Homily for the Solemnity
of the Ascension
May
9, 2024
Collect
Eph
1: 17-23
Mark
16: 15-20
Christian
Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.
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| by Dosso Dossi |
“The ascension of Christ your Son is our exaltation” (Collect).
We celebrate today
not only something that Christ did but also what his action means for us. By his incarnation, he joined himself forever
to all that’s human. By his resurrection
and ascension, he lifts up all that’s human.
The Fathers of the Church remarked that God became man in order that man might become God.[1] They don’t mean that in an essential or—to use a word from the Creed—a consubstantial sense but in a spiritual sense. We’re adopted into God’s family. “Where the Head has gone before in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope” (Collect).
St. Paul prayed
that we attain “the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones”
(Eph 1:18). We aspire that the fullness of
Christ fill us and all humans in every way (1:23); that we become all that God
created us to be, images of the Son keeping company with the Son forever.
Even as he
physically departed our company in time, he charged us to spread the Good News
“to every creature” (Mark 16:15). Pope
Francis once told a child that perhaps our pets will be with us in heaven. I don’t suppose Christ means for us to
preach, literally, to our dogs and cats and all the wild creatures. On the other hand, St. Francis is supposed to
have done something like that, and Martin de Porres was known to commune with
the mice in the granary.
Be that as it may,
we’re certainly commanded to make the Gospel known; to make known God’s love
for us and his eternal plan. Christ
isn’t distant from us as we do that but accompanies us thru his Holy Spirit. In an Ascension Day sermon, St. Augustine
preached: “While in heaven he is also
with us; and we while on earth are with him.
He’s here with us by his divinity, his power, and his love. We can’t be in heaven, as he is on earth, by
divinity, but in him, we can be there by love.”[2] By loving God our Father thru Christ, and by
loving Christ’s Body here on earth—our brothers at St. Joseph, our staff, our
visitors—we make Christ present now and anticipate the glory that we’re called
to share in an eternal future.
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