*Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is taken up to his Father in heaven. We
tend to read the Ascension along essentially Enlightenment lines, rather
than biblical lines—and that causes a good deal of mischief. Enlightenment
thinkers introduced a two-tier understanding of heaven and earth. They held
that God exists, but that he lives in a distant realm called heaven, where
he looks at the human project moving along, pretty much on its own steam,
on earth.On this Enlightenment reading, the Ascension means that Jesus goes
up, up, and away, off to a distant and finally irrelevant place. But the
biblical point is this: Jesus has gone to heaven so as to direct operations
more fully here on earth. That’s why we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will
be done on earth as it is in heaven.”Jesus has not gone up, up, and away,
but rather—if I can put it this way—more deeply into our world. He has gone
to a dimension that transcends but impinges upon our universe.*
* MARK 16:15-20 *
*By Courtesy Bishop Robert Barron*
