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Live
Letters The Ascension of
the Lord |
The Catholic Telegraph
May 12, 2002Many people look on the feast of the Lord’s ascension as the commemoration of a change of address for Jesus. He had been living on earth for a while, but at a certain point He moved back to heaven where He had come from. That’s one way to look on the ascension, of course, but there is more to it than that.
Jesus’ being taken up into the clouds was an expression of the Father’s pleasure in the mission of Jesus. In answer to His life of faithfulness and self-sacrifice, the Father exalts Jesus above all creation and establishes Jesus’ glorified humanity permanently in His own presence.
Likewise, although Jesus would no longer be present to His followers as He had been before, His saving activity would continue in the life of the Church, a life that was just beginning to unfold. Ascension has to do with Jesus, but it also celebrates the Church.
The passage from Ephesians that is read in year A (and which may also be read in the other two years of the cycle), is concerned with Jesus’ exaltation and with the Church. The passage comes soon after the opening salutation and a long passage of praise and blessing. It is immediately preceded by the thanksgiving that was a conventional part of letters of that historical period. But the thanksgiving is brief and leads into our passage in which Paul prays for the recipients of the letter and introduces the main topic of the letter, the Church. It is a reading that is complex in content and structure. It practically cries out for grammatical diagraming and theological explanation.
The author (Paul or one of his disciples) first prays for knowledge for Ephesians, for a grasp of spiritual realities. This knowledge would bring enlightenment. This enlightenment that is being prayed for would be concerned with three realities, i.e., with an awareness of the hope that is connected with our call to faith; with a consciousness of the gifts that come to us as followers of Christ; with an appreciation of the power of God that we share through faith.
Now the text goes on to describe how God has exercised His power. He raised Jesus from the dead and gave Him the position of honor in heaven. Jesus Christ is superior to all the powers of the cosmos both now and for all futures, temporal and eternal. Christ is at the summit of everything and has been established as head of the Church. The Church is nothing less than the body of Christ, a body that will continue to grow and develop until it manifests the full life and holiness of its Head.
Put simply, this passage prays that the readers may become aware of God’s power expressed in the exalted Christ and in the life and growth of the extension of Christ that is the Church.
One might say that this reading describes what it means to be a member of the Church. Being a member of the Church involves sharing in the exaltation that the Father conferred on Jesus as a result of His human ministry. But it also means sharing in the earthly expression of the glorious risen Christ, sharing in His body, the Church.
The last verse of our reading speaks of the Church as "the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way." This suggests that, while the Church will never be anything different from the body of Christ and while all fullness of godliness and grace already dwells in Christ, the Church is not yet finished. It is still being filled with the glory of Christ and is growing toward the stage when it will be a complete expression of the fullness of Christ.
This means that the Church has a history, a history that is still in the process of coming to completion. That history consists in the unfolding of God’s plan for our salvation. In Christ, the Father’s plan has reached its final stage. Christ’s eternal glorification in heaven means that His work is done, that there is no more need for future earthly ministries on Christ’s part. Salvation has been achieved. But it still has to be applied to specific women and men. It still has to be presented and responded to by various cultures in various times under various circumstances. God seems to want His saving love for us to be expressed in all the multitudinous contexts that make up human reality. Until it is, the body of Christ has not reached its goal, has not reached fulfillment. Its history is not over.
But God does not work at the history of the Church alone. Just as Jesus chose to need human collaborators for His ministry of salvation in His earthly life, so also He has chosen to need collaborators for the ministry of salvation that He continues from heaven. Each one of us has a role to play in the expression of God’s love for us human creatures. Each one of us has a part to play, a contribution to make to the history of the body of Christ. The ascension is concerned with the final glorification of Christ. It is concerned with the growth of the body of Christ which is the Church. And it is therefore concerned with us.
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Conversation Questions.
Where do I see the saving power of God working in the Church?
How do I contribute to the future of the Church?
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