Hallowing Heaven

Scriptures: The Ascension of the Lord, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Why did Jesus have to leave? This is a fair question, I think, and one that the Apostles themselves asked of our Lord.

For 40 days after His Resurrection, the Risen Christ appeared to His Apostles, to Mary Magdalene and Peter, to Thomas and the Eleven, to Cleopas on the road to Emmaus and even to crowds of 500 people. He was the same Jesus whom they had known during His earthly ministry, but He had been changed, glorified, perfected by His Passion, Crucifixion, and Rising from the tomb. This is not to say that the Son of God wasn’t already perfect, but in this ordeal, in His conquest of sin, death, and hell, He had glorified both the Father and Himself, and had redeemed all of humanity in His own person, even back unto Adam and Eve.

And we may be forgiven for wishing that He’d stuck around for a little while longer. After all, having the Risen King of Kings, forever appearing bodily to the faithful and the doubting alike, would surely have established the Church as the one unassailably true religion. Do you doubt that Christ is Risen? Well, here He is! Touch His wounds; place your hand into His side. Do not doubt, but believe! Yet this is not how Christ chooses to rule the world. And we should be grateful for this. We live, after all, by faith and not by sight.

God is love. And love, as you’ve often heard me insist, cannot force. But neither can love give up; neither can love ever stop loving the beloved. Faith is a matter of love, not of sight. For the believer, there is superabundant evidence of God’s goodness and glory all around us. Yet for the unbeliever, no amount of proof would ever be sufficient. Neither would they believe even if a Man were to come back from the dead.

Jesus promises us that His Ascension into Heaven is in fact for our benefit. And He gives to us three reasons why this is so: (1) He goes hallow Heaven; (2) He goes to prepare a place for us in His Father’s House; and (3) He goes so as to send to us the Holy Spirit of God.

We’re all rather familiar, I think, with the “Harrowing of Hell”: that great conquest of the underworld in which Christ, upon the Great Sabbath of Holy Saturday, battered down the gates of Hades and proclaimed liberation to the souls imprisoned there. But its counterpart, the Hallowing of Heaven, might strike us as a bit odd. What need has Heaven of hallowing? It is Heaven, after all. What could be more hallowed than that? In point of fact, the Hallowing of Heaven refers to Jesus booting Satan out of the presence of God and establishing Himself as humanity’s Great High Priest for all eternity.

Recall the book of Job, in which the Devil appears before God’s throne. “Where have you come from?” asks the Almighty, to which Satan replies, “From going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it.” Once he had been Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, greatest and purest of all the angels. But since his fall from grace, having been ignobly cast down by the Archangel Michael, he returns now from his exile upon the earth as Satan the Accuser, Satan the Adversary. And he comes to bring charge against humanity for our myriad sins.

No longer God’s right-hand man, Satan now re-presents himself as a prosecuting attorney, ever holding up the sins of mankind before our mutual Creator, ever thrusting the putrid stink of our wickedness before the purities of the heavenly court. But in the wake of the Resurrection and His conquest of hell, the Risen Christ will tolerate this no longer. Satan is banished again from the presence of God. No longer shall the Holy Trinity be pestered by this gadfly, this spiteful demon forever spitting up every transgression of humankind as if to say, “See? I was right about them all along!”

Now, instead of a prosecuting attorney, we have before God Christ the Great High Priest, who forever intercedes for us, prays for us, makes satisfaction for us. Our Father in Heaven is eternally reminded by His only begotten Son of His great love for us, His great mercy, and the infinite merits obtained for humankind through Jesus Christ our Lord. The truth of our sin and of God’s justice has been supplanted by the truth of Christ’s worthiness and of God’s infinite mercy and grace. Thus is Heaven hallowed for all of mankind.

And this, dear Christians, is how Christ prepares for us a place in His Father’s House. Never before has Heaven been considered a proper dwelling place for human beings. Granted, some truly remarkable figures—Enoch, Elijah, Moses perhaps—were said to have risen to Heaven in body and soul, thus to bask in God’s presence forever. But these were the exceptions to the rule. Heaven was a place for God’s unveiled glory, and for those angels faithful and powerful enough to stand within it. Human beings were made of dust, and to dust they should return. The dead dwelt in the underworld, in Hades. Even paradise was considered but a neighborhood within the land of the dead.

No longer! Now paradise has been raised by Christ into Heaven, into the beatific vision of God’s presence. When Christ ascends, He brings all of us, all of humanity, right along with Him. In Him alone we are all redeemed! One sinless Man is all it takes to raise human nature up to its intended perfection. “In My Father’s House there are many dwellings,” Jesus promises, and we see this promise fulfilled in the wondrous visions of Revelation. Despite warnings that the road to life is narrow and those who take it rare, we see now the massive heavenly City of God, a City of Brobdingnagian proportions, 1500 miles cubed!

It is impossibly large and impossibly glorious, with more than enough room for every man, woman, and child who has ever lived or who ever will. Christ has opened Heaven to all. No longer can the Scriptures imagine Eden as a garden fit for two. The new Heaven is a megacity, not aloft and aloof in the heavens, but one that descends to earth so that all may enter her open gates and bask in the Light of the Lamb.

Finally, Christ ascends into Heaven to send us the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete. We often translate Paraclete as Advocate, or Helper, but it’s really a legal term. It means “defense attorney.” The Paraclete is the one who protects and defends you, who argues and implores the court on your behalf. Gone is the prosecutor; here comes instead the public defender. And just as Christ was God in the flesh, God-With-Us, so the Holy Spirit is God in the assembly, God-In-Us. Christ returned to the Father so that we might have God not just above us and alongside us, but God within us, God dwelling in the hearts of all believers.

When Jesus ascended, He didn’t leave. We didn’t lose the God-Man. Instead, He ascended so that His Holy Spirit might descend and bring us into His Body, so that we might all be God-Men, we might all be “little Christs” in Him. You want to see God in the flesh? You want to touch His wounds and place your hand in His side? Well just look around you! Here is God in the flesh! Here is the Risen Christ! Here He is, in these wounds all around us! Do not doubt, but believe!

But more on this at Pentecost. For now we wait, and hope, and pray: “Come, Holy Spirit.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.