Acts 1, 1-11; Ephesians 1, 17-23; Luke 24, 46-53
Spirituality is not disincarnate. It is through the incarnation of Jesus Christ that God manifested who He really is. It is through our bodily life that we experience the infinite within us.
The message of Easter is not about the resurrection of the spirit of Jesus. The first witnesses went to the burial place and found an empty tomb, with the body missing. Today’s scriptural account of Jesus’s return to the Father speaks of Jesus in person conversing with his disciples and being taken from their sight.
Without entering into the issue of burial v cremation we all acknowledge that our body will one day melt away. Yet the body is not worthless or insignificant in our journeys of faith. Unfortunately, there has been a Christian tradition of seeing the body in a negative light.
It was all due to Greek philosophy infiltrating to a large extent the first articulations of the faith and highlighting emphatically a divinity very distant from humanity. These categories of philosophy were utterly inadequate to give expression and articulate what the message of Christianity was about. But at that time what was foremost on the agenda was to put the Christian faith on the culture map. There was a price for this.
It is through our body that we relate with others, with ourselves and with God. Having a distorted relationship with one’s body can be very disconcerting because, to some extent, our body is also our home.
Our body is not simply physical, material, in contrast to all that is spiritual. There is also the infinite in our bodily presence, and our call, from a faith perspective, is to transcend our humanity, our finiteness, to reach out beyond physicality and have a taste of the divine.
Jesus’s mission took off with the proclamation that God’s kingdom is at hand. In today’s scripture readings, the impatient disciples ask: is this the time that the kingdom will become manifest? They understandably thought that with Jesus’s departure they would see the mission accomplished, as if God’s kingdom were something mainly spiritual coming down from heaven. This is not the case.
It is very natural even for us to become exasperated with all that we proclaim while watching the world going its way. What was mainly proclaimed at Easter was that Jesus’s life did not come to an end with death.
Jesus had often spoken about being glorified. Today’s readings from Acts and Luke’s gospel both give account of this glorification of Jesus as a return to the Father. Luke writes that “he withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven”. Acts speaks of a cloud which “took him from their sight”.
The language of being carried up or a cloud veiling him is very symbolic, and our challenge today is to find ways of articulating our faith in Jesus who still lives. What matters most in what we celebrate this Sunday of Ascension is not some spectacular event of Jesus being physically elevated. The central and most important truth in this is that of God transcending the human to redeem us, rendering our earthly living no longer simply earthly and material. It is here on earth, in our bodies, that we are glorified and given the possibility to live fully.
The command Jesus gives to his disciples in today’s gospel from Luke is to “stay in the city”. This is very telling indeed as regards our commitment to be proactively present in our world.
What we are actually celebrating today with the ascension of the Lord is how Jesus – God become man, assuming fully our human nature – shows us that our body is ultimately a sacrament through which our soul becomes visible and real.
If we were created out of love, as we believe, surely we were not created to live imprisoned in a body meant to decompose and melt into nothing. There is solid meaning even in our bodily existence. Otherwise God would not have taken up a bodily life just like ours.