Second Homily on the Ascension of our Lord

From a homily by the former Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, III

Here we are faced with a paradox: What the Apostles perceived as Jesus leaving them once again, this time not by way of the cross by way of ascension, was in fact a prelude to a deeper, fuller and more substantial knowing of the risen One mediated by the Spirit.

... a new kind of knowing in which Christ who is the Way, the Truth and the Life is known inwardly and with such force that they will, in time, be able with St. Paul to cry out, “The life I now live is not my own, but the life Christ lives in me.”

Here I am put in mind of an observation made by Carl Jung that “the Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal -- Christ -- in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man.” “Too few people,” he observes, “have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never from within the soul.

Christ’s ascension opens the way for a new mode of being present, being with ... What the Spirit takes from Christ is not information but life, life expressed as love and realized in the intimacy of communion whereby Christ dwells in us and we in him.