other than Jesus's resurrected presence.
The Ascension, by Hans von Kulmbach, ca. 1508
Jesus sends the Holy Spirit so that those who are called and sent (an apostle is one who is sent) can carry out the mission of establishing God's reign in advance of his return, when God's kingdom will be fully established on the earth, not in some inchoate heaven somewhere up in the sky. Here's the crux of this: the heaven-centered life is easily disconnected from real life, it is "spiritual" in that weirdly persistent Gnostic sense to which human beings are so prone. Gnosticism is a spiritual virus. Gnosticism, which preceded Christianity by centuries, is a religious parasite. It is Gnosticism that causes people to divorce nature from grace, spirit from body, heaven from earth. Holiness is wholistic, not dualistic. In terms of Jesus's Ascension, he ascended in order to be more present to us by means of the Holy Spirit, not absent or somehow less present.
If you were to encounter Jesus in person, as did many people during his mortal life, it would be no different than encountering any other person. Most people who encountered Jesus were not immediately, or even eventually, convinced he was the Son of God in the flesh, the Savior of the world. In such person-to-person encounters we remain "outside" each other. What makes sexual intercourse so sacred is that by engaging in it two people enter each other. We sometimes call this "knowing" in the "Biblical sense."
At end of his amazingly beautiful reflection on the love members of Christ's body are to have for one another, St. Paul states what it is each of us most desires: to know "as I am fully known" (1 Cor 13:12). The relationship the risen Lord desires to have with each of us and all us together in order to make us his body, the kingdom of God already present in the world, is even deeper and more intimate than that of a lover. This is the work of the Holy Spirit.
How the Holy Spirit comes to be in us most powerfully, most efficaciously, is through the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, the sacrament of sacraments, the sacramentum caritatis (i.e., the sacrament of love). It is by sharing Christ's body and blood together that we become Christ's body. The effect this is to have is to link us together in a profound way, in the way of divine love. It is the relationship the Spirit establishes between us and among us, a love that is so effusive it spills into the world beyond our parish, or eucharistic community, that constitutes our witness to the world. "This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35).
The words addressed to the apostles by the man dressed in white had the effect of leveling their gaze. It is not the essence of Christianity to stand around looking up at the sky. Culturally we're exposed to a lot of well-meaning things that constitute an anti-Gospel. In this regard, the words of a song, an evengelical hymn, come to mind: "This world is not my home/I'm just-a' passin' through/My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue..." This is Gnosticism, not Christianity. For Christians, the kingdom of God is not a dream deferred but a present reality, one we are called to witness to as we await the joyful hope and the coming of Savior, Jesus Christ. Meanwhile we fulfill the mission Christ gave to his Church, which is to be co-workers in bringing about the completion of God's good creation.
The alternative prayer (i.e., Collect) for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord in the Liturgy of the Hours begins: "Father in heaven, our minds were prepared for the coming of your kingdom when you took Christ beyond our sight..." With prepared minds and a leveled gaze, let's set about our mission of ushering in God's kingdom in anticipation of Christ's return.
Good points all around.
ReplyDeleteAnother, probably implicit in what you've said, is that we'd have the dickens of a time carrying out our Lord's standing orders to bring what we've got to 'the ends of the earth' - - - if we don't stay connected **with** the earth.
I agree, Brian. The whole "why are you standing looking up at the sky?" thing strikes me a but Pythonesque.
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