From abode of the dead, Jesus leads the just to heaven

If we recall the opening Gospel on Palm Sunday,  we remember how 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.

On the Ascension, we celebrate the true Kingship of Christ inasmuch as our Lord’s return to the Father as 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 to free the dead from their captivity in the nebulous underworld that housed them until Jesus liberated them from this “hell” (a netherworld existence where the just awaited their liberation by the Messiah) and escorted them 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.

This, my friends, is what we celebrate on what would otherwise be the Seventh Sunday of Easter.  This is why the Church summons us to gather in worship today.  Jesus’ Ascension marks the beginning of the real Kingship of the Lord. From that day until the consummation of God’s saving plan with the Second Coming, Christ now brings all peoples into submission not by violence but by love. Concommitantly, he infuses and nourishes a real faith that lays latent in every soul—so that every person now has a vocation to salvation. Every person now 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.  This, then, is a peak into the real nature of the God who is Love.     

Father Comandini is managing editor of “The Catholic Spirit