May 21, 2020
The Ascension is about Jesus leaving
Our expectations behind.
Not that this would be anything new.
One could read the gospels as one long story
Of Jesus leaving the expectations
of the crowds who cheered him,
The religious leaders who feared him,
And the disciples who followed him
behind.
The Resurrection, unexpected as that was
Even left the disciples idea of death behind.
In the ascension, Jesus would now leave their ideas
About Resurrection behind.
Resurrection, was not as they had hoped,
A divine do-over, a gimmie, as in golf.
Jesus would not stay behind
To provide them with wisdom, with miracles, with comfort.
The ascension, they thought meant that Jesus was leaving.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
If they had just stopped to listen,
they would have heard him say
That he would be with them always-even to the end of time.
He was not going to be waiting for them in heaven,
he was going to be with them as they lived their lives, on earth.
For the disciples and for us to understand the ascension
We must leave behind an idea about the nature of God
That we generally possess.
God, Jesus keeps teaching us, cannot be confined.
He cannot be confined in a temple, In a religious tradition,
He cannot be mastered by a set of liturgical practices
He cannot be controlled by our behavior
no matter how devout.
God is not restricted to one people, or one nation.
This of course is what got him into trouble
With the religious leaders of his time.
They felt Jesus’ expansionist views of God
Violated all that they knew and held dear.
They were partly right.
God cannot even be confined, Jesus teaches us today,
Even within himself.
As clearly as Jesus manifests God,
As clearly as the Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in the Father
Nevertheless, God cannot be confined, limited, restricted to:
The earthly Jesus of Nazareth.
This now sounds dangerously close to heresy
So it is understandable if you feel a little uneasy.
But the truth Jesus teaches today is that
God cannot be captured by anything we understand
About space, about time, about life, about death.
What we are assured of is this:
That the Jesus we cannot see-is with us always.
God’s existence in our lives is not bounded or defined
By any geography that we know.
God’s existence is not dependent on any
Experience we might have.
To say it another way, whether we know it or not,
In Jesus we live and move and breathe and have our being.
If it sounds a little mystical, well it is.
So that we do not confuse God with any one icon of God,
Jesus ascends into heaven so that he can be everywhere.
Let me try to make this point one more way.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta said,
“People have told me that they see Jesus in me.
I am happy if this makes them happy.
I see Jesus in everyone.”
In good days we gathered in churches,
places special to so many
To hear God’s word,
to receive the body and blood of the Lord.
We do these special things of God
That we might see God
everyplace, everywhere, in everything.
We are not able to gather in our special places
right now, not as we used to, or want to.
So this feast of the Ascension reminds us
that God is not left behind in our churches.
We can no more leave God behind in a church building
any more than Jesus left the disciples behind.
We may not be able to be in our places of God
but the very life of God is everywhere we are.
Amen.
Paulist Fr. Mark-David Janus is president of Paulist Press.