Friends, today we celebrate the wonderful feast of the
Ascension of the Lord, the journey of the risen Christ into heaven.
Now can we even begin to make sense of this in the early twenty-first
century? Doesn’t this all sound rather pre-scientific and mythological?
Jesus going up to heaven in an embodied state? And what does any of
this have to do with us? Why should we bother with such a peculiar
event?
The prayer of Jesus is that the earth will be filled
with the glory of God, that it will be transformed and elevated
according to God’s purposes. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead
is the beginning of this process. It signals that the great
revolution by which God becomes the ruler of earth has commenced.
And the Ascension carries that revolution to a new
pitch. It’s the coming together of earth and heaven. We see this
“coming together” throughout the Church’s life, in good preaching, in
great Christian art, in the singing at liturgy, in the architecture
of our cathedrals and churches, in the corporal and spiritual works
of mercy. Heaven meets earth and earth meets heaven, and that’s what
the Ascension finally achieves.
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