To make sense of why Jesus goes to heaven, we have to ask how he goes. I don’t mean whether he was whisked away on angels’ wings or a cirro-cumulus cloud. I mean that he ascended in his risen and glorious body.
St Thomas Aquinas makes the point that Jesus ascended into heaven as man. As God, of course, Jesus had no need to do so, he was eternally there with the Father and the Holy Spirit! So, the point, if you like, of the Ascension is that the Lord takes his human body into the glory of heaven.
The humanity of Jesus, the humanity we share with him, is not shed or dropped aside. It was not a disguise, or a temporary adoption. The humanity of Jesus is eternal. The man, Jesus Christ, reigns forever in heaven. But no man is an island; and we who are his kin, by blood and by baptism, are united with him and are to share that kingdom.
The ascension of Jesus, the head of the body of which we are members, is the beginning of our future bodily life in heaven. The Ascension indicates that the life in Christ we begin on earth through the gift of the Spirit has its fulfillment in heaven.
I have used the word “heaven” a lot in the previous paragraphs, because today is the feast that, more than any other, should drive home to us that heaven is where we are meant to be. Because of the Lord’s Passion, Death, Resurrection, AND Ascension our eternal home is there. This is the feast that shows most powerfully that the great work of our redemption is not about taking us back to Eden before the Fall. It is, rather, about bringing us to a new and glorious life, sharing in the divine life of the Holy Trinity.
This feast is where we really begin to understand why, in the Exsultet sung at the Easter Vigil, we speak of the Fall as the “happy fault.” Because today we begin to really understand what God’s response to our sin is, not punishment and destruction, but healing and transformation. Today we see a little more clearly, hopefully, truth of the words in the Preface for masses for the dead, for the Lord’s faithful people life is changed not ended. Today we see how wondrous that change will be.
Fr Chris Denham
