Ascension marks crowning of Christ’s paschal mystery

As we recall the opening Gospel on Palm Sunday, the crowds placed Jesus on the back of a donkey and placed a purple robe around our Lord and waved palms at him as he entered Jerusalem. They, who did not fully understand Jesus, believed him to be the Messiah, long-promised by the Prophets. However, the King, who they anticipated, would be a “Warrior-King” who would usher in a new age in which all Israel’s enemies would submit to the truth, abandon their false gods and worship the One, True, God whose Ark of the Covenant linked the Jewish people to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in a bond of love because Israel was his Chosen People. As we know from salvation history, the Kingship which they believed Jesus would exercise could not be further from the images they conjured from the Scriptures. To the contrary, their King would be condemned, flogged, crowned with thorns, nailed to a Cross and hung in public view for having been found guilty of blasphemy by the Jewish religious authority, and as a threat to civil peace by the Romans. So much for the earthly kingship of Jesus Christ.
 

Forty days after the Resurrection, the Church celebrates the true Kingship of Christ inasmuch as our Lord’s return to the Father, better known as the Ascension into Heaven, the place where God the Father would decorate his only Son for having succeeded at the mission for which he was sent to Earth — to make known the love of God, to redeem the people of their sins and thereby reconcile them to God, to put Satan at bay, and escort the righteous ones to the true land of milk and honey, the real paradise, the New Jerusalem. There, they witnessed the Father crown Jesus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, granting him sovereignty over all powers, thrones and principalities of the universe. From this day forward, Jesus did usher in a new age — let us call it the age of grace. And the mediator of all grace would be henceforth the very one who saved us from ourselves, from our selfishness and sinful tendencies: Jesus.
 

The Ascension marks the beginning of the real Kingship of Jesus Christ — who from that day until the consummation of God’s saving plan with the Second Coming, would bring all peoples into submission not by violence but by love, not to crush their idolatry built on ignorance but to infuse and nourish a real faith which lays latent in every soul — so that every person now has a vocation to salvation, every person has a chance to spend eternity in joy with the new humanity of the redeemed and in a relationship with the God who created them and saved them through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Imagine, how blessed we are then, to be in a relationship with a God who condescended to become one of us so that, in time and with grace, we could become more like Him. His, then, is a peak into the real nature of the God who is Love. The Ascension, like Easter, is also the day the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice!
 

How can we relate to the Ascension today? I’m sure for the surviving family and friends of the loved ones who died from COVID-19, the feast is comforting. In our country alone, more than 560,000 people died from this virus. What can we offer besides a moment of silence? We can offer assurances that their loved ones may have died but they are alive in Christ.  I say this because the Ascension marks the grand opening of Heaven.  As Jesus returns to the Father, his very being embraces all those good people who departed this life prior to his Ascension. Jesus’ temporal mission was not only to save the living from sin and eternal death — it was also to redeem those who died and who, up until this point, were in a somnambulant state of being, a sort of netherworld suspended between God and earth.
 

The Ascension did not take away physical death, inasmuch as the Redemption is still at the stage of first-fruits, but the death of our loved ones is no longer perceived as the end; rather, it is a passageway to a new and better existence, where there is no more pain, no more sorrow, no more tears, no more separations. We have cause for rejoicing because in Jesus Christ, the dead have found life eternal.
 

Father Comandini is managing editor of “The Catholic Spirit”