Acts 20:16-18,
28-36; John 17:1-13
The passage most quoted in the New
Testament from the Old Testament is Psalm 109:1
(110): “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at My right hand, until I make
Your enemies the footstool of Your feet.’” 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 manifests 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. His Ascension enables us to experience
such blessedness even now by uniting ourselves to Him 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 1,701 years ago in AD 325. They rejected the teaching of Arius
that Jesus Christ was not truly divine, but a 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 today
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 blessedness of the heavenly Kingdom. We
so easily give in to the temptation to define and entrust ourselves to the
passing standards and agendas of this world that can never 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 worry, sorrow, and 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 and lovingkindness of the Savior contradicts the idolatry
of those who assume God must be just like them in their hatred and cruel
vengeance against their enemies. 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 wander in
spiritual blindness 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. The great contrast between the
heights of heaven and the mundane realities of our lives is obvious. 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 not yet ascended in
holiness with our Lord.
We must use that
recognition not as an excuse but instead as a reminder to be vigilant against
the temptation to think that the circumstances of our lives somehow make it
impossible for us to become radiant with His holiness. As Christ said, “the kingdom of God is within
you.” (Lk. 17:21) Whenever we forgive someone who wronged us, ask forgiveness
of those we have wronged, show mercy to the poor and needy, put someone else’s
needs before our own, or resist temptation in any way, we are participating
already in the heavenly reign. We have certainly not fulfilled our calling to
become perfect as our heavenly Father, but we are truly becoming more like Christ
in holiness as we take even small and imperfect steps to conform our character
to His. That is how we may ascend into
heavenly glory even as we live and breathe in this world.
We must,
therefore, remain on guard against all the fantasies and obsessions that
distract us from true faithfulness in the present circumstances of our lives. In our families, friendships, and workplaces,
and also in our parish, we must humble ourselves by serving our neighbors. We
must refuse to allow thoughts that fuel our passions to take root in our
hearts, for they will make it impossible to become like Christ in self-emptying
love. The only way to ascend with Christ is to unite ourselves to Him in humble
faith and obedience. 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 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.
We must not be
distracted from living faithfully in the present by fantasizing about how much
better we imagine our path would be if we lived elsewhere or had different callings
in life. We must not live in the past or
in the future but simply focus on uniting ourselves to Christ in holiness as we
actually are in this world. Our best
opportunities for healing and transformation may well be in the dimensions of
our lives that we are strongly tempted to escape for the sake of a delusional
spirituality.
Today we continue
to celebrate that the Lord has 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, with all of its
frustrations and disappointments, 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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