Readings: Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:17-23; Matthew 28:16-20
For most of us, the coronavirus pandemic
has been a time of distance and separation,
a time of absence from the people and things we love.
There is, of course, the literal physical distance
that we must take from people:
no closer than six feet; faces veiled by masks.
I hear the French are even thinking of abandoning
greeting one another with a kiss on each cheek.
Then there is the separation we feel from friends and family,
an absence that technology seems unable to really compensate for:
nothing makes you appreciate the irreplaceability
of another person’s bodily presence
like an extended Zoom visit.
There is also a strange distance
that has affected our sense of time:
early March seems years, not weeks, ago.
We are above all distant from what we might think of
as our “normal,” pre-pandemic, selves:
so distant that we are beginning to think
that we may never recover those selves.
It might be tempting to thinks of the Ascension
as a feast of distance and separation and absence:
the going of Jesus to a distant place, far away from us,
his departure marking a vast distance
between us and those days
of his resurrected presence with his disciples,
a distance we try to bridge by sending up prayers,
in something like the religious equivalent of Zoom.
The joy of Easter for Jesus’ friends
was having him bodily back among them,
and the Ascension might seem to undo this.
And, indeed, the depiction of the Ascension in the Book of Acts
is something of a farewell scene:
the risen Jesus taking leave of his friends,
after which that stand, around looking up at the sky,
perhaps in wonder, or perhaps with longing
to have back again the bodily presence of the risen one.
But the scene of Jesus’s Ascension in the book of Acts
is balanced by his final words to his disciples
in the Gospel of Matthew:
“behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
The passing into heavenly glory of Jesus’s risen body
does not seem to deprive his friends of his presence.
Indeed, through the gift to them of his Holy Spirit,
Jesus is somehow more present, more with them,
than he was even in his resurrected body.
I think often of Pope Benedict’s description
of the Ascension as “the beginning of a new nearness.”
The entry of the risen Jesus into heavenly glory
does not involve him leaving here and going there,
but somehow brings here into there,
draws earth into heaven,
and in turn makes heaven present on earth
through the power of his Spirit,
who forms his followers into his body
and fills them like a temple built of living stones.
The Ascension does not deprive us
of Christ’s bodily presence;
rather, we become that bodily presence.
As Paul writes to the Ephesians,
God the Father, “put all things beneath his feet
and gave him as head over all things to the church,
which is his body,
the fullness of the one
who fills all things in every way.”
Through his ascension into glory,
Christ’s body now is spread abroad
throughout the world,
for, as the poet Hopkins, put it,
“Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
I think one reason why the suspension of public Masses
has been such a trial for so many people
is because it is in gathering together for worship
and receiving sacramentally the gift of Christ’s body
that our identity as the body of Christ
is renewed and strengthened.
The temple built of living stones
is manifested most fully
in God’s people gathered at God’s altar,
and people feel keenly the absence of that gathering.
But without in any way diminishing
the real pain of absence that people are experiencing
we must believe that God
would not let us suffer this trial to no purpose.
This time of absence and distance can become,
through God’s Spirit,
an experience of the “new nearness” of the ascended Christ.
We cannot stand around looking lost,
wondering where the body of Christ has gone.
Our challenge on this day of Ascension
is to let the Spirit fill us
so that we can become his witnesses
through the fire of love
that has been poured into our hearts.
Perhaps this is what God is showing us today:
Christ’s body, the Church,
plays now in ten thousand places,
dispersed and yet somehow one through the Spirit.
The day will come to regather,
to receive again the body of Christ,
and it will be a day of rejoicing.
But for now we wait,
suffering time’s slow passage,
trusting God to provide,
knowing that heaven has been joined to earth,
that we remain joined to one another
through the bond of the Spirit,
that we are the church
even when we cannot go to church.
May God grant us the gifts of patience and love
and may God have mercy on us all.
