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 This weekend brings to us the Solemnity of the Ascension, transferred from the traditional Ascension Thursday to the following Sunday so that more people can celebrate this beautiful feast. What we are celebrating is the last apparition of Our Lord to His disciples and apostles forty days after the resurrection. They were in Jerusalem. He led them out to the summit of the Mount of Olives, giving them last-minute instructions as they went. Then He raised His hands, blessed them, and "parted from them and was taken up to heaven" as St. Luke tells us.
When St. Leo the Great,
one of the early popes and doctors of the Church, comments on this event
in the gospels, he tells us that Our Lord is no longer with us in His
physical being but rather "our Redeemer's visible presence has passed
into the sacraments. Then he goes on to say that "a more mature faith
enabled the minds of the believers to stretch upward to the Son in his
equality with the Father. It no longer needed contact with Christ's
tangible body in which, as man, he is inferior to the Father." Thus
when we adore Our Lord in the consecrated Host, either by receiving Holy
Communion or adoring Him in the reserved Sacrament, we are dealing
lovingly with our Lord who is risen, who has ascended, and is now
enthroned in heaven with His Father and the Holy Spirit. To quote a
frequently used prayer of the liturgy of the Ascension: God mounts his
throne to shouts of joy; a blare of trumpets for the Lord!
Victor Brown, O.P.
The Mystery of Redemption, Rev. Rinaldo Antonio Zarlenga, O.P. |
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