'Ascension of the Lord'
Knights of the Southern Cross Fifth Triennial Conference Mass
Mary MacKillop Centre, North Sydney
Acts 1:1-11; Eph 1:17-23; Mark 16:15-20
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
24 May 2009
The Ascension is the last appearance of the Risen Christ. He had used the period after his death and resurrection to instruct his apostles and disciples on what was going on. We heard in the Acts that some of them were still hoping against hope that Our Lord might have now finally been going to set up his political kingdom on this earth. "Are you now going to set up the kingdom of God?" And he said, No, no, no, I am about something else.
We are told there that he ascended into heaven, into the skies. It is a way of speaking, the only way we can describe it, but we should not conclude automatically from that, that heaven is upstairs and hell is downstairs. It is a way of thinking, a way of speaking. When I studied in England I used to do some chaplaincy work at a Catholic primary school. The kids there of course knew that I was Australian and they sometimes would ask me why I did not fall off the world because we were on the other side of the world and on the bottom of the globe. And it is a similar way of speaking that describes the Ascension.
At the Ascension Our Lord told his disciples to go out everywhere and preach the Gospel and here we are two thousand years later as if we are starting from the Holy Land. We are almost as far away from there as you can possibly be, all at the end of that long succession of witnesses that long tradition, so that we have the faith today.
So what is the significance of this feast of the Ascension? It is not simply the going up of any good person to be with God. It is rather the return of the Son of God to the Father. It is a re-affirmation in a different way that Jesus, as well as being the Son of Mary, is also the Eternal Word, the second person of the Trinity. Jesus is going back to being (as we say) at the right hand of the Father.
Secondly, it emphasises that Jesus is the Lord of the whole cosmos, the whole world of nature. Jesus is not just the head of the Church. As the saints and some of the New Testament writers said, not just the Lord of history, but part of the one true God who created the entire Universe.
And thirdly, with the departure of Jesus we know that the Holy Spirit will come, and we celebrate that next week at Pentecost; that completely spiritual being who can work anywhere and everywhere, but is sometimes so difficult to recognise.
In the Second Letter to the Ephesians Paul prays that the Spirit of wisdom and perception might be with us to bring us to the full knowledge of Christ our Lord and he uses a very useful image: he prays that the eyes of our mind might be enlightened.
I remember reading years ago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian Christian writer, and he spoke about the third eye. A third eye, metaphorically speaking, that helps us to understand what is going on at some depth around us. It is useful, indeed necessary, to understand often what is happening in the hearts of those who are closest to us or those working with us. We need this sort of third eye sometimes, perhaps often, to understand what is really happening inside each of us ourselves, and of course we need this deeper level of understanding to try to work out where God is in our daily lives, especially when the unexpected or a sad and sorrowful thing happens.
But to understand these things we need a very real level of humility and we need persistence. Very, very few important things are understood in the flash of an eye. These days it is not at all difficult not to believe and sometimes good people - genuinely good people - can find it very hard to believe. Speaking more broadly, the Australian poet, Stan James, penned a few lines which I think will help us understand what I am trying to say:
"Sometimes we are at our lives the same way dogs are at a concert – We hear all the sounds and none of the music."
That is quite possible and it happens and we men are sometimes accused of being worse at that than the women. It is a stereotype, which I suspect is sometimes, perhaps often, true. For example a man/husband is the last to realise that the marriage is in trouble and perhaps in crisis. It might be dad who is very slow to realise that one of the children is in trouble or really agitated or sad and needs to be helped. But whatever about that, both men and women, can travel on the surface and refuse sometimes to go underneath the surface, because we fear that there we might find things that will upset us.
We need perception and wisdom to recognize our hidden God and love Him. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) used the phrase "the eyes of faith", taken from Abbé Jean Pierre Rousselot (1846-1924), who described Christian faith as a 'faculty' – an ability to see as true what God wants to show us. What cannot be seen without this 'faculty' is what we call 'faith'.
In faith we cannot see everything, or even see clearly what we see. St. Paul told the Corinthians (1 Cor 13:12) that while now we see supernatural realities "as in a mirror, darkly," then after death we will see "face to face", and mirrors in those days were metal, and very inefficient and may differ from our wonderful glass mirrors.
Nor is the situation of people without faith like that of people who are blind; who cannot see at all. It is more analogous to those whose vision, for all its acuity, lacks depth; who are unable to perceive another, a fourth, a spiritual, immaterial, supernatural, dimension.
St. Augustine, in his usual direct fashion, reminds Consentius of this in a letter. "Faith has its own eyes," which enables us to see beyond the finite to infinite, beyond the now to the truth of the hereafter. That is what we pray to possess and continue to possess.
Some truths of science and maths we may understand and accept, but that does not really touch us personally at all. It is very, very different when Jesus says, "come follow me" and we have to decide to try to organise our lives, our basic values around his teaching.
So let us pray a prayer of thanks for the gift of faith; let us pray that as we continue our pilgrimage we will truly understand more and more deeply, we will have a better level of perception and comprehension to really recognise God who is at work in our hearts and the hearts of all those around us.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
