You Will be My Witnesses
The Monday Mystery Part 17: The Ascension
“So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God” (Mark 16:19)
Welcome to the seventeenth entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.
I’d like to begin this reflection with a friendly reminder that at the time of printing, Christmas is less than three months away! And if you’re reading this on January 15th, trust me, it will be back before you know it. Realizing this gave me a small jolt of surprise…I thought to myself, ”already?”
This is the first time I can remember being surprised by Christmas. These days it doesn’t exactly sneak up on us. Give it another twenty years and I’m sure they’ll start Christmas sales in August. But for now, October is when it seems to first start crossing people’s minds.
Another idea that’s crossed my mind was the various things I’ve noticed the Christmas and Easter seasons have in common: To begin, both are joyously commemorated by, and fondly associated with family gatherings, delicious food, gift exchanges, wearing our best clothes, and general revelry. Easter Sunday in particular is the high water mark of the liturgical cycle; having prepared for forty long and sometimes dreary days in Lent, we pull out the stops and begin a fifty day season of celebration on Easter Sunday.
As an aside, I know it’s even earlier to think about Easter, but if you haven’t gone to your Church’s Easter Triduum liturgies (i.e. the Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil celebrations) I highly encourage you to do so. Same goes for midnight mass on Christmas Eve if you can make it. James Couzens beautifully expresses the wisdom behind these occasions, which go above and beyond what we experience on ordinary Sundays. Special commemorative events and year end banquets might be a lot of trouble. We might have to fight traffic and sit through boring speeches and get home later than we would have liked. But they serve a critically important function: without them, “Life becomes an endless series of Wednesdays.”
Nevertheless, if my friendly reminder caused your blood pressure to spike, perhaps you can take comfort knowing that it’s not just you: the first Christmas and Easter were also stressful. Although these seasons are “supposed” to be sentimental, dreamlike moments where we all take a break from reality and bask in how well everything is going - the actual events they are based on were the polar opposite of our Hallmark expectations.
To illustrate, Joseph and his about-to-give-birth wife were practically homeless, finding a manger at the eleventh hour for a ‘home’ birth among farm animals. Shortly after, they had to flee the country to escape a mass murdering king. It was hardly the most wonderful time of the year.
Similarly, when Jesus rose from the dead, that didn’t do much to change his disciple’s material circumstances. After Jesus’ murder, all bets were off. If he could be so brutally and brazenly executed, there was nothing to stop his followers from receiving the same fate. The disciples knew Jesus had risen, but they also knew it was open season on them, and so they spent the first Easter locked in the upper room of their hideout.
In today’s mystery, after forty days of adjusting to the incredible fact of Jesus appearing suddenly alive after so clearly being dead, the disciples lose him once again when he ascends into heaven. Although they doubtlessly learned many things from Jesus, they don’t appear to have had a clear answer to the “now what?” question which had dropped on them like a megaton bomb when Jesus was crucified. The tone of that question had shifted from desolate mourning to suspenseful anticipation.
Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? (Acts 1:6).
If you expect Jesus to give a clear and direct answer to this question, it’s time to put down the Bible and take a nap. Jesus replies,
It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:7-8)
After this, Jesus ascends into heaven. I must admit I’m sometimes frustrated by the scriptures. Sometimes they come across to me like a sports interview, where the coach says, ‘to win this game, we need to play better on defense and put more points on the board!” Or the stock market analyst, who insists that “the key to making money with your investments is to buy low and sell high.”
Like the advice of these sporting and investment experts, Jesus has given us great truths, but at times it feels like he has left us frustratingly bereft of specifics. In his ascencsion the issue becomes even more pointed, because he seems to have left us frustratingly bereft of himself. One could easily imagine the disciples saying something like “Are you kidding me? Did he really just levitate into the sky? So much for ‘And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age!”
But the disciple’s response is telling and instructive. In Luke we read that they, “…returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple praising God” (Luke 24:52-53). Evidently, they were able to make sense of what Jesus said, and were able to trust in his promise. They knew that Jesus had left to begin his reign at the right hand of the Father. They had asked about the kingdom of Israel. Jesus’ words and actions show that his plan pertains to the entire world, not just one kingdom, significant and near to his heart in a thousand ways as it may be. CS Lewis beautifully wrote about this mission in his book Mere Christianity:
“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends:”
When Jesus ascended into heaven, not only did he not leave us, he more definitively landed on Earth. And this landing is more through than Lewis’ passage might suggest. When we are baptized, the Holy Trinity dwells within us. And when we receive the Eucharist, we receive Jesus, body blood, soul and divinity. Through the Holy Spirit, we have the mind of Christ, and we live his life.
As we saw in earlier posts, while he was here on Earth, Jesus insisted on generally acting in ways that were consistent with the limitations of his human nature. For example, he didn’t run around as an infant, even though he could have used his divine nature to miraculously make his limbs stronger. He chose to let women provide for his needs, even though he was capable of feeding thousands by multiplying bread and wine. And he also chose to be in one place at a time. I believe one of the reasons Jesus chose to ascend into heaven was to put an exclamation mark on the fact that he is now in nearly two billion places at once, operating and carrying out his ministry in and through every Christian living a life of grace and docility to the Father’s will.
In a human army, a general leaves his troops to do the fighting for him, not because he is a coward, but because he is most effective in the command center. He would do a disservice to his troops if he let the army fall into disarray while he battled in the trenches, as courageous of a gesture of solidarity that would be.1 But in the heavenly army, Jesus is in the command center and on the front lines with us.
When you do your test run, watch the disciples ‘lose’ Jesus again when he ascends into heaven. Why are they able to walk away rejoicing? Ask the Lord to help you to understand and feel their jubilation, knowing that Jesus is in heaven and yet also right alongside us. And ask for your marching orders. How can you carry out Jesus’ mission behind enemy lines?
I say all of this without prejudice to General Hal Moore, who was played by Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers. General Moore refused to leave the battlefield three times in the battle of the la Drang Valley in order to stay with his men, and keep his promise to be the last man to leave.