The Ascension
“And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” - Matthew 28:20
Does this verse not make you sit in awe and wonder at the Lord’s love and care for you? For you particularly. Not merely humankind as a whole, or creation collectively, but you as an individual. The Lord promises to remain with you personally until the end of time. Beyond your own life, beyond even the existence of the earth itself, He promises to be with you until the end of all things. The Lord created you to live in relationship with Him for all eternity.
This Easter, I have been astounded by the way God seeks after us. It is easy to focus on our own efforts to become saints, to grow in virtue, and to become more like Christ. So easy, in fact, that we forget the Lord comes to meet us and remains with us. He desires us and yearns for us to be with Him. The great gift of the Ascension is that Jesus Christ has made a way for us to be with Him forever.
We can only go where Jesus Christ has gone first, and so He had to return to His Father in heaven. He walks the path we must all one day walk. This includes the suffering He endured, but also the Resurrection and the Ascension into heaven. This piece of art is especially beautiful because it shows Christ’s wounds. His woundedness was not erased when He rose from the dead, but glorified. Lent has a way of unveiling our wounds, and the Easter season allows us to see them in light of the Resurrection. Christ desires to heal our wounds without erasing the evidence of them. Our struggles become places where God is able to enter in and reveal His glory. It is this glory that is revealed in Christ’s Ascension.
The disciples likely desired to go with Christ—to follow their Master and retreat from this world. But what did Jesus tell them to do? To go out and evangelize the world. To share the most life-changing and wondrous news ever proclaimed in the history of creation. Jesus called them to go out and suffer, live, love, and show the world who He is. He does not wish to take a single moment of this beautiful life from you. More than that, He desires to experience it with you.
The anticipation of the Easter season is Pentecost, there is still something greater to come! Jesus reminds us of this in the verse that opened this reflection. He remains with us because He loves us and because He desires to remind us that greater things are still ahead. One day we will be fully united with Him in heaven, and at the end of all things, there will be a new heaven and a new earth.
So as we step toward the final moments of the Easter season and into Ordinary Time, may we grow ever more aware of the nearness of the Lord. Let us look upon our wounds and recognize that the Lord dwells even more closely within them than we realize. As Christ ascends into heaven, may we faithfully set out upon our earthly mission until the day He calls us to walk that path toward the Father with Him.
