Ascension and 7th Sunday of Easter

In all four of today’s readings, prayer and divine intimacy is a recurring theme. But before we get to that, a quick doctrinal aside also prompted by the readings.
 
Today’s first reading opens “after Jesus had been taken up to heaven.” This Ascension, which the Church just celebrated on Thursday, puzzles many people, so I hope a little aside about the Ascension and why it matters is helpful.
 
Jesus is taken up to heaven forty days after Easter, in symmetry with the forty days of Lent before Easter. Just as the forty Lenten days recall Jesus’s forty days in the desert, before he began his public ministry, so the forty Easter days track the final days of his public, earthly ministry. 
 
I reckon the first thing to say about the Ascension is just to notice it, and give thanks for the liturgical calendar. Letting the liturgical seasons and the story that they tell shape our attention and our schedule is a tangible way – such a rewarding way - to let Jesus and our faith shape our lives and who we become.
 
Here’s a confession: on Tuesday this past week, for various reasons, I had to be at work unusually early and leave unusually late, and I’m embarrassed to say that while I had wrestled with my conscience and picked out some candidates, I failed to make it over to the Chestnut Hill library in time to vote in the primary. But on Thursday – Ascension day – when my to-do list was just as demanding, I did rework a few things in order to attend Mass. And honestly, looking back on the week, while I should have done both, I think Thursday rightly outranked Tuesday.
 
The Ascension has a political element because when we say that Jesus ascends to sit at the right hand of the Father, we are affirming his lordship over creation. If Jesus is in charge, then Caesar isn’t. Today’s epistle talks about how we will have to suffer in Christ’s name, and so the Ascension also poses hard questions about Christ’s kingship and how he rules through humility and suffering.
 
The Ascension also makes a claim about Jesus’ body. At a moment in the story when we might be tempted to spiritualize Jesus’ identity – when he is returning to the Father to dwell with the Holy Trinity, when we might be tempted to imagine that his identity becomes some kind of ghost, or reverts to some ethereal inner “true” self – on the contrary, the Ascension affirms that it is his embodied, physical humanity that is taken up into eternity. It’s on this basis that the New Testament and the Church, ever since, affirms that our own human destiny is not to abandon our own wounded, earthly bodies, but rather to expect them to be glorified and redeemed.
 
If you ever want to learn more about the Ascension, there’s a wonderful short book called Ascension Theology by a Canadian professor named Douglas Farrow. Every year at Ascension, I think to myself that it would be great to do a discussion group centered around Professor Farrow’s book. I’m thinking we’d start just after Easter, and finish with a big party on Ascension Day. If that interests you, please drop me an email, and we’ll see if maybe we can pull it off this time next year.
 
In the meantime, back to today’s readings. It says in Acts that after the Ascension, the disciples departed from the Mount of Olives and returned to the upper room in Jerusalem. That’s the same upper room where Jesus had washed their feet and inaugurated the Eucharist. The same upper room where Judas had left to betray Jesus. The same upper room where Jesus appeared after the resurrection, and where Thomas had doubted but then professed his faith. I wonder what it felt like, after the Ascension, to walk from the Mount of Olives, back to this room, whose walls were soaked in so much. Today they go back to this room to pray, to pick a replacement twelfth disciple, and wait for the Holy Spirit. They don’t know Pentecost is coming, but it is.
 
With today’s Gospel reading, we’re back in that same upper room, although we’re out of chronological sequence. Today’s passage from John is Jesus’s prayer at the Last Supper, but it’s also an explanation of his whole mission. It’s a prayer in two stages: first relishing his intimacy with his Father, and second interceding for those who follow him, that we may be part of the same intimacy with the Father. Jesus knows how fragile his disciples are, how they will need support, but he is presenting them and their successors (us) to the Father anyway, asking the Father to bring us into the same unity of love that the Trinity itself enjoys.
 
In our Psalm today, the second stanza was also a prayer. Our cantor sang “that I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord, and contemplate his temple.” This gaze of love, this contemplation of where the Lord lives, is the essence of prayer. From Teresa of Avila to Ignatius of Loyola, from Mother Teresa of Calcutta to the theologians of Vatican II, so many spiritual writers describe prayer as simply gazing at God, and, perhaps even more intimately, letting God gaze back at us. All the practical techniques of prayer, that we can practice and study together, aim at this. How does it feel to put ourselves under God’s loving gaze? It can be unsettling…but letting ourselves become so transparent is also the key to everything else.
 
Jesus says in today’s Gospel this is eternal life, that they should know you. To know and be known, to be in relationship with God, to sit in a loving gaze with our creator – this is why we were created. To be capable of that is what all the sacraments, all the suffering, all the service is for; to let grace peel away our defenses, excuses, and evasions, until we are reconfigured and capable of this loving gaze with the Lord. That’s what it’s all about.
 
With the Ascension, Jesus takes our earthly nature up to heaven. With Pentecost – next Sunday, 50 days from Easter – the Holy Spirit descends from heaven to the earth. Right now, with this Eucharist, we recapitulate this divine exchange. The priest will elevate the bread and wine, and they will be sanctified, and the Lord will descend, and we will take him into our bodies. May God be praised for this extraordinary gift, this taste of heaven, this divine intimacy. Amen.