Today’s readings: Acts 1, 1-11; Ephesians 1, 17-33; Luke 24, 46-53.
True faith is when in the face of obscurity, we can be still, in adoration. The Apostles believed in Jesus while he was with them, but their true faith became manifest the moment “the cloud took him from their sight”. It was then that they became really empowered, that they worshipped him, and that they found the strength to go back to Jerusalem full of joy.
The two accounts of the Ascension which Luke gives in Acts and in the Gospel are complementary reading of an event that deeply impacted the lives of the first believers. While in the Acts account the disciples were “staring into the sky”, in the gospel the same disciples “went back to Jerusalem” to stay in the city of which before they were so afraid.
Faith in Jesus, since the time of the Apostles through the Fathers of the Church and to the ongoing story of witness in time, always developed and progressed with the adage ‘until he comes’. For believers it is not sufficient to look back and confirm that he really came, that the Son was God incarnate among men in time and space. What really completes the circle of belief and grounds the faith of the Church is the tension towards the future advent, ‘until he comes’.
There is the aspect of waiting in the ‘until’ that is fundamental to the act of belief. It is an active and dynamic waiting. In What the Mystics Know, Richard Rohr writes that “God has written the pattern in things as they are, and yet we never see the full pattern without divine assistance”. The full pattern of our life, personal and collective, unfolds as we struggle to come to full knowledge. For this, as Paul writes to the Ephesians, we have been given “a spirit of wisdom and perception of what is revealed”. We need wisdom and perception to decode what has been revealed but which at the same time remains hidden to our eyes.
When we say ‘until he comes’, we are not simply referring to the end of time. Jesus is the Lord who comes, who continues to make himself present in all that shapes our lives. Faith makes us discern his real presence, which is in no way confined to the Eucharist, but which can be discerned in all we go through and impacts our lives.
This is a call to embrace ordinariness, which in turn makes us touch the deep mystery of God’s presence in all we experience. Our personal journeys are uncharted, but we have been given the reassurance that we shall be “clothed with the power from on high”.
All our attempts to translate the Lordship of Jesus in earthly theocracies are in contradiction with the true meaning of faith. Celebrating the Ascension of our Lord means also liberating our mentality from the dualism of sacred and profane that has unfortunately for too long marked and conditioned our way of perceiving reality. The order to “stay in the city” means ‘not deserting’, not escaping daily life with its turmoils, not shunning political responsibility for all we do or omit to do and which distorts our social cohesion.
The way history evolves very often disturbs us, and many a time we have failed to come to terms with a changing reality. We always feel more secure when things remain the same. But true faith helps us to penetrate the mystery of time and to grasp better God’s entry in our spaces. Jesus’ exit from time and space in the Ascension points precisely to God’s real presence in history which can never be framed or fossilised in human form.
God is always God, never graspable, as Meister Eckhart would say. As we often acknowledge, atheism has very often been the by-product of our theisms, of our distorted ways of perceiving God and framing Him.
The Ascension is ample manifestation that God’s time can never be blocked. God enters time but remains beyond time. God’s sovereignty does not impoverish or belittle our humanity. Indeed, God manifests His infinite love and mercy in our finiteness, in time and space.
Because God’s grace perfects our nature and completes what is lacking in the way we perceive reality. Faith in Jesus as Lord is more an invitation to ‘stay in the city’, rather than to stare at the sky.