The Ascension of Christ and the Blessed Sacrament

Forty days after the Resurrection of Our Lord at Easter, Holy Mother Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Ascension. For 40 days, Jesus Christ remained with His disciples here on earth in order to prepare them for His imminent departure and to strengthen in them their understanding of  the mission that He was entrusting to them. Jesus’ time to leave this world had finally come, and before He would return to His Father, He needed His disciples to understand that His presence among them would henceforth be different. He would not be completely absent from them, but the mode of His presence (that is, the manner in which He would be present to them) would be different.

While He was still in this world, the followers of Christ related to Him in the way in which we human beings normally relate to one another. They walked with Him, they talked with Him, they shared moments of joy and sorrow and even intimacy with Our Lord (I’m referring to chaste and pure intimacy, of course, in the sense of a closeness that they felt with Him). He was their God, their Saviour, and their Lord, but He was also their best friend, in the deepest sense of what friendship really is: a true and sincere concern and love, along with the desiring the good of the other. They could speak to him openly and freely, face to face, as one speaks with a close friend. But their relationship was still worldly, in that it was still lived as we live our human relationships in this world. But at the Ascension, all of that would change.

Christ ascended into Heaven not to distance Himself from us, but to prepare us for an even more intimate means of being united to Him, through the most holy form of communion possible. In this world, the disciples of Jesus could relate to Him through the senses and through the physical means that the Incarnation of God facilitated. They could see Him with their eyes, hear His words with their ears; they could touch Him with their hands in such a way that the reality of the Incarnation could not be doubted in any way. But after Our Lord's Ascension into Heaven, His disciples could no longer rely on their senses in order to experience Him. Their eyes no longer physically saw Jesus; their ears no longer heard His consoling voice; their hands could no longer touch His physical presence. All of this was gone at the Ascension. And yet the presence of Christ among them remained.

How did the Apostles and early disciples who had seen the Lord while He was physically in this world relate to Him after His Ascension? The answer to this question is important, because we too do not experience Christ (normally) through the senses, and so we can learn from the early disciples how we are to enter into an encounter with Christ today. What was the one thing that allowed the disciples to enter into contact with the One whom they could no longer see, hear, or touch? Well, the answer to this question is given in Scripture: The righteous man liveth by Faith (Rom 1:17; Gal 3:11; Heb 10:38). Faith is what unlocks the possibility of having a relationship with Christ after His Ascension into Heaven. But a relationship based on Faith is very different to a relationship based on the senses.

Faith gives us eyes to see the invisible; it gives us ears to hear the inaudible; and it gives us hands to touch the intangible. Since the physical Body of Christ has ascended into Heaven, it is only through Faith that we can have access to a living relationship with Him.

Faith is a virtue. And a virtue is a habit. And like any habit, we can strengthen the habit by practising it or lose the habit by neglecting it. If we want to strengthen the virtue of Faith within us, we must exercise the Faith. Like a muscle that is not exercised sufficiently quickly atrophies and becomes weak, so too the virtue of Faith needs its own regular "exercise" and must be put into practice, lest it wither away and die.

How do we exercise Faith? We do it by making frequent Acts of Faith. These Acts of Faith can only be made when there is a particular object of Faith that is presented to our intellect (our mind). And where do we find such objects? Primarily in the Sacraments. Every Sacrament is an object of Faith because every Sacrament contains invisible graces, graces that cannot be seen or experienced by our senses, but that are real nonetheless. It takes Faith to believe that a newly baptized child — once the water has been poured over his head three times and the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity invoked by name — has become at that very moment a child of God, freed from Original Sin and made into a temple wherein the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost now dwell. In Penance, it takes Faith to believe that when the priest has said the words of absolution (Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…. I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost) that your sins have indeed been forgiven by Christ and that your soul is restored to a state of grace, a state of friendship with God. All the Sacraments, in fact, should be celebrated in Faith and received in Faith. When done, our Acts of Faith, exercised through the Sacraments, unite us to Christ Himself — and in fact, through Him, to the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Whereas all the Sacraments are called to be personal encounters with the living Christ in Faith, there is one Sacrament that is most appropriately suited to this. This is the one Sacrament that the Church calls The Mystery of Faith (Mysterium Fidei): the Holy Eucharist. The Catholic Mass, and the Real Presence of Our Lord at the Mass from the moment of Consecration onwards, is a strong invitation to the faithful to make an Act of Faith. In the Blessed Sacrament, we do not experience the Crucified and Risen Christ as did the Apostles before the Ascension. We cannot see or hear Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. And if we touch the Blessed Sacrament (as does the priest when he holds the Sacred Host between the thumb and index finger of each hand, or the faithful when they touch the Host by their tongue when receiving Holy Communion), our sense of touch does not reveal to us that we are indeed touching the sacred Flesh of Christ — for the Host maintains the texture of bread even after the Consecration. Thus the Blessed Sacrament cannot be experienced by the faithful directly through the senses as the Body and Blood of Christ. But an Act of Faith suffices, both for the priest and for the lay faithful, to know that what looks like bread, feels like bread, and tastes like bread is not in fact bread at all, but Jesus Christ’s most precious Body and Blood.

Because of this, the Holy Eucharist is called The Mystery of Faith (Mysterium Fidei), and it strengthens our Faith like no other Sacrament can. When we spend time adoring the Blessed Sacrament exposed on the Altar or hidden in the Tabernacle, our senses are saying to us, “It just looks like bread,” while our Faith affirms, “And yet it is not bread but the Sacred Body of Jesus Christ.” In these moments, we must choose whom to follow as our master. Will be follow our senses (which, as experience shows, can often be deceived and mislead us), or will we follow the Faith which, because it comes from God who is Truth itself, can neither deceive nor be deceived? The true disciple of Jesus always follows Faith, even when what it tells us is contrary to what our physical senses would have us believe: Justus ex fide vivit: The righteous man lives by Faith.

Before the Ascension, the disciples of Our Lord entered into communion with Him through the senses; after the Ascension, we can only encounter the Risen Saviour through Faith. And the moment when Christ opened the eyes of His Apostles to understanding this crucial passing from a relationship based on sight to one based on Faith was at the Last Supper, when He introduced them to the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist.

The Sacraments in general, and the Most Blessed Sacrament in particular, are, therefore, the primary means by which we encounter the presence of Christ in this life since His glorious Ascension into Heaven. The Blessed Sacrament trains us to be like the righteous man of which the Scriptures speak, and to live by Faith. Spending even just a short time before the presence of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist is enough to strengthen and fortify the virtue of Faith within us in leaps and bounds. Yet we should not aim for a few minutes of Eucharistic Adoration here, and a few minutes there. We should strive to pass as much time as possible in this life basking in the Light of Christ before the Blessed Sacrament.

While the Apostles lived their relationship to Christ through the senses (before the Ascension) and through Faith (after the Ascension), they now see Our Lord face to face in His Kingdom, in the Lumen Gloriae, the Light of Glory. This eternal contemplation of Christ's Holy Face is what Heaven is all about. It is nothing more, nothing less, than contemplating the Eternal Face of God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — for all eternity! There will be no more need for Faith in Heaven, because Faith will give way to Sight: which is what the Church calls the Beatific Vision, the vision of the Blessed in Heaven!