Homily for the 7th Sunday of Easter

On Thursday of this past week we marked our Lord’s Ascension into heaven. This Sunday after Ascension Day retains a strong memory of that event, as we see in our reading from Acts. And we stand in the calendar, like the Church in the first part of Acts, in that strange time between Christ’s exit and the Holy Spirit’s entrance on Pentecost.

This is an opportunity for us, as it was for the disciples, to consider the meaning of the Ascension. And today I want to ask in particular what it shows us about the triune God — consider this the first of a couple opportunities leading to Trinity Sunday —and, in turn, what that means for us.

Our gospel selection brings us again to John. Even before his death, in the upper room, Jesus prays to the Father before his disciples: “Glorify me in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.” And further on: “Now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.”

John’s gospel is keen to remind us of the eternal glory of the Son. The Son is not a new creation, but existed in eternity with the Father, in identical glory, before all things. And it is back to that glory that the incarnate Son intends to return when he ascends into heaven.

But why the Ascension? If the early Church wanted simply to give Jesus a kind of spiritual exaltation, to proclaim him raised to heaven in spiritual triumph, they could have easily done so without the story of the Ascension, which emphasizes, as all the gospel stories post-resurrection, Jesus’ persistent bodily existence. His body is new, to be sure, but it is still, even in its resurrected glory, a human body. He didn’t leave behind his humanity when he rose from the dead. Nor did he leave behind his humanity when he ascended into heaven. In one of the more powerful phrases of the Roman Rite, the proper Communicantes of the Ascension speaks of how on that day the Lord set at the right hand of glory “the substance of our frailty united to himself” — unitam sibi fragilitatis nostrae substantiam for the Latin scholars. I referenced this on Thursday because it is unique and strange. We are fragile creatures, as the fathers often put it, suspended over the void by nothing but the Word of God. Yet somehow this fragility has now entered into the very seat of power and dominion.

There is a strong political dimension to this that we need to take seriously. Jesus is not a spiritual figure if by that we mean a figure who inhabits a spiritual realm cut off from bodies and nature and politics. Isn’t that what the world today wants Jesus to be? Modern civil religion has no problem calling Jesus Lord, as long as he is Lord only of spiritual things, which is to say, Lord of some other world, not this one, the one that matters. But we meet no such spiritualized Jesus in the Ascension. And this is why the Ascension was seen as a threat to the powers of the world, because by ascending into heaven with his humanity intact, the Son of God effectively proclaims that Israel’s claim to God’s special favor was right all along. The scandalous particularity of Israel’s status as the chosen nation is now at the center of Christ’s universal rule from the throne of God.

This is, actually, a very strange thing to say. Just think about it for a moment. A particular human nature — body, soul, intellect — is now at home in heaven. More specifically, a human nature is now at home with the eternal three-in-one nature of God. The same God who has eternally existed in unchangeable and infinite splendor; the same God who exists always as three persons with no confusion and no division; the same God who is utterly beyond all time and space and created order, who created the world in total freedom and love. This God has taken human nature to himself. And, maybe more importantly, the Son’s continued human existence in heaven causes no change in God.^[1]

How can that be? How can the assumption of human nature cause no change in God?

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To answer this we need to take a small detour.

In the rectory we still have a small wooden cross with the words “God love you” scrawled on it with a marker. In my Episcopal Church days we served a small town in Alabama where a certain man, partly disabled in both speech and motion, had made it his life’s mission to constantly make these crosses and give them to everyone he met. He was a bit unusual, but even in a largely post-Christian culture it seems normal to say something like “God loves you.” Indeed there’s even the cheap knock-off trend where we just replace references to God with “the universe.” We can accept the ridiculousness of thinking the universe has feelings for us only because we retain a certain cultural memory of God. Because the idea that God loves us is in the end a pretty decent summary of the Christian gospel.

Yet there is probably no other statement that would have seemed more bizarre to a first century person. God loves me? What does God get out of it? What’s the catch? While divine love of a sort was at least conceivable among the various Greco-Roman pantheons, it would have seemed very strange among the philosophers, for whom God was really just the Good — the unchanging perfection at the center of all things. For such a God to love would be a blemish on God’s divine credentials, because love implies change and vulnerability; love implies imperfection — it implies a need that must be met elsewhere.

And yet at the very heart of early Christian reflection on God was the notion that God somehow loves us in Christ. So part of the conversation that led to Trinitarian doctrine was thinking about how it could be possible for a being who has no needs, no imperfections, to love. And the answer, to put it boldly, was that this God, the Holy Trinity, was not somehow less divine than the gods of antiquity or the God of the philosophers, but more so. This God was so divine that he could love even within his own nature, because this God’s nature was a perfect communion and love between three eternal persons. Precisely because this love was already perfect and infinite, God could love something that was not God — God could love us, in other words, and it would not change God’s nature, because God’s nature is precisely the infinite outpouring of love.

And here we return to the mystery of the Ascension, and of the presence of human nature in God’s unchanging nature. You see, God’s divinity is so divine that it isn’t threatened by human nature, even “the substance of our frailty.” Human nature can drink at the well of divine nature, and God’s nature will never be lessened or compromised. The exaltation of human nature to heaven — the Father’s refusal to set any limits on its glorification — is a statement not of God’s lowness and compromise, but of God’s utterly transcendent freedom.^[2]

This transcendent divine freedom, perfect in three persons, is the only way to believe that God intends good towards us and not evil, that God is, despite the changes of the world, trustworthy. A God who welcomes an utterly inferior nature into his own triune life is not a God who needs to preserve his own honor at our expense. God does not change. But he has chosen, from all eternity, to share his own nature with us. He has chosen to share his eternity in time.

Thus we should not, as the angels say in Acts, stand gaping up into heaven, but instead live with the knowledge that our human nature is already in heaven. In Christ, we are seated at the right hand of the Father, and the work we do here on earth participates in God’s final work of reconciling all things to himself. In a way, the absence of Christ in one particular way — the fact that we cannot fly over to Galilee and find him walking around — has made his presence more universal, in and through the Church and her sacraments.

What a privilege that is, and what an awesome vocation: to make heaven known on earth! We do it when we serve others and recognize in them the humanity that is already with God in heaven. We do it when we offer celebrate the Eucharist, proclaiming and worshiping the Lord’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament.

In such particular acts, spiritual and corporal, personal and ritual, we pray and work for the completion of that union between heaven and earth begun in the Ascension, that union where earthly struggles and contradictions and scarcities will be made beautiful in the life of the triune God.

On that final union, I close with the prayer of John Donne:

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end. 

^[1] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale 208: “The renunciation of the ‘form of God’ and the taking on of the ‘form of a slave’ with all their consequences do not entail any alienation within the Trinitarian life of God.”

^[2] From the Breviary, a sermon from Pope St. Leo: “no limit was set upon the uplifting of that nature short of the right hand of the Eternal Father.”