29 May 2025 - Solemnity of the Ascension
Acts 1:1-11; Heb 9:24...10:23; Lk 24:46-53
Homily
This is the fortieth day of our celebration of the Lord's Passover, which will conclude in ten days' time with the Solemnity of Pentecost. What we are celebrating today, on the feast of the Ascension, is just one facet of the same Paschal Mystery. Indeed, it was not until the 5th century that Christians began to celebrate the Ascension liturgically as a festival distinct from the Resurrection. In fact, these two feasts are simply two facets of the same mystery.
The Ascension of Jesus into heaven is not the passage from one space to another, as our space probes do. It is the passage from time to eternity, from the visible to the invisible, from immanence to transcendence, from the opacity of our world to the divine light.
Heaven is not a place but a state into which we will be transformed if we live in God's love and grace. When we affirm every Sunday in the Creed that Christ “ascended into heaven”, we are not talking about Jesus' journey into space, but we mean that, in His humanity, He has entered eternity. In the heaven of our faith, which is not the heaven of astronauts, there is no space, no time, no upward or downward direction. The heaven of faith is God Himself, Who dwells in an inaccessible light.
The Evangelist Luke is the only one to have given us a description of the Ascension. The other three Evangelists do not separate the moment of the resurrection from that of Jesus' definitive entry into the glory of the Father. Moreover, Luke gives us two accounts of the Ascension, one at the end of his Gospel and the other at the beginning of the Book of Acts, and the two are not entirely concordant. It would be futile and erroneous to try to reconstruct a historical description of the events by combining the details from the two accounts; for Luke's aim is not to describe an event but to give a spiritual and theological teaching. For the moment, let's look at the Gospel text we have just read.
When the two disciples from Emmaus returned to Jerusalem in great haste, they found there the Eleven and all their companions who had come up from Galilee with Jesus. Suddenly Jesus found Himself in their midst, and He spoke to them the words that form the beginning of the Gospel we have just heard. He reminded them of the prophecies about the Messiah's death and resurrection and called them to be witnesses to them, then he told them to stay in the city, in Jerusalem. Then, after an unspecified period of time, he ‘led them away as far as Bethany’. The original Greek text is much stronger than the rather bland translation ‘he took them as far as Jerusalem’. The Greek text says that Jesus took them out [of Jerusalem], i.e. uprooted them from the ‘city’, to bring them to Bethany. There He blessed them, and as He blessed them ‘He parted from them’ and was taken up into heaven.
The central idea of Luke's account is not the glorification of Jesus, but His separation from His disciples. A brief space of time was opened up to hope so that the disciples, deprived of Jesus' physical presence, could deepen their understanding of his death and resurrection and of his new way of being with them. This brief space of time is now over. After prostrating themselves, they returned ‘full of joy’ to Jerusalem, and were constantly in the Temple blessing God. Despite the mention of joy, Luke's Gospel ends on what could be described as a negative note, or with the rather sad observation that the disciples had not yet understood. They returned to the very Jerusalem from which Jesus had just torn them, taken them out. Unable to understand the future, they took refuge in the past. They had forgotten that the veil of the Temple had been torn in two at the time of Jesus' death. The beginning of the Book of Acts will show how they became fully open to Jesus' message from Pentecost onwards.
In the Acts account (our first reading), two angels appear to the disciples and say, "Galileans (not inhabitants of Jerusalem!), why are you standing there looking up to heaven? This Jesus, who was taken from among you, will return just as you saw him go. There is no reason to think that this is a prediction of Jesus' triumphant return at the end of time. Rather, it is the return that Jesus predicted when he said, ‘Behold, I am with you always, even unto the end of time’ and ‘when two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’. One form of presence is ‘taken away’ and a new form of presence is given. This is the heart of Luke's message. The Parousia will not be the triumphant return of an absent Jesus, but the full manifestation of the fact that He has always been present to the Community of His faithful - that He is always present in our midst.
For us and our Church today, as for the Church and Christians of all times, these texts from Luke are a call not to live in the clouds, looking to the sky where Jesus has temporarily taken refuge, but to meet him present here on earth in all the events of our personal and collective lives, in our trials and difficulties as well as in our joys and our hope.
Jesus is not out of time, and will not return in time. He has entered the eternity of God, which transcends all time and place. He is in us and in our midst.
Armand Veilleux