By Stephen P. White
Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Ascension. (Depending on where you are; consult the liturgical calendar of your locality). It is worth reflecting: Why did Christ ascend? Why, having conquered death, did He not remain here? Would it not have been simpler for a risen and manifestly divine Jesus to walk the earth, for as many millennia as necessary, converting sinners by the unmistakable fact of His glorified bodily presence?
In the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples ask Jesus a question that suggests they themselves were thinking along those same lines: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom of Israel?” It is a reasonable question to ask the newly risen Messiah, but Jesus avoids a direct answer: “It is not for you to know the times or the occasions… But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Both the question and the answer suggest a solution to our original question.
Jesus did not come to be an earthly ruler. That is, He is the Lord of the universe, but not in a worldly sense. Not in the sense that His disciples, who believed in His divinity even though they knew Him in the flesh, tended to expect. His kingdom, as He told Pilate, is not of this world. As Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well: “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”
How can we, bodily creatures as we are, learn to worship in Spirit and in truth?
The short answer: we learn through faith. Faith is a gift, of course, but more specifically, it is a gift suited to the limits and condition of our humanity. God is not a capricious trickster who likes to make things harder for His creatures by making Himself difficult to see. He is a loving Father who gives us what is best for us. And faith is a true gift for those whose “greater good” requires faith.
Which is to say that Jesus ascended for our own good.
In the Gospel of John, during the Last Supper, Jesus says to His disciples: “But I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.”
The Ascension is a gift precisely because it requires of us a faith in things unseen and opens us to a dependence on the Holy Spirit.
Pope Leo the Great, in the fifth century, reflected on this point in a beautiful sermon on the Ascension:
[W]e duly commemorate and venerate that day on which the nature of our humility in Christ was raised above the whole host of heaven, above all the orders of the angels, beyond the height of all the powers, to sit with God the Father. In this providential order of events we are founded and built up, so that the grace of God might become more admirable, when, despite the withdrawal from the sight of men of that which was rightly felt to inspire reverence, faith did not fail, hope did not waver, love did not grow cold. For it is the strength of great minds and the light of firmly faithful souls to believe without wavering what is not seen with bodily eyes, and to fix one’s affections there where one cannot direct one’s gaze.
The Pope continued:
And where would this piety spring from in our hearts, or how would a man be justified by faith, if our salvation rested solely on those things that are presented before our eyes? Therefore our Lord said to the one who seemed to doubt the resurrection of Christ, until he had verified with sight and touch the marks of His passion on his own flesh: “Because you have seen me, you have believed: blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Jesus ascended, in the words of Pope Leo, so “that we might be capable of this blessedness.” Our dependence on faith is, in itself, a gift.
The bodily presence of the Risen Lord was a benefit to the faith of the Apostles; His absence is a benefit even greater for us. We know the presence of Jesus through the Sacrament of the altar and by the Holy Spirit, which instructs and guides the Church. In the words of Leo: “And so, what was until then visible of our Redeemer was transformed into a sacramental presence, and so that faith might be more excellent and stronger, sight gave way to doctrine, whose authority was to be accepted by believing hearts enlightened with rays from above.”
Aquinas echoes this same point when he writes: “The ascension of Christ into heaven, by which He withdrew His bodily presence from us, was more profitable to us than His bodily presence would have been.”
He offers three reasons for this.
First, to “increase our faith, which concerns things unseen. For ‘blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.’” Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the proof of realities unseen.
Second, to instill hope. Through hope we desire heaven and eternal life as our happiness, as the Catechism says, “placing our trust in the promises of Christ and relying not on our own forces, but on the aids of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”
Third, to “direct the fervor of our charity toward heavenly things.” Aquinas cites Augustine, who asks: “What does ‘if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you’ mean, if not that you cannot receive the Spirit while you continue to know Christ according to the flesh?”
After the Ascension, the three persons of the Trinity are present in us, but spiritually.
The Ascension, therefore, is a glorious and fitting gift for faith—for that piety that lifts our hearts—and enables us to worship in Spirit and in truth.
About the author
Stephen P. White is the executive director of the Saint John Paul II National Shrine and a fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.