Party Like It’s Ascensiontide
This Thursday is the great Feast of the Ascension. We often don’t think much about the Ascension, but it is the necessary completion to the work of salvation done by Christ. It changed everything. Let’s consider this for a moment.
The singer Prince had a song in the ‘80s that posited that the world would end in the year 2000. The refrain was, “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999”. The Athens group REM had at about the same time a song called, “It’s the end of the world as we know it”. The approach of the end of the 20th Century made everyone ponder on the end of the world.
But the world that had existed since the Fall of Man actually ended 2,000 years ago, when Jesus Christ, who had risen from the dead, ascended into heaven. That was the end of time as humanity had always known it. When the creator of the world died, Time had run down to death’s doorstep, to the very gates of hell, and there, on a certain day, it met the Author of Time, the Conqueror of Death, and now time moved differently. It still measured the change in created things, but now, instead of leading irresistibly to Hades, to the place of the dead, it leads to resurrection – it leads to a place beyond time. It runs backward because now it leads to a second birth – a birth into eternity.
Our Lord came into time so that, in his human nature, he could live, and suffer, and die, and rise again. This had to happen in time, in the concrete circumstance of history, because it was in time, in the concrete circumstance of history, that man had fallen. And it is in time, in the concrete circumstance of history, that each man lives and must be redeemed. Redemption was bought for us by a Person who was fully human and fully divine. In his divine nature, he could be everywhere present, and could fill all things. But his human nature could not be everywhere present, and could not fill all things, unless, joined forever to the divine nature, it left time and went where no human nature had ever gone – into eternity. In order for his great Sacrifice, once offered, to be made available to all men at all times, he had to leave time and return to eternity in the very union of human and divine nature that had comprised the Sacrifice.
At the Ascension, time stops being the controlling factor of human reality, for our Lord’s redemption becomes immediately available to all humanity – to those who lived before the Incarnation, and to those who lived after. In fact, after the Ascension, the Incarnation appears, outside of time, to be woven into the very fabric of creation. Our Lord, the Scriptures tell us, is not just the Lamb that was slain in Judea under Pontius Pilate: he is the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. Suddenly the Incarnation undergirds all of time and history, flows forward and backward from the still point of eternity to wash over all of human experience.
That is why St. Peter can tell us confidently that “the end of all things is at hand” (I Pet. 4:7). The old world is over; the new kingdom has arrived, and in the Church it breaks through into time and changes its course. The waiting-place of Hades, of Sheol, the City of Desolation, is depopulated. All men now encounter death, not as a terminus, but as a gateway to resurrection. All humanity will be resurrected, either to the eternity of heaven, or to the eternity of hell, and time is now the measure of our choices that take us to one or the other. Time, like water, is capable of giving life or death. We can drink, or we can drown. But before the Resurrection and Ascension, we could only drown.
The Incarnate Lord, in his risen Body marked with visible scars of his crucifixion, is now present to everyone, everywhere, at all times. He doesn’t just promise us union with him after this life, in heaven; he is so anxious to be with us that he returns to us, like the father of the prodigal son, not to meet us halfway, as it were, but to meet us where we are and to feed us with his very Body and Blood. Because of the Ascension, we can have union with our Lord now, and time can indeed be redeemed in the very midst of our lives. As St. Leo the Great put it, “Our Redeemer’s physical presence has passed into the Sacraments”.
Some of us focus almost solely on the things of the world: working for some kind of imagined outcome that always eludes us. “The world is too much with us;” Wordsworth wrote, “late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Others focus only on the world to come, as if this life were just a meaningless preamble. To both kinds of people, St. Peter says, “The end of all things is at hand.” Whatever your own priorities and projects, they are going to disappear - unless they are given over to God and done in union with him.
“The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” says Our Lord (Mt 4:27). The coming of the Kingdom is not meant to be something we watch, like spectators, from the outside, but because we have been joined to the kingdom of heaven in our Baptism, and because we have been joined to the King of heaven in the Eucharist, we are there, in the midst of it, now. Our life is now able to be lived for the timeless and eternal goal of seeing, in St. Peter’s words, “that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.”
—JB+
