HOMILIES PREACHED BY FATHER ALTIER ON THE SOLEMNITY OF THE ASCENSION

Today we celebrate the Feast of Our Lord's Ascension into heaven. By Ascension we mean that He, by His own power, was taken body and soul into heaven. This is different from Our Lady's Assumption. To ascend means to go up by one's own power, to be assumed means to be taken up by someone else's power. Our Lady was lifted up by God; but Jesus, being God, took Himself by His own power up to heaven. And He took our humanity with Him so that united to the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity our human nature is already present in heaven in Jesus Christ.

Now beyond this St. Paul tells us in the second reading that we heard today from his letter to the Hebrews, that Jesus then has passed into the sanctuary. He is our high priest and He has offered a sacrifice, as he points out, not like the high priest of old who used to enter the Holy of Holies that was made by hands. The Holy of Holies in Jerusalem was a copy of the temple that Moses had seen in the vision of heaven. What God, up on top of Mt. Sinai, showed to Moses was that vision of the worship of heaven. He then told Moses now you make a sanctuary that is going to be modeled on what you saw. And so the high priest entered into the Holy of Holies once a year with the blood of the bull and the goat so he could sprinkle that blood upon the altar for the forgiveness of sin.

Sunday May 27, 2001

The Ascension of the Lord

Reading I (Acts 1:1-11)

Reading II (Heb 9:24-28; 10:19-23)

Gospel (St. Luke 24:46-53)

Now about the veil that St. Paul is mentioning, remember that passage in St. John's Gospel that tells us that at the moment of the death of our Lord, the veil or the curtain in the temple was torn in two. There was a huge veil, a huge curtain that hung in the doorway between the Holy of Holies and the rest of the temple. It is as if there was a huge veil right across here at the front of the sanctuary that separated the sanctuary area from the rest of the church. That is the way that it was so that the people could not see into the Holy of Holies. That curtain, or veil, separated the people from the place of the Lord. Now St. Paul tells us, unlike the high priest that had to go around that veil and into the Holy of Holies, Jesus has entered the Holy of Holies through the veil which is His own flesh, the veil of death, the veil which keeps us from God, that is the life in the body.

Now our Lord, even with His body, has entered into the glory of heaven; and He has gone not with the blood of bulls and goats but with His own blood. He has entered therefore once for all time. This is what is so important to be able to understand; that in His Ascension our Lord has taken His sacrifice up to heaven. It is just as we pray at the Mass, "Lord may your angel take this sacrifice to Your altar in heaven," so that the sacrifice of Jesus is before the throne of our heavenly Father. In having taken our humanity and His sacrifice into heaven there is no more sacrifice for sin. That is why at Mass we do not sacrifice Jesus again, but it is one continual sacrifice. Once for all, St. Paul says, once for all time.

Many Christian people misunderstand that and they say Jesus offered Himself once on the Cross, therefore it is done. Everything is finished, there is no more sacrifice for sin, no more sacrifice period, it is all finished. Jesus died for my sins therefore I am going to heaven. That is not what it meant. St. Paul means it is once for all time. That sacrifice continues to be offered, as it will right here on the altar in just a few moments, and for all time there is one sacrifice as God promised through the prophet Malachi.

Why are we talking about this on the Feast of the Ascension? In this we see several things in the readings. First of all St. Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles. He is writing to a person he calls Theophilus, which is you and me (Theophilus is from two Greek words which mean the lover of God.) For anyone who loves God, St. Luke is writing, this is the truth of what happened. He reminds us that Jesus for forty days after He suffered, showed Himself to His Apostles and proved to them in many ways that He was alive. He sets the context. He talks about the life, the suffering, the death, the resurrection, the forty days and then was taken up to heaven in their sight. So we see the whole context the life, the death, the resurrection of our Lord, and now also the Ascension. The Ascension is so important because without it the work of redemption would not be fulfilled. Think about what it would mean if Jesus did not ascend into heaven. It would mean that we could all rise from the dead and then we would be stuck here on earth for the rest of eternity. God did not make us for that purpose. He made us so that we can be with Him. And the only way we were going to be able to be with Him is if the way to heaven was open, if whatever separated us from God was removed. So just as at the death of Jesus the curtain was torn in two, now we see that through the flesh Jesus has entered into that Holy of Holies. There is nothing any longer which separates us from God except for our natural life in this world. Now at the moment of death when we enter through that veil, we too have the opportunity to be able to go heaven to be united with our Lord, and to be able to enter face to face into that glory of God.

The reason I was talking about that sacrifice of Jesus is that it is not just a matter of sitting around gazing lovingly at God. That would be enough; that would be more than enough. It would be more than we would be able to handle for the rest of all eternity, because God is infinite. To be able to look at Him for the rest of eternity implies that we will never ever, ever reach the end of God. There will always be more and as we look at God (there are not instances in eternity but if there were) at every single instance of eternity we would see more. We would see a new vision of God, and we would be filled with the glory of God. But God is not content merely with that. He has invited us into the very worship of Himself. That is why we have to understand the importance of what Jesus has done by taking His sacrifice up to heaven, by bringing Himself and His flesh in our human nature before the throne of God to offer Himself once for all time to our heavenly Father. Right now He is standing before the throne of almighty God, and He is showing to God the Father the wounds that He incurred for us. As we offer this sacrifice on the altar in just a few moments, and that sacrifice is taken up to heaven, Jesus is right there showing the heavenly Father the sacrifice that He offered physically as we offer that sacrifice mystically and united with Him. So the importance of this is that we now already share in the heavenly worship.

What we are doing right here is similar to what happened in the Old Testament. Moses had the vision of the heavenly worship and made a temple that looked like the temple in heaven, and was able to enter into the worship of God and offer the blood of bulls and goats. We offer the blood of the innocent Lamb in the true tabernacle. So even though here we already share in that heavenly worship it is still in a temple, which is a mere copy made by human hands, but we offer a sacrifice that is not merely human but it is divine. We offer the very sacrifice of heaven and we receive the very bread of angels, the bread come down from heaven. We receive Jesus, and that is the dignity that will be ours for all eternity. Jesus has already taken Himself and His sacrifice and His humanity; His body, His Blood, His Soul, and His Divinity, He has taken up to heaven and He has offered that to our heavenly Father. The heavenly Father has accepted the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. But even still it is not complete. Notice again the context in the readings twice, in St. Paul's letter to the Hebrews as well as in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we hear that, "This Jesus whom you saw go up to heaven will return just as you saw Him go." It is not enough that when we die that our souls would be able to go to heaven. God made us both body and soul, and so right now the saints who are in heaven already gazing on God, do not yet enjoy the fullness of what they will have because our bodies, like the body of Jesus will be reunited with our souls. Assuming that we go to heaven, our bodies will be with our souls for all eternity, so that just as the body of Jesus Christ was taken to heaven, and that sacrifice which He offered in His own flesh is now offered to God before the throne, so too our bodies, our flesh, our humanity (for which that sacrifice was offered) will also be taken up to share in the glory of God. That is what this day is all about. That is the importance of the Ascension. Not only has Jesus already taken our humanity to heaven, not only is He there offering that sacrifice once for all time so that we would have the opportunity to share in the glory of God; but He will come back in His glorified humanity to take those who will rise from the dead on the day of judgment, on the day of resurrection, on the last day of this world, He will take us with Him so that we will enter into the glory, into the fullness of glory of God in body and soul. Not only will we look upon the face of God; we will actually enter into the very worship of God, and be able to understand in the fullness of our being what it is that we already participate in here. We will enter into the heavenly banquet, the marriage banquet of the Lamb, where we will feast upon Jesus Christ for all eternity.

Where we enter into God, God enters into us (as we talked about last week) and we will understand even as we have been understood; we will see even as we are seen. And we will be able to participate fully in the worship that we already share in here, where the sacrifice of Jesus Christ will be ours for all eternity. We will be able to unite ourselves with Him and offer glory to God and worship Him for all eternity. So today and every day as we come for Mass and we worship God, we need to gaze lovingly upon our Lord present in the Blessed Sacrament. At the same time we need to look forward to the fullness of that, but recognize the dignity that is ours. Even now we share in the worship of God, but now only in a temple and in the Holy of Holies that is a copy of the true one. As we look forward to the fullness of the promise that we already share in this Mass and in the Holy Sacrament of the Mass, we look forward to the glory of God and the fullness of worship. That is when we too will enter through the veil into the very sanctuary of God, and with the angels, and the saints, and with Jesus Himself, we will worship our heavenly Father through all eternity.

Note: Father Altier does not prepare his homilies in advance, but relies solely upon the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

May 12, 2002

Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord

Reading I (Acts 1:1-11)

Reading II (Ephesians 1:17-23)

Gospel (St. Matthew 28:16-20)

Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord, and this feast tends to be sort of downplayed in the minds of most people.

We focus an awful lot on Easter, and rightly so, as the resurrection of Our Lord from the dead is the single most important of all of the events in human history. We tend to put an awful lot of focus on Christmas, on the day that Our Lord was born into the world. Even when we look at those two feasts, we recognize that most people sort of forget that the Incarnation did not take place at Christmas, but at the Annunciation. The Annunciation tends to get very little focus in the eyes of many people. What happened at Easter is fulfilled in the Ascension, and yet many people tend to ignore the Ascension and focus solely on the Resurrection of Our Lord. As I have pointed out before, we need to understand, that if the Lord had merely risen from the dead, but not ascended into heaven, what that would mean is that our bodies could rise from the dead and then we would be stuck on earth for the rest of eternity, not a very happy idea, at least in my opinion. When you have the opportunity to be able to go to heaven, why would you want to stay on earth? Imagine having a glorified body, and being stuck in this world. That is not a good thing.

Our Lord in His Ascension has taken our humanity up to heaven, and in His humanity as well as His divinity, which are completely, perfectly united with one another, He has been enthroned as King of Glory. He is the King of all creation, not because He is God, as God He is King over all because He is the Creator, but to be the King, our King, it is because He died and rose and has ascended into heaven. It is because He took our humanity to Himself. On the last feast day of the Church year, when we celebrate the feast of Christ the King, that is not celebrating the divinity of Christ, but rather it is celebrating the humanity of Christ which is hypostatically united to His divinity and glorified in heaven, where He is seated at the right hand of the Father. Now having said that we must then understand the importance of this feast for ourselves. First of all, the catechism points out to us that this is the third time that Jesus was raised from the earth. He told us that when He is raised up from the earth, He will draw all men to Himself. He was raised up from the earth when He was crucified. He was raised up from the earth when He rose from the dead, and now He is raised up from the earth in His Ascension into heaven.

It is to Himself that He will draw us all. He draws us all to His cross, and asks that each one of us would share in His cross and in the work of redemption. He draws each one of us to Himself in His Resurrection, in the promise that each one of us will rise from the dead. The ultimate hope and the ultimate glory is that He will call each one of us to Himself in His glory in heaven, where we will share in that glory in its fullness. But we already do! I recommend to you that you go back and look at that second reading of St. Paul from his letter to the Ephesians and just consider what it is that he is telling us. He prays that the God of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, will give each one of us a spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in a knowledge of Him. Beginning with that, that we would all come to know God, but he does not stop there. Once there is a knowledge of God, then he says, “May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened that you may know what is the hope that belongs to His call.” The “hope that belongs to His call” is that you will be able to go to heaven, that you are members of His Son and that you will be able to have God as your inheritance. Then he says what are the riches of your glory and the inheritance among his holy ones.

The “riches of His glory” is Jesus Christ. You are a member of Jesus Christ, and consequently the inheritance among his holy ones, as I just mentioned, is God Himself. It is not merely the opportunity to go to heaven, but your inheritance is God! Imagine that! What you are going to inherit is something which is infinitely beyond yourself, and yet that is what the Lord is offering to you. It is not merely an opportunity to be able to go to heaven and be happy forever, but an opportunity to be one with God. It is not just to be able to sit back and think about this, but to enter into the mystery of God, the fullness of the richness of God in all of His glory.

That is what is being offered to you, and not merely for a short period of time, but for all eternity. With that in mind St. Paul goes on to say. “…and what is the surpassing greatness of His power for us who believe in accord with the exercise of His great might which He worked in Christ in raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in the heavens.” God wants to show His greatness and His glory in you. Certainly by raising you from the dead and also seating you at His right hand, but even now He wants to show His greatness and glory in you. Because St. Paul again goes on, at the end of the reading to say to us, that Jesus Christ is head over all things and that He has given all things over to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way. The Church is the fullness of Him who fills all things in every way, and you are a member of that Church. You are a member of Jesus Christ, and the Church and Jesus Christ are one. So the fullness of Jesus Christ dwells in you as a member of the Church. The glory of God dwells in you already and He wants you to be able to share fully in that glory. This is why Our Lord could promise us in the Gospel reading that He is going to be with us all days until the end of the world.

He is with us in His Church, and His Church is going to remain all days until the end of the world, regardless of the attempts of Satan and his media to try to destroy it. Praise God that that is happening out there, because it is a purification for the Church. It is a purification for each and everyone one of us, as we need to make the decision of who we are going to follow. Are we going to follow the media and their attack, or are we going to follow Jesus Christ? It is not that everything that the media is saying is false, it is not. There is truth in what they are saying. There are horrible, filthy, disgusting scandals that even priests and bishops have perpetrated against the people entrusted to their care. Yet this is part of the divine plan of Jesus Christ. Now when you think of that, that is enough to make some people get up and walk out and say, if that is what God Himself is going to plan, I do not want anything to do with it. We need to look beyond that and recognize that what God is doing in the lives of those people who were victims, and the lives of each one of us who are not victims, is that God is asking us to look beyond the human and look to the divine. We need to be able to look at the fact that while members of the Church are sinners, just like each one of us, let him who is without sin be the first to cast the stone. I would suggest the exact same thing to everyone in the media, let him who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.

It is not about the humanness, the Church is the fullness of Jesus Christ. The Church will remain all days until the end of the world. Jesus Christ is with His Church all days until the end of the world. Jesus Christ continues to be crucified in His Church all days until the end of the world. Yet Jesus Christ continues to be glorified in His Church all days until the end of the world. That means that the Lord wants to be crucified in you, and He wants you to be crucified in Him, but He also wants to be glorified in you and He wants you to be glorified in Him. The question is, are you willing to share in His glory? It is not enough for us just to sit back and stare at the sky and ponder the Ascension of Our Lord. The angel came down and asked the disciples, what are you doing looking at the sky? He has promised us that Jesus Christ is going to return in the same way that we saw Him go. In the meantime, we have work to do. The disciples could not continue to stare at the sky and marvel at what had just happened, it was now time for them to get to work. Our Lord told them that they were to remain a few days until they were baptized with the Holy Spirit. It was then that they had to go out.

Each one of us already has the Holy Spirit. Each one of us now is called to go out and to spread the Gospel of Christ. What a glorious time it is to be able to do it, because people will scoff at us for preaching Christ and for preaching the fullness of His Church, because all that they see is the bad. The Lord is asking you now, are you willing to stand with Him, or are you going to hang your head and be embarrassed to be a Catholic because there is all kinds of bad press out there? Mark my words it is only going to get worse. You need to make a decision now, are you going to stay with Jesus Christ or are you going to abandon Him? He promised He will not abandon you. He will remain with you all days until the end of the world. Are you going to remain with Him all days? That is the question. There is no doubt about what He is going to do, it is only about what we are going to do.

Our faith as Americans has never been tested, never. Little tests have been given to each one of us in our lives. We have never had an opportunity as Americans, in our day, to suffer for our faith. We need to praise God that we have that opportunity now. We have the fullness of His power, the fullness of His glory and it dwells within us already. We are seated with Jesus at God’s right hand already in glory. There is nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be embarrassed of. You are not a Catholic for a priest. You are not a Catholic for a bishop. You are a Catholic for Jesus Christ and do not ever forget that. Do not ever be embarrassed of Jesus Christ. Do not ever be embarrassed to be a Roman Catholic, because Roman Catholics are not about sin, Roman Catholics are about Jesus Christ. That is what we must be about. Do not hang you head in shame because some members of the Church have sinned. No, every member of the Church, except one, has sinned, and that is our Blessed Lady. You have sinned, I have sinned, everyone of those priests and bishops including our Holy Father, has sinned. And so has every person who is pointing a finger at them for their sins. We have no reason to be ashamed. We have no reason to be embarrassed. We have reason for hope, because as Catholics we profess forgiveness of sin. We profess Jesus Christ, who died and was raised and has been ascended into heaven and is seated at God’s right hand. You have died with Him in baptism. You have been raised with Him in baptism. You have been glorified with Him, and you are already seated at God’s right hand with Him spiritually. Now we await the day that it is going to happen physically. Each one of us has an opportunity to do that, to be crucified with Him, to rise with Him from the dead, and to be glorified with Him for eternity. The choice simply remains with us. Are we going to do it? Are we going to be embarrassed of Jesus Christ and the shame that is being heaped upon Him and walk away? Or are we going to recognize who He is, and who His Church is? The Church is Jesus Christ. Are we going to be embarrassed to be Roman Catholics and walk away from Jesus Christ? Or will we be crucified with Him in order to be glorified with Him? That is the offer He is giving to each one of us today. Each one of us must make that decision for ourselves. We weak, sinful people, have the opportunity with Jesus Christ to glorify God. Do we want it? Are we willing to do it? Are we willing to die with Christ so as to rise with Christ? If we are willing to do that, we have the guarantee, that the power, the riches, the inheritance, the revelation of Almighty God will be ours. The inheritance of Jesus Christ, who is God Himself, will be given to each one of us for eternity.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Our Faith in the Ascension of Our Lord

June 1, 2003

The Ascension of Our Lord

Reading I (Acts 1:1-11)

Reading II (Ephesians 4:1-13)

Gospel (St. Mark 16:15-20)

Today, as we celebrate this glorious feast of the Ascension of Our Blessed Lord into Heaven, one of the problems that we face is proof. People like to have proof of everything. And considering that this is not the norm, and since we have not seen it, we tend to doubt. It is a human problem. When we stop to think about the fact that this only happened to a couple of people – Our Lord ascended of His own power into Heaven and Our Lady was assumed by the power of God into Heaven, that is it – we look at that and say, “How do we know? Are we really sure that this happened?” Those who want to doubt will look at the Gospels and say, “Well, they were just trying to make something up so people would believe. It’s a myth. It didn’t really happen this way.”

The thing that I have always found amazing is that, for most of us, if we would pull out a history book and read it, we would believe almost every word in it, and that written by somebody who was not even there and even by somebody who is writing perhaps a couple of thousand years after the fact. Still, we will believe that. The reason why we believe it is because this person is basing what he is telling us on sources that are close to the time. I have always found it interesting that when you talk to historians about the Gospels, what they will say is that Josephus uses Jesus’ name so we know he really existed, as though the Gospels, the writers of the New Testament, and two thousand years’ worth of saints is not evidence enough for these people. But because somebody who was secular used the name of Our Lord and talked about a certain Jesus who had lived around the time of Pilate, therefore Jesus really did exist.

The Gospels, above all, are the most historic books that we have. They are written by people who were eyewitnesses. They are written by people who certainly have a point that they want to make, but are not trying to make their point by making up stories or making somebody look good when they were not. All you have to do is read the Gospels and you see the human problems that the apostles had. You see the difficulties that the Church was facing early on. They are not trying to cover things up; they are not trying to hide things. If we read a secular history even the historians will say, “The problem is that history is written by the victor, and so we don’t really know if it happened quite the way that they said it did because they want to make their own battle exploits look a little better than maybe they really were.” The apostles did not do that. They did not try to make themselves look good. They did not try to present somebody as being heroic when in fact they were just like us, weak and flopping all over the place. What they did was to present the reality of things in the best way that they knew how. And as we heard in the first reading, Jesus had demonstrated Himself alive to His apostles in many ways after He rose from the dead.

Then at the end of the readings, Saint Luke speaks about the Ascension of Our Lord. Now we have no absolute scientific proof that this happened. We cannot. But that is also the reason why Saint Luke addresses his writing to a certain Theophilus – that is you. The word “Theophilus” means Lover of God. For one with faith, no proof is going to be necessary; for one without faith, no proof will ever be sufficient. It is not a question of having to prove scientifically that this happened; there are other things that we can look at. Saint Paul in the second reading, for instance, tells us that He ascended into Heaven and He has given gifts to men. All we need to do is look at our own lives. Well, maybe some of us better look at the lives of the saints instead; but at any rate, we need to simply look at the effect that the Ascension of Our Lord has had in the lives of millions of people throughout history to see the change in their lives, to see the holiness with which they lived. This is not something which one is going to be able to concoct in their own mind. If it is just a myth, it would not really matter to most people and they would recognize that it is a myth. And if it is just a myth, it would not change their lives; one would not be able to see the power of the Holy Spirit at work when we look at the lives of the saints. And if we are praying and trying to live the life that we are supposed to live, we need not look any further than our own lives and we will see the evidence of the Holy Spirit at work within us. When we see these sorts of things then we have to understand that this really is real. There are things that happen in our lives that we cannot explain by simple natural causes.

We need to stop and ask ourselves as seriously as we possibly can, “Do I really believe in all of the things that I profess when I pray the Creed?” That Creed is the synopsis of our Christian faith, but it is something which, especially when we pray it every single Sunday (and if we pray the Rosary everyday, we pray the Creed every single day), can easily run the risk of becoming just a bunch of rote phrases that we really do not pay much attention to. All we have to do is look at the first word and it says “Credo” – I believe. It cannot be just a bunch of rote phrases. This is the very essence of our belief as Christian people. So I really recommend to each one of us here that we take some time and ask ourselves as seriously as we possibly can, “Do I believe what I profess? Do I believe every word in this Creed?” because that is who we are. And it is only when we can truly say “yes” to accept everything that is there, to take it into our hearts and allow it to change our lives, only then will we truly be able to say, “I believe.”

When we are able to say that then we will be able to look into our own lives and see the evidence of the Resurrection, of the Ascension, of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, of the power of Jesus Christ working in us and through us as we heard in the Gospel reading today. So when we hear Saint Mark telling us that Jesus was taken up from their midst, when we hear Saint Luke telling us that He rose into Heaven amid the clouds and the angels appeared to the apostles, there will be no doubt in our minds. We do not need any kind of scientific proof and there never will be one because the Lord has confirmed this in many, many ways.

Once we can accept the reality of this then we need to ask ourselves the next question: “If He ascended and has given gifts, what are the gifts that He has given to me?” Each one of us needs to ask that because once we recognize what the Lord has done then it is up to us to respond. When we think about the Ascension of Our Lord, the opening prayer today said that the Ascension is our glory and our hope. It is our glory because Jesus Christ has taken our humanity into Heaven where it is seated at the right hand of the Father. And it is our hope because He has promised us that where He is we also will be. That is why we need to look at this for ourselves. It is not just some empty thing that we are doing, but in fact it is critical. All we need to do is think on the practical level and say, “Had the Lord not ascended into Heaven, we could all be celebrating the resurrection of the dead and that would be it.” We would be no better than the Jehovah’s Witnesses: We can all rise from the dead and stay on earth. No, thank you! Once around is more than enough for me of this life and of this world. If the Lord did not ascend into heaven, there would be no hope; Heaven would not be open to us.

But even beyond that – the fact of looking to the end of our lives and ultimately to our own resurrection and assumption into Heaven – we need to look at what is happening now. Because He has opened Heaven and because He has sent the Holy Spirit and filled us with various gifts, it is now incumbent upon each one of us to accept the gifts that He has given to us and to cooperate with the grace of the Holy Spirit so that we will be found worthy on the day that we leave this world for our souls to be able to enter into that mansion that Our Lord has prepared for us.

When we see it in that light, we begin to understand that we cannot just go through these liturgical celebrations in a rote fashion. We cannot just simply look at something like the Ascension of Our Lord and say, “Well, that’s nice. If it really happened it was a couple thousand years ago, what does it have to do with me?” It has everything to do with us…everything. We cannot keep these things at an arm’s distance; we must take them into the heart and we must live the mysteries that we celebrate. This is who we are as Christian people. Remember on Easter Sunday, the reading that we heard from Saint Paul tells us that we are already seated at God’s right hand. That is because Our Lord has taken our humanity; and because we are members of the Mystical Body of Christ, we are united with Him and therefore with Him we are already seated at the right hand of the Father. That is how important this feast is to us. Every single moment of our lives that we spend in the state of grace, this feast is central to who we are. We are not earthbound; we are already seated at God’s right hand in Jesus Christ. Therefore, Saint Paul tells us, we are to set our sights on the things above, not on the things of earth, because this is not where we belong. We are made for Heaven.

We live this life as sojourners, as foreigners passing through a land, but Saint Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Philippians that our citizenship is in Heaven. We need to live as citizens of Heaven, and we can live it already because it has begun. Our humanity has been translated into Heaven and each one of us as members of Jesus Christ is already there spiritually; all that we await is to go there physically. But before we can do that, we have to demonstrate ourselves as faithful and as worthy. That means to accept in our hearts what it is that we profess and to live it in our day-to-day lives. So in just a moment when we pray the Creed, even though the translation says “We believe”– and we do – the word that is there in Latin is in the singular: I believe. Really pay attention to these things and not only ask yourself, “Do I believe them?” but then ask yourself, “If I believe this, what do I have to do to live it?”

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Sunday May 23, 2004

The Ascension

Reading I (Acts 1:1-11)

Reading II (Ephesians 1:17-23)

Gospel (St. Luke 24:46-53)

Today, as we celebrate the solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord, it gives us a chance once again to consider our human dignity. Around Christmastime, we always ponder the dignity of the human person, that God would condescend to become one of us. But that was not enough for God. He is never ever going to be outdone in generosity. We know that the reason in part for which He took our human nature to Himself was so that He could suffer, so that He could be crucified, once again demonstrating to each one of us that human suffering has great dignity provided that it is used for the proper reason, that is, provided that it is offered to God for the good of other people. It is also in our humanity that He rose from the dead. In His divinity, He had no means by which He could suffer. In His divinity, He could not die. Therefore, without our humanity He could not rise from the dead, and so He would not be able to guarantee us of the resurrection from the dead. But even that is not enough.

As I have pointed out many times on this feast, if it were not for the Ascension of Our Lord, if all He did was to rise from the dead, we would be no different from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, those poor souls who think that for the rest of eternity they are going to live on earth. What a waste! Who would want to live here for the rest of eternity when you can live with God? But because they reject Who Jesus truly is and they reject God as a Trinity, they do not believe in the reality of what we are called to. In the Ascension of Our Lord, we see the fullness of the dignity which is ours, that in our humanity God Himself has now ascended back into heaven and has placed our humanity above all the angels, the principalities, the powers, and every other name that can be named, as Saint Paul said in his Letter to the Ephesians that we just heard. Above everything else created, the humanity of Jesus Christ has been exalted.

Now when you just stop to think about that, we think so often of how worthless we are. Somehow, we think that we are no good, that we are unlovable, that we are trash. Look at what God has done. We need also to be careful of thinking the other way, that is, that we are the most incredible thing that has ever walked the face of the earth and let our pride get in the way. We have to see humanity from God’s perspective. We are not told in Scripture that the angels were created in the image and likeness of God. In fact, Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Hebrews, even begins with that point by saying, “To which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are My son, this day I have begotten you’?” Jesus did not become an angel, nor did He descend into the depths of hell in order to convert the fallen angels; but rather He descended into the abode of the dead in order to bring out the human persons who would believe in Him.

Angels by nature are far higher than we are, but in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ our humanity has been elevated above all creation. In the Incarnation of Christ, our humanity is now infinitely higher than what it was even in the Garden before Adam and Eve sinned. So we cannot sit back and say, “Well, if it weren’t for sin, I would be worth something. When God first created humanity, it was very good but it’s not anymore.” Those are lies of Satan and they need to be rejected. Look at what God thought about humanity – your humanity. He took your humanity to Himself because it was very good. Fallen, yes. Sinful, yes. But the nature of humanity, the way God created it, is very good. And because the nature cannot change (if the nature changed, the very being would change; therefore, even when we fell in Adam and Eve, and even when we have committed our own sins – no matter how grievous they are, our nature cannot change) our nature remains as God made it: very good.

That is something we need to struggle with because most of us, tragically, do not believe that. We need to spend time before the Blessed Sacrament pondering and praying about the reality of who we are. Not who we are by ourselves, we know fully well that if all we do is look at ourselves according to our own being, that is, to what we have done in our bodies, it is pretty unfortunate. The only thing we can take credit for on our own is sin. And so it is not a matter of looking at yourself and what you have done, but rather it is a matter of looking at yourself in accordance with who God has made you to be. Not what you have done with what God has made, but rather simply look at what God has made and who He has made you to be. He has made you very good.

But that was not enough for God. He has united His divinity to our humanity and raised us up even above the angels. Now He has exalted our humanity above all creation, even in heaven where it is part of God Himself. Our humanity is not an integral part of the Trinity per se, but it is substantially united to God Himself and that is a union which will never end. So our humanity has been elevated to the very level of God.

When we think about the pattern that Our Lord has established for us, and once we recognize our dignity, then we have to ask ourselves, “What are we to do with this dignity that is ours?” Remember, Our Lord told us that when He is lifted up from the earth He will draw all men to Himself. The Catechism of the Catholic Church points out rather insightfully that there are three times that He was lifted up from the earth. The first time was at His crucifixion, when we nailed Him to a cross and lifted Him up and suspended him between heaven and earth. The second time He was lifted up from the earth was when He came forth from the bowels of the earth at the moment of His Resurrection. The third time He was lifted up from the earth is in the celebration of today’s feast of the Ascension. It is in these three occasions where we see the pattern laid out for ourselves. We know, as Our Lord makes very clear to us, what is required of us if we love Him. He was lifted up on the Cross to draw us to Himself on the Cross. But suffering for its own sake is worthless; it must go beyond that. And so when He rose from the dead, He drew us to Himself in the Resurrection so that we would have hope as we suffer through this vale of tears, to be able to look just beyond the Cross to the glory of the Resurrection. But now He has been lifted up from the earth and He is seated at God’s right hand. And in our humanity we are already seated there with Him, so that again lifted up from the earth He will draw each one of us to Himself.

That is the pattern for us: We have to suffer with Him in order to be glorified with Him, as Scripture says; glorified with Him in His Resurrection but also in His Ascension, so that not only are we seated spiritually with Him at the right hand of God our heavenly Father, but rather we will be seated physically with Him. We also see in this feast the glorious exchange that takes place. When Jesus became man, He Who is pure spirit from all eternity took human flesh to Himself and He lived in time according to the flesh and has now taken our flesh and our nature into heaven. We, who are born in time, have never been just simply spirit; from the first moment of our conception, we are both body and soul. But when we die, assuming that we go into heaven (provided that we die in the state of grace), we will have the experience of being just a soul awaiting the day of resurrection when the body will be reunited with the soul. On that day, we will experience our own assumption into heaven when the body and the soul will be reunited. So we see Jesus, Who is pure spirit, taking on a body; and, in reverse order, we see ourselves, who are body and soul for a time, becoming only a spirit until the body is reunited with the soul. The pattern that Our Lord has laid out for us is very clear, and the dignity that is clearly demonstrated by this pattern is one that must be understood and accepted by each and every person.

When we look at our world today, people just simply want to immerse themselves in the material, in the profane and the banal. We look at Our Lord’s Ascension and we realize that all that stuff is worthless. It is stuck to this world, but we are not. We are not called to live for this world. We are called to live in this world, but to live for heaven. We are not to immerse ourselves into the selfishness and sinfulness and all the things of the flesh that this world offers, but rather we are to live as we truly are: already seated at God’s right hand as we await the fulfillment of that when we will be able to go there individually – not only spiritually, but one day physically as well – to share in the very glory of God. That is your dignity. Do not trade in your dignity for the filth that this world is offering. Do not reject the dignity which God has given to you, making you in His own image and likeness, becoming human just like us, and raising our humanity to the level of divinity and seating it at the right hand of God high above all the angels. Do not trade that in for the profligate way of life that this world offers. Do not immerse yourselves in the mire that the pigs would give themselves over to you so they can spend eternity with Satan, but rather rise above what the devil is offering us and set your focus on God.

Recognize who you are. The devil is going to be right there to show you all your sins when you sit down to pray, and he is the one who is going to say to you, “Look at how worthless you are! Look at how rotten you are! Look at how no-good you are!” Look at Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and listen to what He says to you: “Look at who you really are. Look at how good you are.” Look at what He has done with your humanity, and look at what He wants to do with you individually for all eternity. Reject the ways of the world, reject the ways of Satan, reject the ways of the flesh and live according to the reality of the dignity of who you are: a person made in the image and likeness of God, redeemed in Jesus Christ, lifted up and seated already at the right hand of God. Live in this world but do not live for this world. Set your sights on heaven where Christ is already seated at God’s right hand, and where you, in Christ, in your humanity, are already seated there with Him.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Sunday May 8, 2005

The Ascension of our Lord (Observed)

Reading I (Acts 1:1-11)

Reading II (Ephesians 1:17-23)

Gospel (St. Matthew 28:16-20)

In the second reading today, Saint Paul prays that the eyes of our hearts will be enlightened, that we might know the riches of the call of God. Now if we are going to know the riches of the call, we first of all have to recognize that God would call us. And in order to be called by God, we first have to recognize our own dignity. God is not going to call someone who does not have the dignity of a child of God. God is not going to call someone to the glorious inheritance of which Saint Paul speaks if that person is completely unworthy and unable to enter into that inheritance. The inheritance is nothing less than God Himself. It is eternal life in heaven. And so if Saint Paul is telling us that what we need to recognize are the riches of God, the riches of the call that we have each been given, we have to ask ourselves, “Then what does it mean in the light of today’s feast?”

The riches of this call, the great glory that God is calling us to, requires first of all that we understand that we are made in His image and likeness. The devil in his vile lies has told us all so many times how rotten and worthless we are. Other than Catholics, almost every Christian believes that human nature is evil, that it is completely depraved. This is a heresy. It is completely contrary to the teachings of the Church and completely contrary to the teachings of Sacred Scripture. Recall from the first chapter of Genesis that when God created us it was something that was entirely different from the first five and a half days of creation. On those occasions, God saw that what He made was good. Then He made us and He saw that it was very good. That is the reality of who you are. You are very good in the eyes of God by your nature. It does not mean that what we do is very good, but it means that who we are is very good; so good, in fact, that God Himself has taken our humanity to Himself in the Incarnation, uniting a human nature to the divine nature. So good is this humanity that it became the means to salvation because our human nature united to the divinity of Christ in His Person is the very reason why He could suffer and die. It is that exact same human nature that rose from the dead. And it is that exact same human nature that has ascended into heaven.

As we celebrate today the Ascension of our Blessed Lord into heaven, we realize that our own humanity is now in heaven. Not merely looking at God the way that we hope one day we will be able to do, but the humanity of Christ is substantially united to His divinity and it will never, ever change. We might be tempted to think that once He had died and risen from the dead He could slough off His human nature because it was not necessary anymore. That is not true. The union of the human nature and the divine nature in Jesus Christ is a substantial union, meaning that it can never, ever be separated. For all eternity, the humanity of Jesus Christ united to His divinity shares in the glory of the Most Holy Trinity and is seated at the right hand of God, our Almighty Father. That is how good our humanity is to God.

Now we also need to be able to recognize that without the help of God there is nothing we can do except sin. We can sin all by ourselves. Other than sin, there is absolutely nothing that we can do by ourselves. Nothing. And so when Saint Paul is talking about the might that God has displayed in raising Christ from the dead and seating Him at His right hand, and he is telling us that God is showing that same power in us, it is first and foremost the power to forgive sin, that if God has the power to raise the dead and bring them to heaven then He certainly has the power to forgive our sins.

But more than that, Saint Paul, in speaking about our inheritance, is telling us that the power of God shown in raising Christ from the dead and seating Him at His right hand is going to be at work in us too, because our bodies which participate in the fullness of our humanity (humanity requires in its fullness both body and soul) will rise from the dead. Our bodies will be reunited with our souls, and they will live for eternity in only one of two possible places. The human body of Jesus Christ is the only means to heaven. Saint Paul makes that very clear in his Letter to the Hebrews when he says to us that Jesus has passed through the veil into the sanctuary not made by human hands but rather the one that is eternal in heaven. And the veil, Saint Paul tells us, is His flesh. Without His human nature there would be no salvation. There would be no forgiveness of sin. There would be no Resurrection because if He did not have a body there would not be anything to rise from the dead. Without His body, there would also be no Ascension into heaven. What would there be to ascend if He did not have a human body?

We might look at this, consider the Gospel, and find ourselves in the same boat the apostles were in. They saw Jesus risen from the dead, they worshiped Him, and Saint Matthew says: but they doubted. We can look at it and say, “Well, how is it going to happen that my body is going to rise from the dead? What’s going to happen to make me go to heaven?” (Or the other way, if we choose.) How it is going to happen, we cannot explain. That it is going to happen is a guarantee because it is a guarantee from the mouth of Our Lord Himself and it is a guarantee from the mysteries that we have been celebrating over these last seven weeks: the Passion, the death, the Resurrection, and now the Ascension of Our Lord. It is in His humanity that He has done this with all the power of His divinity. But all that power, Saint Paul tells us, is at work in us.

So when Saint Luke, at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles which we heard in the first reading, addresses all of these words to the beloved Theophilus, he is addressing them to you. Theophilus means “the lover of God.” If you love God, all of these words are addressed to you. Yours is the inheritance that is nothing less than God. Imagine that! Your inheritance is God Himself! How much does God love you? Not just enough to be able to forgive your sins, not just enough to raise you from the dead, not just enough to put you in a place where you are going to be exceedingly happy for eternity, but God loves you so much that He is giving you Himself as your inheritance. Does God think you are some worthless thing? Absolutely not. God looks at your dignity and He has called you to Himself.

This is why Saint Paul is praying that the eyes of our hearts will be enlightened to be able to know the richness of our call and the glory which is ours in Christ, the glory which is nothing less than heaven. Of course, to get to heaven we need to understand the call because it is a call to holiness. It is a call to be saints. How else are you going to get to heaven? The only way is if we are holy. That is the richness of the call: to be able to share in the life of God Himself. Not merely in the life of God as He descended from heaven and took on our human nature, but to share in the richness of Christ as He is right now seated at the right hand of God the Father, to share in His life, a life of glory.

Now we need, again, to be very clear. It is easy to be able to look at the glory of God in the sense that the humanity of Jesus shares in the fullness of the divine power and the divine wisdom and glory. But remember at the Last Supper, Our Lord said, Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him. And what was the glory of the Son of Man? It was to be crucified. If we want to share in the glory of Christ, if we want to be able to recognize the richness of our call, it is indeed to be able to share in the glory of heaven, it is truly to be able to recognize that our inheritance is God Himself, but it is also to recognize that we must share His earthly glory in order to share His heavenly glory; that is, to share in His Passion in order to share in His Resurrection and in His Ascension and in His ultimate glorification in heaven.

That is the richness of the call which is yours, O beloved Theophilus. Yours, if you love God, is the call to be holy. It is the call to be united with Christ. That, again, is what Saint Paul is talking about at the end of the second reading, that God has put everything under His feet – that is, under the feet of Christ – and has subjected all things to Him. Then he talks about the power which is in Christ in His Mystical Body, the Church, of which each one of us is a member. So if we are going to be able to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened, it must begin by recognizing the dignity that we have as being called by God, as being His children, because if we think that we are somehow evil, worthless, depraved, rotten, and all the other things that we can call ourselves – all the lies that the devil has been telling us since we were little, tiny babies – if we believe his filthy lies then we cannot believe in the richness of the call of God. We cannot believe that ours could be a share in the glory of Christ because we cannot believe that our humanity can have a share in the inheritance which is promised to us.

Our Lord took our humanity to Himself, and now He has taken our humanity into the glory of eternity and He is calling us to share in that glory. He has promised us an inheritance because as members of Christ our inheritance is His inheritance. His inheritance is His Father, and so our inheritance is His Father. If we are going to worship Him but doubt, we are cutting ourselves off from our inheritance, we are rejecting the call, and we are rejecting our own dignity. We need to look very carefully at what Saint Paul spoke to the Ephesians, and what the Holy Spirit, through that letter, is speaking to us. It is precisely what we see in the second reading today. Look at that reading, look at the call which is yours, and apply all of this to yourself. Doubt no longer but believe, Theophilus. Love God with your whole heart and soul and strength. Seize the richness and the glory of the call which is yours, and strive for that holiness which is possible only in Jesus Christ so that you may share in His glory now in order to share in the glory of your inheritance – which is nothing less than God. If you love Him now, you will love Him for all eternity, O beloved Theophilus.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

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