Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord! Today, we celebrate one of the beautiful facets of the Mystery of Easter as we stand with the disciples watching Jesus ascend while pondering Jesus’ words that he is with us always, to the end of the age. There’s a bit of holy tension at work here, and I’d like to invite you, dear Friend, to live into that tension a bit today, not in order to definitively resolve it, but in order to find yourself cradled by it, held by it, transformed by it.

So here’s the elephant in the room: how can it be that Jesus is with us always and has also gone away from us?

I remember almost a full year ago giving a homily at the Comfy Space Eucharist on the Sunday after Ascension. Sitting with our young disciples on the floor of the Children’s Chapel, I asked them: “Where is heaven?” Many of them pointed upward. So I asked a little follow-up question: “Could heaven be anywhere else do you think?” Just as many of them paused for a moment, and then pointed to their hearts! It was an amazing moment. And then, to add to the amazingness, two of our youngest theologians said some incredibly observant things. “Heaven,” said one, “is both very far away and also very close.” (!!!) The other: “Heaven is in my body.”

At the time, the observation that "Heaven is in my body" seemed a little odd, but that’s only because I assumed (wrongly) that it was spoken out of childhood innocence or naïveté rather than real, profound, lived and living wisdom. Because the truth is that little statement illuminates so much of the Mystery of the Resurrection (and more!). I mean: we believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and that belief matters, it means something. Jesus didn’t rise again as a ghost or an idea or as a gnostic deity newly perfected having sloughed off the supposed impurity of the body. No. Jesus rose bodily from the dead. This affirms, in part, that the wholeness of our humanity, the wholeness of human experience, the wholeness of who we are, has been assumed into God’s divinity; that our very bodies are deeply loved by God; that our bodies are not opposed to divinity or to mystery, but have been made sites of the unfolding of divinity and of mystery and of a depth of joy that is completely and delightfully unfathomable. Some have argued that Jesus’ resurrection body seems to do things our bodies can’t—like walk through walls—and that’s led some folks to speculate that Jesus’ body must not be a real human body. But here’s the thing that we often miss simply because we tend to prejudice our own familiar, limited (and fallen!) perspective: Jesus is the standard of the human, not us. Just as miracles are not opposed to the real but are the standard of the real—not opposed to nature but they fulfill it—Jesus is the standard of the human.

To say, then, that “Heaven is in my body” is to affirm, in the light of the Resurrection and Ascension, that every human being is capable of revealing the arc of heaven. Every human life, every human body is capable of revealing the shape of glory. Every body, every life, reveals something of the beauty and wonder of God. And there’s more! To affirm that Jesus sits at the right hand of God means that Jesus’ body, a human body, our body, is situated at the very heart of heaven; that Jesus’ own wounded heart is the Heart of the Real and our own True Heart as well. Heaven is in my body…and also…my body, your body, is already in heaven!

Heaven is both very far away and also very close. Jesus is far away and very close. Heaven is in my and your body and in and through Jesus, our body is in heaven. And even so, Jesus’ body—that no wall could keep out, that death could not conquer—that holy human body is still here with us, even now, unbound by space and time and truly present in the Eucharist, truly present in the gathered community that is broken and poured out for love of the world and for love of God…truly present, dear Friend, in the very substance of your life by the grace of the One who is Life. It is, in fact, in loving relationship with that One that the fullness of heaven really, joyfully and substantially subsists.

These are the sacred tensions into which we’re invited to live today, by which we’re invited to be transformed today, the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+