Robert Barron - Seated at the Right Hand of the Father
Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this wonderful feast of the Ascension of the Lord. We have this feast right at the end of the Easter season as a prelude to Pentecost, the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit. And getting the Ascension of Lord right is very important for understanding many aspects of the Church’s life. And so I want to dwell on that a little bit with you today. I want to do so under two headings. The first I’m going to call more political; the second I’m going to call more liturgical. They are both hinted at in the great statement in the Creed that we recite week after week: «He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father».
So every week we say that as part of the Nicene Creed, «He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father». What does that mean? Well, first of all, and I’ve made this point with you before, but it’s worth making again, the Ascension of the Lord does not mean his translation to another place within the cosmos. So think of Jesus moving from Capernaum to Jerusalem. He’s moving from point A to point B within the space-time continuum. If we think of the Ascension as Jesus simply taking off like a rocket and going up into space, well heck, even if he’s moving at the speed of light, in two thousand years, he’d still be within the confines of the Milky Way Galaxy. It doesn’t mean he’s moving, something as trivial as moving from one place to another within the universe. Rather this: It’s the transition of Jesus from this dimensional system to the higher dimensional system that the Bible calls heaven.
Now, when you say «heaven» or «the clouds» or «the heavens,» that’s a symbol. So we point to the sky as an evocation of something that is beyond our ordinary experience, beyond the confines of this world. We’re speaking of the dimension of God. Now think for a minute, everybody. God is not an item within the universe. Mistake that atheists old and new make over and over again is they think of God as a big being within the context of the universe, and then they look around for him. Some say he’s here; some say he’s not. But it’s getting the whole thing wrong. The creator of the time-space continuum is not an item within the time-space continuum. We say that God is beyond space and beyond time. So God’s eternity (for example, read Thomas Aquinas on this) doesn’t mean that God lives in everlasting time like a vampire who never fades away. It means God exists in a manner that is transcendent to time.
Now, here’s an important point: This doesn’t make God irrelevant to our experience. On the contrary, it makes God more present to it, more available to the totality of it. The eternal God who’s beyond time, yes, presses upon every moment of time. God who’s beyond space, yes, is present to every and all place. Now, I’ve used this image before, but I’ve always found it very useful to understand this kind of paradox. You think of a square on a two-dimensional plane. Now move to a higher dimension, move to a three-dimensional system, and the square becomes like a cube.
Now, a cube can fit in it, so to speak, an infinite number of squares. It can be present to an infinity of squares, because it exists at a level transcendent to the two dimensions. Think of a circle in relation to a sphere in three dimensions; the sphere can contain an infinite number of circles. In a similar way, God’s dimension, which is beyond space and beyond time, can be present to every space and to every moment of time. That’s the paradox, but so much of the life of the Church depends upon this.
So the Ascension of the Lord means that Jesus, who operated indeed within our time-space continuum, I can pinpoint around two thousand years ago in ancient Palestine, that’s where Jesus was. But the ascended Christ, now, has entered into the divine dimension in such a way that he can indeed impinge upon all of space and all of time. I’ll give you an example. This morning I’m in my chapel praying my holy hour and I was doing the Jesus prayer: «Lord Jesus Christ, son of living God, have mercy on me, a sinner». I wasn’t just remembering some figure from long ago; I wasn’t engaging in some subjective fantasy. No, I was in dialogue with Jesus. And that’s why people all over the world can be praying at the same time to the same Jesus, because now ascended, he can be present to every and all moment of time and space. Okay, now let’s pursue this with what I’m calling the political interpretation in mind.
This ascended Christ is now able to direct operations in his Church like the general of a great army who is overseeing all the operations, impinging through his command upon all of them, organizing and coordinating the effort. How wonderful that the Acts of the Apostles, from which we read during the Easter season, commences with the account of the Ascension. Because that’s the condition for the possibility, now, of Jesus from the height of this higher dimension now commanding the work of his Church. It’s why we speak of his session or his being seated at the right hand of the Father. Well, in the ancient world, the seat, that could be the attitude of the teacher, right?
The teacher would sit, and the students would be at his feet. It’s also the attitude of the ruler: From his chair he rules. Sitting at the right hand of the Father, Jesus is being envisioned here as a kind of plenipotentiary of the Father, the one who is ruling with the full authority of the Father. Don’t see this in a subordinationist way, as though Jesus is somehow less than the Father. No, no, he’s at the right hand of the Father with the plena potencia, the full power of the Father, and now is directing operations. That’s Jesus, now, in relation to the totality of the Church. Now, to anticipate next week, what are he and the Father going to do from their exalted place but send the Holy Spirit to enable and equip his Apostles to do his work in the world. That’s the political, if you want, dimension of the Ascension, the Christ, the Lord.
So when Paul keeps saying «Iesous kyrios» as a challenge, of course, to the claim that Caesar was the Lord, no, no, Jesus is the true Lord who is the commander, the commander of all things ordering his Church according to his purposes. Okay, that’s one dimension, a very important one I think, of the Ascension. The second one I’m going to call liturgical, liturgical. And I want to refer to our text for today for the feast of the Ascension taken from the wonderful and mysterious Letter to the Hebrews. If you have a chance during this season, read that letter. It is complicated and you probably should get a good commentary on it, but it repays the effort.
But listen now to this line from the Letter to the Hebrews: «Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands, a copy of the true one, but heaven itself, that he might now appear before God on our behalf». Now, there’s a lot packed into this. Ancient Israel saw the temple as a copy, if you want, of the true heavenly temple. Read the book of Revelation; you’ll find something very similar when the seer looks through and he sees the heavenly court where God is being continually praised. The temple on earth was seen as a mystical participation, a symbolic reflection of the temple in heaven. Again, that higher dimension, don’t think the sky, think higher dimension. Jesus’s cross was indeed a great act of sacrifice, his bloody sacrifice on the cross.
But listen now. Because Jesus is not just a human figure but is divine, what Jesus did on that cross has a resonance in heaven. It has an eternal implication. The historical sacrifice on the cross participates in, is reflective of the perfect heavenly sacrifice of Christ in the temple in heaven. That’s why we hear in that same Letter to the Hebrews, «He entered this heavenly temple, not with the blood of goat and calves, but with his own blood».
Now, this is a reference to Yom Kippur, to the Day of Atonement, the highest of the high holy days, when, once a year, the high priest in the temple would enter into the Holy of Holies, and he’d slaughter an animal there. He would sprinkle the blood around and then he’d come out through the veil. Remember the veil that is torn at the Crucifixion? He comes out through that veil and he sprinkles the people. It was the great moment of sacrifice whereby Israel was reconciled to the Lord, where the sins of the nation were taken away and the mercy of God offered. See, what did they see in the cross of Jesus that all of this, over a thousand years, all of this temple sacrifice with the blood of goats and calves was but an anticipation of the true and fulfilling sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
Now, one more step. And that sacrifice, because it’s made by the one who is a heavenly figure, the Son of God, has an eternal resonance in the heavenly temple. So he, Jesus, entered that high heavenly temple not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood. And there he stands eternally offering to the Father a pleasing sacrifice. Okay, you say, I guess I understand that. But what’s the implication for us? Well, every time we attend Mass, this is foremost, should be foremost in our minds.
What’s the Mass here below? When the priest wearing not doctoral robes, say a Protestant minister might come out with doctoral robes, he’s just there to teach, but the priest, that’s a temple figure, comes out in temple garb. He works at an altar and a sacrifice, namely that of Jesus, is re-presented in an unbloody manner. And that sacrifice at every church all over the world, keep in mind the eternal impinges upon the temporal, right, in every way, in every parish, every cathedral, every chapel, every private Mass, the grandest Mass, all of them participate mystically in the great act of sacrifice offered by Jesus in the heavenly place. All of them are seen as a mystical reflection of that eternal sacrifice Jesus is offering continually before the Father.
This is why the Mass only makes sense in light of the Ascension. Do you see what I mean? If Jesus is a great spiritual teacher from long ago, well, heck, we can get together and we can remember him and we can tell stories about him and fine, fine. But that’s not at all what the Mass is. The Mass is even now, even now, in this mystical manner, participating in the eternal sacrifice of Christ, which again, think spheres and circles and cubes and squares, contains every Mass across all of space and time, that’s made possible only by the fact that Jesus is ascended into heaven and present in the eternal temple. Think on these things, everybody, as we celebrate the feast of the Ascension. Our activity in the world as his apostles depends upon the Ascension. Every time we celebrate the Mass, we are mindful of the ascended Christ. And God bless you.