He Goes Up To Heaven Bringing Us With Him
The Ascension of the Lord means to us many
great aspirations of which the following three realities may seem most
important for me and for you as believers in Christ.
First,
today Christ leaves us on earth and goes up to heaven. By so doing, He by no means abandons us
lonely and unaided amid suffering and difficulties, both physical and
spiritual. He indeed promises to stay
with us always until the end of the ages.[1]
After
the Resurrection, Christ, the Risen Lord, no longer lives in our human
conditions, characteristically affected by space and time, and material needs
such as food and drink. He, as the new
creation, has entered the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing, He has
also opened for us the gate of the new life.
From
now on, physically speaking, Christ does not stay with us but in us, as we no
longer stay with Him but in Him by being united with Him, as body parts to the
head,[2] through the power of the Sacrament of Baptism,
and by being conformed to Him in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.[3] The
Risen Lord, present in His Word and His saving mission entrusted to the Church,
always treads all the ups and downs of our journey until the day we will meet
Him at His Second Coming in glory.
Second,
Christ goes up to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father in
our very human nature which once He took and lived up during His saving mission
on earth. By so doing He assures us of
the strongest hope of our glorious future in God’s Kingdom where He is waiting
for us, His brothers and sisters in the same humanity.[4] This
Christian faith in the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting of our
mortal bodies is much more strengthened by the doctrine of the assumption of
the Blessed Virgin Mother into heaven, both body and soul.
Third,
to the disciples saddened and almost broken by the disappearance of the Lord
from their sight, as reported in the First Reading taken from the Book of the
Acts of the Apostles, the angels said that Christ would come back the same way
He was taken up to heaven.[5] This truth gives us more encouragement in our
struggles for being faithful to Jesus our Lord and Savior on the one hand, and
on the other, it also strengthens our determination to fight the forces of evil
in all their forms, in order to build the Kingdom of God right now and here,
knowing that our Lord is watching over us and giving us His full support and
blessing.
The
Ascension of the Lord is really the fulfillment of the promise of Christ Our
Savior that whenever He was lifted up He would draw all of us to Himself.[6]
[1] See Mt 28:20.
[2] See 1 Cor 12:12-31.
[3] See Rom 8:29; Jn 6:56.
[4] See Rom 8:29.
[5] See Acts 1:11.
[6] See Jn 12:32.
Fr. Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Nhut, O.P.
