Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (and the Ascension), 2021
Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying:
“Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me,
so that they may be one just as we are one.
When I was with them I protected them in your name that you gave me,
and I guarded them, and none of them was lost
except the son of destruction,
in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
But now I am coming to you.
I speak this in the world
so that they may share my joy completely.
I gave them your word, and the world hated them,
because they do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
I do not ask that you take them out of the world
but that you keep them from the evil one.
They do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.
As you sent me into the world,
so I sent them into the world.
And I consecrate myself for them,
so that they also may be consecrated in truth.”-John 17:11b-19
(Today I am offering a “twofer”—that is, a homily that covers both the Ascension and the Seventh Sunday of Easter so that all the Latin rite readers of Catholic Answers online will be able to have something that matches the liturgy of his locality. In most American dioceses, the feast of the Ascension is transferred to the following Sunday, but in the dioceses in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska it remains a holy day on its traditional day, as narrated in the scriptures, forty days after the resurrection: Ascension Thursday. Those who live in the rest of the U.S. never hear the readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, since the Ascension always takes its place. So there’s a bonus here for them, since today’s homily, suitable for either day, will be on a Gospel reading you miss out on unless you live in the Northeast or in Nebraska. I won’t offer my priestly opinion of this uneven celebration of the season, but you may well imagine what it is!)
“Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed…” Is heaven up there, someplace? The same Greek verb used for lifting up his eyes is also used for the risen Jesus whole and entire in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, where we are told he was “taken up to heaven.” So did Our Lord really travel through the sky to some place above the earth?
This may seem to be an interesting point, but does it concern our deepest spiritual life, our progress in grace, and growth in the hope of glory? The answer is yes; it does in every way.
We human beings, uniquely among the billions of other beings with a spiritual nature, have a body; we are living spirits, as it were, whose immaterial, immortal spirit is also the form, the soul, the life principle of a material substance. For us, being a composition of body and soul, matter and form, is essential to our nature, it is what we are, it is how we exist.
This means that if you touch my hand, you touch me, and if my soul and body are separated, I am no longer there. My mother’s body in her grave is not my mother, and her separated soul beyond is not my mother; she bore me as a person, body and soul. This is the tragedy of our death, which Christ Jesus came to overcome by his death and resurrection. We will be restored to our full being and personhood, body and soul. I have lost my mother, but I will have her back by Christ’s power.
Now, a necessary consequence of having a body is being extended in a place, whether in our mortal body or our immortal one. Location is an automatic result of being corporeal. But what is more, the risen body has qualities that flow into it from the beatified soul, so that it is glorified. Thus, it can move from place to place with the choice of the will and is not restricted by the laws of distance or gravity, which are limitations of our present state. Yet wherever it is, there is a “there” there. Where there are real, extended bodies, there is a place.
Thus it was that Our Lord traveled all over Judea and Galilee by the power of his risen, glorified body. He appeared and disappeared, he offered his hands and side and feet for inspection, he even grilled a fish breakfast and ate and served it.
If an angel were to appear and do these things, it would be a prodigy, an apparition, because pure spirits do not inhabit space and place. But Our Lord in his resurrection did all these things, because like all who saw and touched and spoke to and ate with him, he was present locally in his true body.
So wherever Our Lord’s living, visible, glorious body is, he is present there as in a place. The same is true for any others who have glorified bodies—Our Lady in the first place, but also, if you follow St. John XXIII in his Ascension Day homily of 1962, St. Joseph as well. And after the general resurrection, all the elect will be together in one place in their risen bodies. This is what we believe, whatever progressive theories of the resurrection might claim to the contrary.
Now, this does not mean they are constrained by place, not at all. They can move about freely anywhere they will to go in the new heavens and the new earth that God will provide. All creation will share in this glorious state ever after.
The body will be dominated by the blessedness of the soul. Our Lord’s going up expresses this freedom from the limitations of body and place, but it also reveals that his true body is in heaven, and heaven is wherever his true, glorious, but natural body is.
If the Lord were not in a place in his natural extended body after his ascension, then our teaching on the Blessed Sacrament would make no sense. For his real presence there means that wherever the sacred species are, they bear a mysterious relationship to his body and blood in heaven, such that wherever they are as a sacrament, he is present in his substance. But his local presence is in heaven. By this sign of the sacrament of sacraments, heaven and earth are joined.
So there is no doubt that the Savior went someplace when he ascended into heaven. This is a place we cannot reach since it is the place of bodies renewed in incorruption and immortality, but he promises to bring us there where he has said, precisely “I go to prepare a place for you.”
Whatever this new kind of place will be in our future experience, we know that it will be more vivid, more concrete, and more self-evident than anything we experience now in our temporary dwelling here below. Did he not also tell us through St. Paul, “Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of any man what God has prepared for those who love him”?
Heaven is most of all essentially the vision of God in our intellect and the perfect possession of him by our will in love, but it will also be even more perfect when we can walk, and talk, and see, and hear, and smell, and embrace those we love amid the marvels of our everlastingly new home on high.
So “lift up your hearts!” He is really there awaiting us, even as he remains with us here under the sacramental signs. Doesn’t that make you love him more, feeding your imagination and your desires with holy hope and anticipated joy?