Acts 20:16-18, 28-36; John 17:1-13
Forty
days after His resurrection, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ ascended in
glory into heaven and sat at the right hand of God the Father. He did so as One Who is fully divine and
fully human, One Person with two natures. He ascended with His glorified,
resurrected body, which still bore the wounds of His crucifixion. Our Lord’s Ascension displays our calling to participate
by grace in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity and share in His fulfillment
of the human person in God’s image and likeness. We may experience such blessedness even now
by uniting ourselves to Christ even as we live and breathe in the world as we
know it.
We also commemorate today the Holy
Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, which met 1,700 years ago in
AD 325. They rejected the teaching of
Arius that Jesus Christ was not truly divine, but a kind of lesser god created
by the Father. The Council declared, as
we confess to this day in the Nicene Creed, that our Savior is “the Son of God, the only-begotten,
begotten of the Father before all worlds. Light
of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the
Father, by Whom all things were made.”
The Fathers of Nicaea saw clearly that the One Who brings us into the
eternal life of God must Himself be eternal and divine. No mere creature could ever enable us to become
radiant with the gracious divine energies as participants in heavenly glory.
Had Christ been simply
a great religious teacher, He could not have conquered death or brought us up
to heaven through His Ascension. Those who claim to admire the Savior as merely
an excellent human being actually reject Him, for they deny the true identity of
the God-Man Who unites humanity and divinity in Himself. Only He could say to the Father, “Glorify Me in Your own
presence with the glory which I had with You before the world was made.” Only He can bring those made of the dust of
the Earth into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity.
The
divine brilliance of Christ’s Ascension is entirely different from the illusion
of trying to raise ourselves up according to the standards of a world that remains
estranged from the joy of the heavenly Kingdom.
We so easily give in to the temptation to hope in the passing things of
this world that can never truly satisfy those called to become like God in
holiness. God created all things good,
but no mere creature has the power to heal our souls. The more that we give our hearts to even the
noblest human endeavors as ends in themselves, the more enslaved we become to
false hopes that distract us from embracing our true fulfillment in God. Since
we bear God’s image and likeness, to ground our lives in anything other than
Him will lead ultimately only to sorrow and bitter disappointment.
Doing
so will make us blind to the glory of our ascended Lord, Who went up to heaven only
after dying on the Cross, being buried in a tomb, and enduring the ultimate
descent to Hades. He rose from the dead
because He had humbled Himself to the point of accepting rejection, torture,
and crucifixion as a blasphemer and a traitor purely out of selfless love and
compassion for His broken and suffering children, who had enslaved themselves
to the fear of death through sin.
Christ endured all this as the eternal
Son of God Who spoke the universe into existence. The unfathomable humility of
the Savior destroys popular assumptions about God and about what it means to
find fulfillment as a human person. He
does not ascend by taking vengeance upon His enemies, causing those who opposed
Him to suffer, or serving Himself, but by suffering the consequences of their sins,
of which He was in no way guilty. The
divine glory of His Ascension shines brilliantly in contrast to the illusions
of those who assume God must be just like them in their pride, self-centeredness,
and cruelty. If we dare to identify ourselves with Christ, we
must open the eyes of our souls to the light of His heavenly glory and refuse
to live as those who keep wandering further into the darkness. In order to celebrate the Ascension with
integrity, we must rise up with Him into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity
even as we remain in a world marred by the sorrowful brokenness of the children
of Adam and Eve.
By rising into heavenly glory as the God-Man,
Christ has shown us what it means to become truly human in the divine image and
likeness. In order to unite ourselves
to Him, we must reorient our desires away from the false gods we have welcomed
into our hearts and toward the One Who overcame the very worst the corrupt world
could do in order make us participants in the eternal day of His heavenly
reign. The contrast between the heights
of heaven and the mundane realities of our lives is obviously very great. That
is not because we are ordinary people with ordinary problems and temptations. It is because we have not united ourselves to
Christ to the point that every aspect of our life in this world has become a
brilliant icon of His salvation. There is
so much in each of us that has refused to ascend in holiness with our Lord.
Our calling to rise with Christ into
heavenly glory is obviously high and we may never claim to have fulfilled it. God is infinitely holy and the journey to
become perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect is truly eternal. No matter where we are on that path, we must
all grapple seriously with what holds us back from embracing the fulfillment of
the human person made possible by our Lord’s Ascension. We must conform our character to Christ’s
such that His radiant glory shines through us as we embrace the challenges of finding
healing for our souls from the disordered desires that can so easily become the
driving forces of our lives.
In order to ascend with Him in holiness,
we must abandon the hypocritical spirituality of those who corrupt Christianity
into a way of raising ourselves up in this world over our neighbors. Nothing will keep us wedded to the spiritual
decay of the fallen world more than perverting the way of our ascended Lord into
a justification for crucifying our brothers and sisters in our thoughts, words,
and deeds. Our Savior calls us to rise up from the corruption of the world, not
to fall even deeper into it through delusions of spiritual pride and hypocrisy.
In order to ascend in holiness with Him,
we must reject all the fantasies and obsessions that distract us from true faithfulness
in the present circumstances of our lives as we take the small steps toward the
Kingdom that we presently have the strength to take. In our families,
friendships, and workplaces, and also in our parish, we must humble ourselves by
putting the needs of others before our own desires. We must refuse to allow thoughts that tempt
us to self-centeredness or resentment to take root in our hearts, for they will
make it impossible to become like Christ in self-emptying love for our
neighbors. The only way to ascend with
Christ is to unite ourselves to Him in humility from the depths of our hearts.
Christ prayed to the Father that His followers “may be
one, even as We are one.” Contrary to
popular opinion, it is not possible to pursue the Christian life as an isolated
individual on the basis of emotion, beliefs, ideas, morality, politics, or
anything else. The Church is Christ’s
Body and we are members of Him together. He is the Vine and we are the branches. The Lord ascended with His Body and, by His
grace, we will too as we serve Him together in His Body, the Church, by doing what
needs to be done for the healing of our souls, the flourishing of our small
parish, and the good of our neighbors.
Our unity is not in our opinions or affiliations concerning the projects
and agendas of this world. We must “lay
aside all earthly cares” as we lift up our hearts to become “one flesh” with our
Savior in the Eucharist. He has already
ascended and brought our humanity into heavenly glory. Now we
must go up together with Him each day of our lives as we come to share more
fully in the salvation that only the God-Man could bring. Even as we live and breathe in this world,
let us rise up with Christ in holiness, for that is what it means to become
truly human in the image and likeness of God.
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