Sunday Gospel Reflection, May 29, 2022: He parted from them and was taken up to heaven...

He parted from them and was taken up to heaven…

Where is the Lord to be found?

    Luke’s Gospel is as straightforward as any account of the extraordinary can be: as Jesus blessed his disciples, he parted from them and was taken up to heaven. When we think of heaven, we naturally look up at the sky as the disciples do in Luke’s second account of the Ascension in Acts of the Apostles, and we hear in Psalm 47, God mounts his throne to shouts of joy! What does it mean to mount one’s throne but to go up, to move in an upward direction? Indeed, the very word Ascension implies a movement upward. But the Ascension is precisely about transcending these limits of time and space. Why are you standing there looking at the sky? the angels ask the disciples in Acts. To look at the sky is to be focused in the wrong place; the disciples need to find Jesus in themselves and in their community. Only with the coming of the Holy Spirit will they begin to understand this, however, and Pentecost is days away. 

    Human beings tend to want to describe God in their own terms, and in so doing, we place limits on who God is and where God is. But the Trinitarian God is not confined by time and space; God transcends those human constructs. God is always greater than the limitations we place upon God, because God is without limits. This is a fundamental lesson of The Ascension of the Lord: God can’t be contained within our terms. Jesus was present at creation; the Holy Spirit was active in us before we were born. We can only open to this extraordinary truth, be aware of it – only then can we hope to have any notion of heaven in God’s terms. 

    The author of the Book of Hebrews tells us that after his death, Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands, but heaven itself. In so doing, he gave us access to eternity through the new and living way he opened for us through the veil. That way goes through humanity, not past it; it exists through flesh, not despite it. We may continue to look up at the sky when we imagine heaven, knowing nonetheless that divinity cannot be contained in our finite terms. Yet, so long as we continue to approach the Lord with a sincere and open heart, we will be making progress. For the purpose of our life journey is to move toward him, toward perfect love, toward perfect union… even if we won’t know what heaven looks like (so to speak), or what direction we are taking, till we get there. 

This post was based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class. 

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