Ascension

[AI translation] Today's feast directs our gaze towards heaven. In particular, there is much talk of that which is otherwise so little talked about: heaven. For today's feast is the feast of the Ascension. In the coverage of this feast, the word 'heaven' is repeated over and over again: 'What are you looking at in heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, is coming in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." (Acts 1:11) On the basis of this record, we confess again and again in the Apostles' Creed that Jesus, after he had risen from the dead on the third day, "ascended into heaven". In our foundation verse, it is a straightforward matter of man saying such a strange thing, "If I ascend into heaven, there art thou..." All these statements and ideas about heaven, about heaven, in this day and age of modern technological advances, with artificial moons, man-carrying space rockets zigzagging the sky, slowly the distance between the stars, these images and statements about heaven are beginning to become unreal, unbelievable. They begin to confound our whole faith. That is why it is good, on this day, the day of our Lord's ascension, to try again to clarify the old concepts.First, what the Bible actually calls heaven, because it is often very different from what we humans imagine it to be. I have seen, and I am sure you have also seen, in old Bibles and old religious books, illustrations in which the artist wants to depict God, and he has drawn or painted an old man with a white beard and a kind face, looking down from a floating glorious throne, as if through clouds, to the earth. Horrible! Not only because you are told not to make yourself a carved or painted picture of God - for you can't, no one has ever seen God - but mainly because such an illustration gives you an absolutely wrong idea of God, of His whole heavenly world, whether it is done with primitive simplicity or with Michelangelo's grandeur. Such and similar ideas have then given just cause for derision. But nothing is easier than to ridicule the idea that somewhere high above the clouds, in the world of stars, there is heaven, where God dwells. Look, says the world, we have flown our planes far above the clouds, we have reached the moon with our rockets, we have even found with our special telescopes that beyond the world of stars there are other star worlds, and beyond those other star worlds again, so where is heaven?
Brothers and sisters, the Bible never taught that heaven is somewhere above our heads in the high altitudes, beyond the clouds and beyond the world of stars. No! The Bible never says that. It is the imagination of men. It is the account of Jesus' ascension into heaven that shows how differently the Bible speaks of heaven than people who deny the reality of heaven. I have said it many times, but I do not hesitate to say it again now: listen to the story, it is not that Jesus began to rise from the ground like a helicopter, higher and higher, above the clouds, and so slowly disappeared from the human gaze that followed him. No! But, "they lifted him up in their sight, and a cloud caught him out of their sight." (Acts 1,9) As if to say: in their sight Jesus was invisible in the heavenly world, in that other dimension of existence where the eye, the telescope, the radio wave, the spaceship cannot reach.
The heaven to which Jesus ascended is not a spatially and temporally different world, another place somewhere beyond the clouds and stars, but another form of existence, the possibility of a higher, other-dimensional life, which, unlike our finite and ephemeral form of life, is an eternal form of life, which we cannot even imagine, because all our thoughts and ideas are bound to space and time. Let no one, therefore, confuse this heaven of which the Bible speaks with the starry heavens, which, however immense and vast, belong to the visible part of the created universe, where, like on earth, gravity and the physical laws of transience and death prevail. It is this visible, physical world that is the particular cloud that obscures heaven from us. Behind this visible physical world, behind this cloud - not above, beyond, higher, but behind it - is heaven. Behind what you see, where there is no earthly law of heaviness, no impermanence, no death. Yes: behind the visible is the mysterious heavenly world, full of indescribable beauty and inexpressible peace, joy. That world of eternal light which is invisible and intangible to our gross physicality and earthly senses, though it is very near to us and surrounds us constantly, even now.
Into this invisible world Jesus entered almost before the eyes of the disciples. The astonished disciples followed this glorification of our Lord with their eyes as long as this wonderful transformation, this passage into this other world, was at all perceptible to the earthly senses. Then, all at once, Jesus was caught up like a cloud before their eyes, i.e. he entered into a form of life no longer perceptible to the earthly eye, and the door of the invisible world closed behind him. It is not, therefore, that Jesus has gone far away from them, to an intangible distance, for heaven is all around us. In fact, it is only now that he has come very close to us!
In a way, this mystery is like the rays and light of the sun. When the sun rises at dawn, it seems to be right there near the edge of the horizon, as if it were on the earth, almost as if it could be grasped with the palm of your hand. Later in the day, it rises higher and higher, seeming to move further and further away from us. But as it rises, it radiates more and more light and warmth to the Earth. And when it is at its zenith, at its dusk, seemingly farthest away from us, that is when its rays reach the deepest and darkest corners of the Earth. We imagine Jesus in a similar way. He started there, too, very close to the horizon, on Earth. Oh, how close he was to people, they could touch him with their hands. Then, at the ascension, He ascended, high above us, into a world much higher than this world of ours. Yet we cannot say, alas, what a pity that He should have departed from us in this way, for it is just now that He is at the height of His glory, in heaven, that the living rays of His grace and love can truly flood into the darkest corners of our hearts.
It is precisely by being lifted up from earth to heaven that He draws nearer to us all and becomes us all. It is for this very reason that he has passed from this world into that world, from the material to the spiritual, so that he can truly be with us without any limitation every day until the end of the world. And so He is there with you, and He is there with all who by faith acknowledge His presence. To believe in Jesus is precisely to be in relationship, in personal relationship, with the Lord who is invisibly beside me. I am never alone, separated from Him only by a cloud, or nothing. I can speak to him, I can hear his voice, I can reach out to him, I can receive from him the gifts he gives me, because the voice, the prayer, the blessing, all penetrate that "cloud", but not the gaze. For it was not by his ascension that Jesus was separated from us, the struggling, rejoicing, sorrowing people on earth, but it was precisely by his ascension that he came into some mysterious, though invisible, but very comforting and happy closeness with us.
And now let us return to technical progress. Should we really fear it for our faith? Does it really make heaven unlikely? Surely not! On the contrary, the believer can truly rejoice in every technical achievement that science makes. But just think: what can be achieved with spaceships? The Moon, Mars, Venus, perhaps? These are our nearest neighbours in space. They are within hundreds of millions of kilometres. Whether mankind will ever reach beyond our solar system is very much in question, not to mention the distances that take light thousands and millions of years to travel. And even if man were able to turn off time at the speed of light and travel for millions of years to distant star worlds, he would still be where the psalmist says: "You have encircled me before and behind, and you have held your hand over me... Where shall I flee from thy soul, and from thy face, whither shall I run?"-and still he would not be one step or thought nearer to heaven!
But the psalmist continues, "If I ascend to heaven, there you are" (verse 8a) Ascend to heaven? Is it possible? Yes, but not by space travel, but in a very different way. In silence. The silence, the inner silence, is the antechamber to heaven. It can be on a crowded tram, if there's no better place. From this anteroom, Jesus invites you into heaven for a conversation. So through silent prayer I ascend to heaven, and there is Jesus. And in talking to Him, the tensions in me are released, and I step out into the world, into the midst of people, filled with heavenly energies: love, joy, peace, purity, goodness.
Isn't the Ascension a precious celebration? For it means that I can walk on earth in intimate closeness with the heavenly Jesus. And that is the happiest and most rewarding life.
Amen
Date: 11 May 1961, Holy Thursday.