On this feast of the Ascension, we recall the new way Jesus desires to relate to his people. Formerly, during his hidden life on earth and his public ministry, he walked among his people in the ordinary way any human being does. He spoke to them, prayed with them, taught them, and healed them. He worked incredible miracles, but from any outward viewer’s perspective he looked and acted like a normal human being. As Isaiah prophesies, “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (53:2). This ordinary appearance ceases, however, after the resurrection.
When Jesus appears to his apostles after the resurrection, he is generally somewhat unrecognizable, although they can see it is him when he makes it known to them. Still, he does not remain with them for long in this new form – he ascends to heaven after forty days. There, from his throne, he now SEEMS to be far away from us. He SEEMS now to simply have no appearance at all. He seems to have left.
As we repeat every year, however, the thought that Christ has left us is a mistaken thought. He has not left, rather, he has chosen to exist in a new sort of relation toward us. Before, he came to us in an ordinary, physical, earthly way. Now he has ascended, but not to leave. He has ascended in order to be even closer. Before, someone could only get close to him by walking toward him. Now, I call him to mind and he is there with me. His presence has become more universal and heightened – not because he has become some sort of ethereal spirit, but because in his physical body, he has gone to a place that needs no movement on our part to access.
Additionally, he has not only gone there, but he has granted to his Church (the apostles and disciples) the power to unite people to him in an intimate union that St. Paul called being “one body” in Christ. This union has come to be known as the “mystical body of Christ” or “the Church.” We say that from heaven Jesus exercises a headship over his body and that we form one body with him.
St. Augustine speaks about how we cannot speak about the head without the body or the body without the head if we want to speak of the whole Christ. Jesus has willed reality to be such that he is incomplete without his body, and that we are incomplete without the rest of the body and our head. This is a great mystery!
Pope Pius XII says, even more strikingly, that although “Christ the Head holds such an eminent position, one must not think that he does not require the help of the Body. … Christ has need of His members. … That is not because He is indigent and weak, but rather because He has so willed it for the greater glory of His spotless Spouse. Dying on the Cross He left to His Church the immense treasury of the Redemption, towards which she contributed nothing. But when those graces come to be distributed, not only does He share this work of sanctification with His Church, but He wills that in some way it be due to her action.”
I end here by simply briefly calling our minds back to St. Francis. See how he lived out his union with Christ his Head and Lord. We see so clearly in his life how Jesus worked the sanctification of so many precisely through Francis’ actions and words. If St. Francis had not been the apostolic disciple that Jesus called him to be, where would the Church be now?
How is Jesus calling you and me to live more intentionally as a member of his body, sharing in the mission of our Head and Shepherd?