Acts 1:15-26
Psalm 103:1-20
1 John 4:11-16
John 17:11-19

"I Go to Prepare a Place"

On Ascension Thursday we pondered several of God's purposes in coming into the world.

At the point of His Ascension and final departure, kingship is the master subject on the Lord's mind and on His Disciples' minds. (Acts 1:6)

God is offended by the idea of earthly kingship. In God's view, kingship arrogantly and pridefully usurps His place in the natural order. (1 Sam 8:7)

God intends kingship for us, for we, belonging to Him (Mt 13:28), proceed from a royal line, but not the kind of kingship that the world conceives of (Mk 10:42-45).

Royalty is not determined by birth (for all have the same royal lineage from God), but rather it is a state of being, a state of belonging to the Lord as "one of His." (Jn 17:21)

We heard in the Gospel of St. John just now that we are to be One with Him as He and the Father are One. It is remarkable that Western Catholics rarely ponder this subject, for it is Catholicity itself: an all-encompassing vision of a world where everyone is crowned by sanctification, a crown that is ours by right of birth. The choice of Matthias as a Disciple, which we read this morning, echoes a theme that began with the choice of Judas. As we know, Judas is a variant spelling of Judah, which is to say every Jew, Everyman. When Jesus speaks of the Twelve seated on thrones (Mt 19:28), everyone of us is included by virtue of this representative name. We might say that it is the "Twelfth slot, which represents the rest of us." Sadly, this name also signifies that all will betray Him — "He who has dipped his hand in the dish with me, will betray me" (Mt 26:23). Well, all the Disciples were at the meal and dipped their hand in the dish. And who among us can claim that they have never betrayed God, whether in disobedience or grave sin?

The great question confronting the Disciples in our Epistle reading this morning is who will now take Judas' seat following the tragedy of his alienation? As this question hangs before them, in parallel another great strand of their Apostolate is being revealed. The salvation of God, once thought to be the special province of the lost sheep of Israel has been shown to be universal, pointing out to "the nations." The language spoken by these nations, and all the known world (even Rome) three hundred years after Alexander's conquests is the Greek language. And so, who will be the replacement for Judas? Essentially, a name that also means Everyman, but rendered in Greek: Matthias. It is not an exact match with Mathitis, the Greek word meaning disciple, but given the circumstances, it is sufficiently close that no one would have missed the connection. (The notable difference is the addition of a "T," the Tau in Greek, which signified the cross to the ancient world. "Here is a disciple! A disciple of the cross!") So the "Twelfth Disciple," which began by including everyone, with Judah, now continues to represent everyone, with the word, Disciple.

But we need not dwell on names to know this, for we are told that God "has given us His own Spirit" (1 Jn 4:13), He has given all who will receive it, a divine essence, a real and biological core made from celestial substance. As the Master is fully man and fully God, so the Disciples have within them a divine reality, a divine identity. They are no longer simply dust, bodies waiting to die and decompose, but stardust. divine in their own right. But we, being formed by centuries of Western Christianity, with its great emphasis on original sin and human helplessness, are inclined to forget this. It has not been forgotten in the Eastern Church. And it not just a matter of human's having God's Spirit, which is a very great thing to be sure, but we also seems to have lost an understanding of God's human character. And by that fact, we have lost our understanding of how exalted a thing it is to be human. God has set a very high, even priceless, worth on the human character. It is ironic that this undeniable fact seems to be have been forgotten.

If we descend from God, if we are made in God's Image, then we must remember that the Holy Trinity, Itself, has a human component: Jesus of Nazareth. When the Risen Christ appears to the Disciples in the upper room, we might have expected Him to appear in a glorified state, such that His human properties have fallen away, cast off like a distasteful and soiled costume. But He has not cast off His human identity. Far from it! He bears unsightly human wounds. Though He has simply appeared within a locked room, He is substantial, fleshly, and insists on eating a meal! When He appears to St. Stephen, the Protomartyer looks up into Heaven and sees the Master standing in His state of glory. The word Christ, though, does not appear; rather, the text reads, "Jesus standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:55). Later in history, those closest to Him, the ones who have ascended higher into their divine and royal character, receive signs of Christ's human reality, which are the stigmata, the wounds of Christ: St. Francis, St. Catherine, Padre St. Pio.

Among the Divine attributes are these: God is eternal, outside of time. God is omniscient; He knows and sees everything. God is unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and forever. Yes, Jesus of Nazareth entered the human lifeworld roughly two thousand years ago. But should we be surprised to see the Son's human properties in God before this time? Certainly, God is not limited by our human timeline. His human character is evident even in His eternal state as St. Stephen plainly saw and St. Francis plainly felt impressed into his hands and his feet and his side.

You see, God the Father is perfect in His serenity. He cannot be perturbed. This is core, dogmatic Catholic theology. Yet, we see God's human attributes in bargaining with Abraham outside Sodom and Gomorrah. We see God's human dimension on Mt. Sinai as His anger grows hot and then cools. We see God's human heart when He is hurt and feels rejected by Israel's demand for a king. We attribute these human traits (impossibly) to the impassive Father, but shouldn't we attribute them, instead, to the Son? We grew up in CCD (or Sunday School) assuming that the God we saw in the Old Testament was "Father God" and the Lord in the New Testament was "the Son of God." But we also recited every Sunday, "begotten of His Father before all ages." God the Son is fully present in the Old Testament as He is in the New. We encounter the Son in the first chapter of Genesis. For according to Catholic teaching the Son of God is the proximate Creator of our world. He is the Eternal Word. The Son of God made us. He made us from Himself. And by virtue of that Self, which is fully human, the Image of God contains human features. It is no exaggeration to say that the visage of women and men is, therefore, a divine visage.

But we have forgotten that, forgotten it as an artifact of our own low estimate .... of ourselves. When you see a woman whose life has descended into chaos following many years of alcoholism, promiscuity, and bitterness .... or you see a man who has deteriorated into the "street" culture of crime and drugs exploiting everyone he can, we grieve to behold a desecration of God. The royal character that was hers or his at birth has been despoiled. God's own Spirit set within these hearts, has been betrayed, and the Spirit has departed. The blessing is no longer on them. They are alienated from everyone they know, from themselves — we have seen them muttering on the curbstones of our inner cities — and alienated from God, now awaiting an eternal death in the House of Alienation, forever to be surrounded by the such as themselves. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" (Dante, Inferno).

We say that Jesus is visibly human, fully a man, yet fully divine. Divine kingship permeates every part of His human body, for He is God. But how often do we also remember that God is visibly divine, fully God, yet fully human by virtue of the Person of Jesus Christ? And yet we must remember this. I have heard it said of so many, many children that "They have nothing to live for." Imagine how many visitors to Haiti — surveying the pandemic of starvation, suffering, disease, and death — have voiced these words. Imagine how often we look at young people in our own country, raised in an atmosphere of corruption and depravity, and say, "They never had a chance." And, of course, my heart is moved by these tender words and the tragic scene they describe. Yet, I can never forget all the people I know who were born into depraved circumstances, who breathed the air of corruption all their young lives, who "learned the ropes" of toxic culture, yet today who are holy and balanced and learned and are mentors to many others. For within the human breast resides a living, breathing Spirit, who literally is God. And upon the human face and outlining the human form are the lineaments of God, made in the Image of the fully human Person of the Holy Trinity. And this mighty, godlike power is deeply etched upon every human soul at birth. And while it can be defaced, it can never be vanquished, not entirely, not if the divine will within us should turn its formidable power against the foes who would despoil it.

Every single person on earth, and at any stage of life, has this power, possesses this inner beauty and strength and magnificence. But he or she must claim it! He or she must master their lives. The life of God on earth was a model of virtue wrought out of discipline and devotion to God (Jn 14:15,21; 15:10). And our own lives, mysteriously equal to His in our essence, can be no less. His Ascension points the way to our Ascension. And this intuition, this deeply etched understanding, touches every soul born into the world, even those who seem to have rejected the faith: