The Ascension of Jesus doesn’t mean he is the first astronaut. It’s more like a home coming. But His home is not some glorious palace above the skies. Together with his Father and the Holy Spirit, He has made His home in us. He is at home in all humanity who welcome him and in this beautiful cosmos He has created for us – and for Himself. Jesus rose and ascended in the body He took from the Virgin Mary. It’s the same body, His for ever, but no longer mortal.

In the Ascension, then, we may lose sight of the risen body of Jesus, but we don’t lose its presence. That’s why He says in the Gospel even as He disappears from sight, “I am with you always, yes, until the end of the age.” And He is especially always with the community He still builds on the Apostles, that is, the Church. Just as He breathed on them after His Resurrection and said, “receive the Holy Spirit”, so after the Ascension, through Pentecost, He breathes continuously the Holy Spirit upon the Church. To what end? So that we will continue His mission to baptize all nations and teach them all that He has commanded us.

So, we can perhaps put it this way: Jesus withdrew from one place on the earth, Jerusalem, and from one point in history, about 33AD, in order to be everywhere on earth and throughout history. He withdraws from the surface of the world to become the heart of the world and of the whole cosmos. He withdrew from just being with us to be also in us. And yet, he has remained visible to our eyes to some extent in seven ways, in His sacraments. Through these signs, He is immediately and actively present to those who celebrate them in faith; through them, He feeds and strengthens in us the grace and the power of His presence and love in ways particular to each sacrament. And these we can only receive in His Church, His Body, which is the most fundamental way in which He remains visible in the world. Through the Church in its mission to proclaim Him, it is He Himself with the Father and the Spirit who seeks to draw all to Himself.

Remember that He repeatedly said that, when He was to be lifted up from the earth, that is just what He would do. Like a great magnet, His Ascension is a movement towards the Kingdom which is within us and among us and it draws with Him all people and things which do not resist Him. In this sense, we could say that the Ascension is not so much a past event as an ever-ongoing process. He is still ascending and we are ascending with Him. For our loved ones who have died and gone to Him, the veil covering His risen body has been taken away. They are one with Him in glory at the heart of the world and of heaven, and we are one with them through Him by our life of faith, by the way we let Him draw us to Himself, until the time for the veil to fall comes for us, too.

Even when Jesus appeared to His apostles and the women after His resurrection and before His Ascension, He could not appear to them in the fullness of His Risen nature. They would not have been able to bear it, nor can we so long as we are mortal. Our mortal eyes and nature cannot gaze on immortality because its glory would overwhelm us and take our life. In this sense, faith is a gift of divine mercy. Faith helps us to see the realities of heaven with the inner eye of trust and hope without being endangered by the full blaze of their glory. Faith is not make-believe but respect for the limitations of our mortal condition. Just as you don’t reveal too much about anything to someone in case it overwhelms them and might harm them, so Jesus is aware that His glory is too much for us just now. Through His Ascension, He paves the way for faith to seek Him and for love to long for Him so that when the time comes, we will be ready to see Him, if not immediately at death, then eventually once we have been through cleansing love of purgatory.

Yet, now Ascended, there He stands, at the heart of the universe, of humanity and of the Church, gradually submitting all things to Himself through the Spirit, painstakingly ensuring that all things will work for the good of those who love Him. And when He and the Father have judged that the universe, humanity and the Church are ready, He will come again. He will emerge from the heart of all things and show His glory and consummate for ever the Father’s plan of salvation. No matter how it may now seem to us, nothing and no-one will be able to resist Christ when He returns just as the Apostles saw Him go. On that Day, all people and events of history will be judged in justice either unto condemnation or unto beatitude. And then, there will be new heavens and a new earth brought forth from this very creation as it is. And He will say, Behold, I make all things new.

So, the phase of human history inaugurated by the Ascension is the time of preparation for the final Apocalypse, that is, Revelation of God. We who live in this phase are therefore called to prepare by living our faith in imitation of Christ and His saints and by fulfilling our personal mission to witness to Him with our lives, our deeds, our words and our love. Because He is at the heart of everything, we can call upon Him whenever and wherever we wish. He has sent upon us the Holy Spirit to empower us to do so. It is up to us to give Him full access to our whole selves and, with Mary, to respond: let it be done do me according to your Word. Then, we will be taken up in glory and our life, which was hidden with Christ in God through faith, will be revealed with Him when He appears in all His glory. Risen and Ascended Christ, here present in this Eucharist, we adore you, we praise and thank you, and we ask you to ready our hearts, souls and bodies for the glory of heaven.