Transformed

May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a spirit of wisdom and perception of what us revealed, to bring you to full knowledge of him.

Ephesians 1:17

My father, my grandfather and my Uncle Keith all died in 1976. When we gather as family (inevitably funerals) we usually speak as if all three have just left the room. It's as if the past 44 years were just yesterday. And yet each of us speaks of them as intimately close and present as we tell our stories, laugh and cry. But we speak from real experience - and that is despite the stories growing bigger with every retelling - and we articulate in gesture and word the celebration in our hearts for the gift of their lives to us.

Theologians need often to remind us that when we speak about God, we use language and the arts to express what we understand or seek to understand. In language and the arts we use simile, metaphor and analogy. So when we  consider the Ascension, it is so much than a story about Jesus going 'up into heaven' and even way more than Jesus sending his disciples to the four corners of the world.

I have spent years wondering about the transformation we undergo in various stages of our life. We remain the same person, but there is something essentially new or changed about ourselves. While millions of words have been written by theologians, bloggers and thinkers, I often find that their words just don't quite hit the mark with me.

One of the marvels of Eucharist is the story of grain of wheat that is planted in the ground, then with water, nutrients and sun, the wheat grain embryo breaks open and out, sending its radicle to establish a root, while the plumule germinates into a stem, leaves, the ears. These ears are harvested. Some are stored for the next season's sowing. Some are sent to be milled and then used for the making of bread. Each grain produces almost 20,000 particles of flour. This is transformation.

The word itself is constructed from trans (Latin for across or beyond) and forma (Latin for form or mould). It has distinct scientific and mathematical understandings but is usually understood as change in composition or structure, change in outward form or appearance or a change in character or condition. When we celebrate Eucharist those milled grains are once again transformed from unleavened bread to become the very Body of Christ (which we call transubstantiation). In our consuming of the Body of Christ we become 'in communion' with Christ himself, in fellowship with all believers.

Jesus' ascension follows two other critical transformations - his transfiguration and his resurrection. Each transformation asserts the power of God working in Jesus and through him. The ascension most clearly acclaims that Christ leads us to our place in God - and as Benedict XVI confirms it takes place in our everyday lives. How that transformation takes place is no more a mystery than the grain that sprouts leaves and roots, that grows to produce many more grains.

Peter Douglas

 

The Meaning of the Ascension

POPE BENEDICT XVI

What is the meaning of Christ's "ascension into heaven"?

It expresses our belief that in Christ human nature, the humanity in which we all share, has entered into the inner life of God in a new and hitherto unheard of way.  It means that man has found an everlasting place in God.

Heaven is not a place beyond the stars, but something much greater, something that requires far more audacity to assert: Heaven means that man now has a place in God.  The basis for this assertion is the interpenetration of humanity and divinity in the crucified and exalted man Jesus.  Christ, the man who is in God and eternally one with God, is at the same time God's abiding openness to all human beings.

Thus Jesus himself is what we call "heaven"; heaven is not a place but a person, the person of him in whom God and man are forever and inseparably one.  And we go to heaven and enter into heaven to the extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him.  In this sense, "ascension into heaven" can be something that takes place in our everyday lives…

For the disciples, the "ascension" was not what we usually misinterpret it as being: the temporary absence of Christ from the world.  It meant rather his new, definitive, and irrevocable presence by participation in God's royal power... God has a place for man!… In God there is a place for us!…"Be consoled, flesh and blood, for in Christ you have taken possession of heaven and of God's kingdom!" (Tertullian).