Father Chas Canoy
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The Ascension of the Lord reveals our destiny: humanity raised into divine glory through Christ. Explore the meaning of the Ascension, heaven, the mission of the apostles, and how the Holy Spirit empowers us to live boldly for Christ today.
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All right, before I dive into the scriptures, I want to make folks aware of a wonderful opportunity to support our youth in their budding relationship with God. If you’re retired or are free during one of your weekdays, we’re in need of people who can be involved with our catechesis of the Good Shepherd, which is one of the primary ways that we provide religious education to our children, not only for students at St. John, but also our homeschoolers and our public school students, since we offer after school opportunities as well. And maybe you or your children felt like you didn’t get much from your religious education growing up, whether you were at a Catholic school or a public school.
I can tell you, though, that the young elementary students, school kids, just love the catechesis of the Good Shepherd so much that we’re in need of more volunteers over at the school. And our St. John schoolteachers and parents alike are mentioning how their children love to talk about CGS and being their time in the atrium. So in this upcoming school year, we are offering CGS not just to the littles up to second grade, but we’re expanding to include grades three to six.
But that’ll be dependent upon whether or not we have enough volunteers. So that’s why we’re turning to you. So even if you don’t have much of a faith formation background, and all you know is that you love Jesus and the church and you want our youth to know his love as well, that’s enough, because we provide the training and we cover the cost of the training sessions that will occur next month in June with opportunities for CGS training in both Kalamazoo and in Ann Arbor.
So if you have time a weekday or two or to volunteer and help our youth, please reach out to our CGS coordinator, Amy Parrish, or give Shane a call at the parish as well. There’s a nice article in the bulletin for more details. All right, the ascension of the Lord.
What’s the ascension? We have it represented in our south transept window here with Jesus ascending upon the heavens. The catechism states that the ascension marks the definitive entrance of Jesus’s humanity into heaven. Let me repeat that.
The ascension marks the definitive entrance of Jesus’s humanity into heaven. So Jesus takes something with him back into the inner life of the Trinity, something that he did not have before, before he came down and became one of us at the incarnation and took on our flesh. What is that something that the second person of the Trinity did not have? Our humanity, right? Us.
He, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, has inextricably wedded our humanity to his divinity. So Jesus in his ascension has not abandoned humanity. He brings our humanity with him into divine glory, right? And as Jesus promised us, I am going to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself. This union of divinity and humanity in Jesus is why the scriptures use spousal language to describe the relationship of Jesus the bridegroom with his bride, the church. So notice the upper part here of Macklin’s masterpiece.
That upper part is a depiction of the wedding feast of the Lamb in Revelation, which of course is after Jesus has come at the end of time to consummate all history and to take the faithful to himself, right? And that’s symbolized by the 24 saints on the left and the right of the Lamb. So I invite you to focus on the Lamb, though, and the mandorla that surrounds the Lamb. So the mandorla is that almond-shaped oval, that almond-shaped oval of multiple colors, right? In fact, mandorla actually means almond in Italian.
So that mandorla symbolizes, whenever it’s used in sacred art, it symbolizes transcendent glory. So Jesus, the Lamb of God, now stands victorious in heavenly glory, having just fulfilled all things. Now, focus on the center of that mandorla, where that dark blue is, right, with the stars and the lines that come from the stars.
That center represents this realm. That’s why there’s stars there. It’s the material universe, right, that God created, from which Jesus just came, right? But this time, taking back with him into heaven, all of his faithful.
So that mandorla represents a portal of sorts from our dimension of space and time into the ultimate dimension of heavenly glory, the ultimate dimension of existence, of union with God, right? So when we say that Jesus ascended into heaven, as we see in that stained glass right there, it looks like he’s launching out to outer space. It’s not Jesus ascending somewhere else in the material universe. No, the ascension is not Jesus going somewhere else, but as Bishop Barron would say, that Jesus is somehow else into that highest dimension of existence that is heaven, the fulfillment of all things.
Maybe Bishop Barron’s illustration of a square would help. You take a two-dimensional square, right, and you raise it to three dimensions. What do you get? A cube, yes.
A square, the square doesn’t disappear when you have a cube, but includes the square. And so, in fact, you can fit an infinite number of squares in that cube. So a higher dimension doesn’t destroy the lower dimension.
It raises it and fulfills it, right, in a sense, which is what Jesus does with our humanity in the ascension. When Jesus ascends into heaven, he doesn’t shed our humanity. He doesn’t abandon the humanity he took to himself, but raises it up and fulfills it to its highest pitch of existence.
That’s the destiny that God has for us. And in the ascension, Jesus takes our humanity into that heavenly realm and prepares a place for each of us. How awesome is that, right? The best is yet to come for all of us.
Now, let’s shift gears a bit. When did the ascension of our Lord occur? How many days after Easter? Forty days after Easter. The resurrected Jesus had spent those forty days with his disciples, much to their shock and disbelief that he’s alive, right? They couldn’t believe their eyes.
So to prove that it was really him in the flesh and not some ghost, he said, hey, come and put your hands on my side. Let’s eat some fish together, because a ghost can’t digest food, right? See that it’s really me, that it’s bodily me. And even though you deserted me in my hour of need, I forgive you.
This is all part of the divine plan. And now that divine plan to bring about the kingdom of God continues, and guess what? It includes you, right? You’re going to be a huge part of it. You’re going to go bring the good news of the salvation of humanity and the transformative power of my resurrection to all the nations of the world.
Now, you can imagine how the apostles may have felt wholly inadequate for such a mission, right? They had just failed to stand up to the Jewish leaders, and now you want them to stand up before the Roman Empire and the rest of the world? But there’s a huge difference this time, right? They had just witnessed that the master, their master was victorious over suffering and death. Jesus took all that the powers of evil could dish out, even death itself, and here he was before them, alive and well. And what does Jesus tell them before he ascends into heaven? He says, all power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
In the creed, when we say that Jesus ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the father, that’s a symbolic language for having the authority and power of the father. He shares in God’s authority and power. And so Jesus is saying here in the scriptures, all power in heaven and on earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.
There’s a second proposition there that he’s leaving out, right? Because he says, okay, all authority has been given to me, but now I’m telling you to go out and make disciples. What’s that proposition be? It’s that now I am sharing that authority that the father has given me with you to go out, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. How fitting it is then that we have Ezekiel, that we’re going to be witnessing that new life that Jesus wants for us.
So Jesus isn’t expecting the apostles to do this by their own authority and power. He imparts his divine authority upon his apostles and tells them to await the power of God, the Holy Spirit, that will descend upon them at Pentecost. Quote, you heard it in the reading, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and to the ends of the earth.
And that Holy Spirit enabled them to do the impossible, all right? As Jesus himself told them beforehand, that they would do his works, and not only that, but even more, greater works than he. Why? Because now, acting through his exponentially growing number of disciples, Jesus could now not just be in Jerusalem, but here in Jackson and throughout the world, right, as we’ve seen. And the Holy Spirit allowed the presence of Jesus to be multiplied the world over.
And members of the body of Christ, you all, would give witness to the gospel, despite the threats and the sufferings and death that the initial apostles endured, just like Jesus did, right? So being a Christian doesn’t mean an easy road. It means following the footsteps of the master, right? And because of that courageous witness to overcome their fears in the face of threats and persecution of the mighty Roman Empire, Christianity spread like wildfire. So friends, that’s the same kind of bring-it-on courage to which we are called in today’s world, to respond in faith, in hope, and in love to a world wrought by doubt and despair and division, all right? Bring the good news wherever you are planted, wherever God has planted you.
And if you feel wholly inadequate for such a mission, know that the first disciples felt the same way. And so they learned not to rely on their own power, but to desire to ask and receive the power of the Holy Spirit, which God offers to us at Pentecost and at every Mass, really. And yes, the Holy Spirit, just like Ezekiel is about to experience, is given to us at baptism and confirmation.
But what is objectively given to us in those sacraments must be subjectively received by each individual, right? In other words, you have to open the gift. If you just put it on the shelf, it’s not going to do you any good, right? The gift must be opened. And so the way we unleash that power, the way we open the gift of the Holy Spirit given to us is, number one, by repenting from putting ourselves and the things of this world above God.
Number two, wholly surrendering our lives to Jesus’ power and love. And then number three, dedicating our lives to fostering the truth, the goodness, the beauty, the salvation that God wants for humanity. When we can say, bring it on to all of that, that’s when God can use us to set the world on fire.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)