Liturgical Year
Part 2 Sunday
Chapter 22 Feasts of the Lord
Feasts and Solemnities of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit
Preliminary QuestionsBibliography |
TheologyAscension |
Trinity SundayTo Think About |
Preliminary Questions
Bibliography
Theology
Ascension
TRR Homily 2008
Have you ever had relatives that you really didn’t like come to your house "for a visit" and stay a few days? You know the "relief" you feel when they are gone and that "underlying dread" that some day they might come back.
Jesus came to earth for a visit. And today we celebrate the fact that he left and went home and we might have that underlying dread that some day he might come back.
If that is your understanding of the Feast of the Ascension, I would invite you to take a deeper look at the mystery.
It has been my experience that many Catholics, when they imagine "Jesus" limit that image to Jesus of Nazareth. Some don’t get that far and have the Second Person of the Trinity sort of loosely "clothed" under the appearance of Jesus but is still so divinely transcendent and unapproachable that the whole mystery of the incarnation is defeated! The task of the Christian is to meet Jesus, fully divine and fully human, but a Jesus who has passed through death and by the Holy Spirit has incorporated us into Himself so that with St. Paul, we can say "Now, I am no longer living, but Christ is living in me. We are Christ’s Body.
Not everybody gets it. Here are some ways to tell if you get it or not.
Implications of "we are Christ’s Body"
We are the living dead. Not the "zombies" of movies. But dead in Christ. Think for a moment of the things you are worried about right now. How many of these things will you be worried about after you are dead? — That’s the point. We are dead. We have died in Christ. All that stuff that the "un-dead" are worried about should no longer concern us. We are in Christ.
Just as the Solemnity of the Resurrection celebrate our rising from the dead; today’s Solemnity of the Ascension celebrates our entry into heaven.
This is what Paul tells the Ephesians:
"May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,
give you a Spirit of wisdom and revelation
resulting in knowledge of him.
May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened,
that you may know the riches of glory for us who believe.
God has placed Christ as head of the church,
which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way."
This "inner vision" this seeing with "the eyes of your heart" helps us to see as Christ sees. And Jesus saw the kingdom as already present in our midst, now. "God was so real for him that he could not distinguish God's present activity from any future activity. He had a poetic sense of time in which the future and the present merged, simply melted together, in the intensity of his vision." (The Five Gospels, pp 136-137.)
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, "The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There it is!' For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you." Luke 17:20-21
When I pray "the Lord will come again" I am not thinking of some day far off in the future; the Lord will come again now, today, in the Eucharist, in the people I meet, in the man asking for help at my door.
"His ascension is our glory and our hope." (Opening Prayer) As we set the table we pray that our gifts of bread and wine "help us rise with him." (Prayer over the Gifts)
"The meaning of Christ’s Ascension," writes Pope Benedict XVI, "expresses our belief that in Christ the humanity that we all share has entered into the inner life of God in a new and hitherto unheard of way. It means that we have found an everlasting place in God." It would be a mistake to interpret the ascension as "the temporary absence of Christ from the world." Rather, "we go to heaven to the extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him." Heaven is a person: "Jesus himself is what we call ‘heaven.’" (Quoted from Magnificat, May 2008, p 31)
We have come together this morning to share this meal which is the sign and sacrament of our Resurrection and Ascension. Holy Spirit transforms us anew, we who eat the Bread and drink the Cup, into the Body of Christ so as to form One Body, One Spirit. (Eucharistic Prayer, quote from EP IV)
If it acts like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck. We are the Body of Christ. We have to act like Christ and talk like Christ for people to be able to tell who we are.
It is this "inner vision" of who we are that enables a Mother Teresa of Calcutta to care for the dying, or Dorothy Day to feed the poor, or Francis of Assisi to embrace the leper. They saw the Body of Christ caring for the dying Christ, feeding the poor Christ, embracing the rejected Christ.
"Go and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."
Not everybody gets it.
"When they had gathered together they asked him,
‘Lord, are you at
this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’"
The disciples didn’t get it. They are still think "him and us".
Matthew tells us: "The eleven disciples went to Galilee,
to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.
When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted."
Today’s challenge:
Look deeper.
Look beyond the bread and wine.
Look beyond the Jesus of history.
Move from doubt to faith, hope, and joy.
Jesus lives and we are His Body.
Alleluia.
Trinity Sunday
LaCunga, Catherine Mowry. "Making the Most of Trinity Sunday". Worship 60 (1986) 210-24. Reprinted in Between Memory and Hope (Maxwell E. Johnson, Editor) pp 247-261.
One example is the word "person" used of God in the plural. For us today a person is a psychological reality, connoting "individual center of consciousness." It is virtually impossible to explain why "three divine persons' in our sense of the word would not mean "three gods." It would be more correct for us to say that God is a person who manifests him/herself in three distinct ways. It is not essential to use the language of "three persons' when preaching on the mystery of divine love. The word does not occur either in the Bible or in early Christian creeds. As Rahner says, by conveying god's radical nearness among us as Word and Spirit, "everything that needs to be said has really been said" (Sacramentum Mundi, vol. 6 [New York: Herder & Herder, 19780] s.v. Trinity in theology, 307f. Quoted in LaCunga, p 250 fn 8).
In the NT, as also in early Christian creeds and in early Christian theology East and West, "God" and "Father" are synonyms. Not until the fourth century does "Father" acquire the intra-Trinitarian sense of "eternal Father who begets the eternal Son." In any case, to equate divine paternity with masculinity is unreflectively literal. There is every theological (and now cultural) reason to use both pronouns when calling God Father (e.g., God the Father, in his/her wisdom..."). Likewise, the Holy Spirit is not female any more than the Father is male. Thus it is equally appropriate to use both personal pronouns of the Spirit, e.g., "The Holy Spirit, in his/her wisdom. . . " (LaCunga, p 252, fn 12)
"In summary, the gradual incorporation of the Feast of Trinity Sunday is symptomatic of the increasing abstractness of Western Trinitarian theology from the end of the fourth century on. As it moved away from its original focus on salvation history toward a metaphysics of intra-divine life, Trinitarian theology became an account of God in se rather than God pro nobis. By the end of the patristic period, Prosper of Aquitaine's (fifth-century) axiom, legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi (the law of prayer determines the law of belief) had in effect been reversed; because of the threat to Christian faith posed by Arianism and other 'heresies,' liturgy came to function as a defense against doctrinal deviations. Lex credendi in many cases dictated lex orandi." (LaCunga, p 257)
Divine fatherhood in its intra-Trinitarian sense (the ingenerate father eternally begetting the son) should be distinguished from two other senses of divine paternity: God as "father of us all" (source of all that is), and God as "father of Jesus Christ" (Abba). The former conveys what it meant to call God Father of Israel or Father of the world. Abba is a familial -- not a metaphysical -- name which depicts the intimacy of God's relationship with Jesus. (LaCunga, p 259, fn 33)
TRINITY: An interesting and helpful metaphor for the trinity is explained in the talk by Dr. Michael Corso "Leadership for the Evolving Face of Catechesis" given at the Sunday opening session of the National Conference for Catechetical Leadership, April 14, 2002. (Sr. Mary Emma) -- He also explains "persona" well. -- Music in the mind of the composer, the written score, the performed work. We are all jazz variations on the theme that is Christ.
To Think About
© Copyright: Tom Richstatter, Franciscan Province of St. John the Baptist, Cincinnati Ohio, Order of Friars Minor. All Rights Reserved. This page was created by Fr. Thomas Richstatter, O.F.M. Every effort has been, and is being made, to acknowledge sources when the ideas are not my own. Any failure to comply with the United States Copyright Act (Title 17, United States Code) will be corrected immediately should I become aware of it. This site was updated on 10/07/08 . Your comments on this site are welcome at tomrichs@psci.net.