Ascension Thursday

Thursday, 13 May 2010

The Ascension of the Lord – Solemnity

Morning Chapter Sermon – Br.Barry

Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 24:46-53.

ASCENSION 2010.

• A remarkable thing about the Ascension is that there is an eye-witness account of it – a description of the indescribable. All the same the first effect of the Ascension was to once again render God invisible to physical sight. What are the disciples to do now with their faculty of sight?
• Vision is the most important of the senses. Indeed, the traditional name for the greatest happiness humans are capable of is borrowed from the power of seeing – the beatific vision, defined as ‘ the seeing that confers bliss’ and the famous Jesuit scientist Teilhard de Chardin wrote that the aim of evolution is ‘ the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes’. A Peruvian woman coming to the U.K. to work said that the first thing that struck her on arriving in this country was the large number of people wearing glasses. An odd confirmation, perhaps, of Teilhard’s idea.
• The spiritual sight which is faith looks around for suitable objects for its physical counterpart and many fitting things have been developed. In no particular order – there is the monstrance and Eucharistic devotion; there is the catacomb art of the early Church in Rome; there are statues and holy pictures; there are icons and crucifixes, of which St. Aelred suggests that the highest use we can make of our sight is to gaze on a crucifix or cross; there are church buildings, their exterior and interior; for monks, there is the whole monastery building; the practise of lectio divina is principally about the use of sight, as far as the five senses are concerned.
• St. Paul has another one. ‘God’s everlasting power and deity are there for the mind to see in the things he has made’, he wrote to the Romans. In this one verse he has combined the faculty of physical sight (‘the things he has made’ ) with spiritual sight ( ‘his deity is there for the mind to see’ ).
• This word ‘deity’ that St. Paul uses is a rare one in the New Testament. It occurs in only two other places, (as far as I can make out), both associated with St. Paul . One is in the Acts of the Apostles in his speech in the Areopagus to the men of Athens ‘that all nations ought to seek the DEITY and by feeling their way towards him, succeed in finding him’. As in Romans, it is God as Creator that St. Paul is indicating here. The third instance occurs in the second chapter of Colossians, in the verse translated in the Jerusalem Bible ‘ in his ( Christ’s ) body lives the fullness of DIVINITY’.
• Put all these three references together and you have - Christ there for the mind to see in creation. This is only the teaching of the canticle in Colossians: ‘in him were created all things in heaven and on earth’.
• All that is for those who look with faith. For a society in which only scientific truths are regarded as real, an invisible God is a serious problem. If you cannot see it on a screen or measure it with a machine then it cannot be real seems to be the attitude. It is no coincidence that such a society has come to be dominated by the entertainment industry, an industry totally geared to attracting the eyes. Such a society has no place for religion and sure enough we are all familiar with the moves that have been made to banish religion from public life. We can be certain that it won’t stop there.
• If it has a problem with an invisible God and with religion then it will have a problem with the Church. There are two sides to this: on one side of the coin they will fail to see what ‘Lumen Gentium’ calls ‘the divine institution of the Church’. It says: ‘the Church exists in Christ’; ‘the Spirit has its dwelling in the Church’; the Church is ‘the kingdom of Christ now present in mystery’; it is ‘ the setting in which the communication of Christ’s life to believers takes place’; ‘ Christ presents himself to us in his body which is the Church’.
• The other side of the coin is that this society will only be capable of seeing the visible structure of the Church, its outward appearance. In other words it will see flawed human beings.
• Does the Church say about itself that its members are not flawed individuals? Of course not. Again from Lumen Gentium: ‘the Church is marked on earth by a genuine if imperfect holiness’ and ‘the Church is at once holy and in need of constant cleansing’.
• The doctrine of the divine institution of the Church is the one that is particularly undermined today and it is a doctrine that will need its martyrs too.
• The Ascension, then, might be said to celebrate the invisibility of God but like all festivals it is celebrated by a feast for the senses.
  
  (Ref: Joseph Pieper 'In Tune With The World')