The Alleluia Moment: A Meditation on The Ascension

The Alleluia Moment: A Meditation on The Ascension May 5, 2016

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I’ve got to admit, this is a day that stumps me. I don’t know what to say about the Ascension of the Lord. Take a look at this responsory, from tomorrow’s Office of Readings:

During the forty days after his passion, he appeared to them and spoke with them about the kingdom of God.
As they watched, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight, alleluia.

While he was with them, he told them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the fulfillment of the Father’s promise.
As they watched, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight, alleluia.

Alleluia?

Jesus is taken from our sight, Alleluia?

He went away, and we’re supposed to sing Alleluia?

Why is this an alleluia moment?

What have you to do with Alleluia, when you can’t see Jesus anymore? Shouldn’t we be singing a lament? Should I get out the books from Good Friday and Holy Saturday? He went away from our sight. We can’t see the Savior. He was supposed to be here, even until the end of the age. He just got back from His descent into Hell. He hadn’t been back two months yet. Then a cloud took him, and we’re left here staring at the sky. Alleluia?

I’m glad He got to go back to His father and all. Is that why we’re singing Alleluia? That Jesus went away and got to be with His father? I know He said He went to make a place for us; very well, that’s great. Our own place in Heaven. We’ll wait here. How long could that take, Jesus being God and all? A few days? A year?

Thousands of years?

I’ve been waiting just shy of thirty-two years, myself, and it hasn’t been very nice. I’ve had my happy moments, but I wouldn’t say this was a rip-roaring good time. I’d rather have just gone with Him at once; slept on the sofa in Heaven until my place was ready. Why wasn’t that an option?

Or was it?

The reading for Ascension Thursday’s Office of Readings comes from a sermon of Saint Augustine. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some bits that struck me. For just as he remained with us even after his ascension, so we too are already in heaven with him, even though what is promised us has not yet been fulfilled in our bodies.”

We are?

Christ is now exalted above the heavens, but he still suffers on earth all the pain that we, the members of his body, have to bear. He showed this when he cried out from above: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? and when he said: I was hungry and you gave me food.

Oh.

These words are explained by our oneness with Christ, for he is our head and we are his body. No one ascended into heaven except Christ because we also are Christ: he is the Son of Man by his union with us, and we by our union with him are the sons of God… not because there is no distinction between the head and the body, but because the body as a unity cannot be separated from the head.

So… that is what He did, after all. In this life, at least in a sense, I am sleeping on the sofa while he prepares a place for me. As long as I remain in Him, I am where He is; and He is in Heaven, preparing a place for me. He is also in me, preparing in me a place for Heaven. Because I’m not there yet. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, I am not empty enough for Heaven to fill. I am all full of dead things and poison. I was born marked for death, and in a way already dead; I have allowed myself to be filled with the death of sin in too many ways. Through His mercy, on this long, slow journey where I cannot see Him, He empties me. By His Passion and Cross, by His emptying of Himself, He fills me again. By His glorious resurrection, He raises me from death. And now, by His ascension, He brings me home. All this takes time. So, by His mercy, it is a very slow ascent. But I am in the Body of Christ, and this life is my ascent.

It seems that it works like that, somehow.

I am in the Body of Christ. I, unworthy and filled with death, am in the Body of Christ, and Christ is drawing me to be where He is. That’s what life is, if you permit it to be. Everything is Grace because every moment is Ascension. Every moment culminates in Heaven, including this one. Right now. This moment. This heartbeat. The very breath I’m taking now. My fingers on the keyboard. The voice of my daughter in the next room. My slight headache; my mild hunger as I put off making supper. The omnipresent tiredness of chronic fatigue, and the sharp smell of the peppermint oil I smeared on my skin to ease the symptoms. These are Ascension. The best day I’ve ever had; the days where I felt Christ’s presence most closely, my engagement, my wedding party, the first time my daughter called me Mamma– that, too, was Ascension. The worst darkness I’ve ever felt; the things Christ did not intend for me, but that happened because of sin and fallenness: the secret abuse I endured all those teenage years, running away and cutting all ties. Sleeping on the sofa in the crazy ramshackle apartment building on the worst street in town, because I couldn’t afford new furniture but didn’t dare go back to the address where they could find me. The emergency surgery. The chronic illness with no friends to help. The disastrous childbirth. The rape, the recovery; the agony of a flashback. The humiliation of facing someone who saw me flash back and no longer considers me a rational human. Christ did not will these, but because I passed through them, they are Ascension. 

What a truth. What a wonderful, glorious truth.

Truly, an alleluia moment. He was taken from my sight, because I was taken into Him, and now we ascend into Highest Heaven. He mounts His throne to shouts of joy, and because I am  in Him, He draws me to where He is. Alleluia! 


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