Ascension Sunday 2022, Who Is Living Life?

Ninetta Sombart

 Ascension

John 16:22–33 

"So you have to suffer pain now. But I will see you again, and then your hearts will be filled with joy, and no one can take that joy from you. Up to now, you have not prayed in my name. Pray from the heart, and it will be given to your heart that your joy may be fulfilled. 

"All this I have given to your souls in imagery. But the hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in pictures but will tell you openly and unveiled about my Father so that you can grasp it in full, knowing consciousness. Thus will I proclaim to you the being of the Father. On that day, you will ask out of my power and in my name. And no longer will I ask the Father on your behalf. For the Father himself will love you because you have loved me and have known in your hearts that I have come forth from the Father. I have come forth from the Father, and I have come into this world.

I leave the sense world again and return to the world of the Father, of which you say that it is the world of death." 

Then Jesus' disciples said, "Now you are speaking in clear thought and without imagery. Now we know that all things are revealed to you and that you do not even need to have anyone ask you questions. This makes us believe that you came from God." 

Jesus answered, "Do you now feel my power in your heart? Behold, the time is coming and has already come, when you will be scattered, each to his own loneliness. You will then also leave me alone. But I am not alone, for the Father is eternally united with me. 

"All this I have spoken to you so that in me you may find peace. In this world, you will have great fear and hardship. But take courage. I have overcome the world."

Ascension

May 29, 2022

John 16:24–33 

All creatures in rivers, lakes, and seas are surrounded by water; water fills the spaces between them. All the cells of our own bodies are bathed in fluid that fills the spaces between them. The water of life flows within us. 

On Ascension Day, Christ assumed a new form, a new kind of body. He became an in-between. 

He is in-between the physical material world and the living weaving world of life; in-between the life in us and the inner world of our souls; in-between our souls and the objective world of the spirit; in-between humanity and God. 

Rilke senses this:

I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?

Is it the things themselves,

or something waiting inside them….

Who lives it then? God, are you the one

who is living life?*

 

Bamberg

Since His Ascension, Christ is like a super-sensible sea in which we live. He surrounds us. And He is inside us. 

He is present in spaces, in pauses, in moments of stillness. He is there, in the space between our thoughts and our feelings, in-between our urges and our actions; he is in the core of our being, our heart, and in-between, among us. “Where two or more gathered in my name, there I am in their midst” (Matthew 18:20).

 He is our sea within and a sea without. “Pray, “he says, “connect with me, from the center of your heart, and life will be given to your heart…Despite fear and hardship, accept my sea of courage, for I have overcome the world” (John 16: 24, 33). 

We are now living in Christ’s new life. His light, his life, and his love are flooding the world, flooding us. We are the cells of his new body. 

 

*Rilke, “And Yet Though We Strain” in Book of Hours, Barrows and Macy, p. 113.

 www.thechristiancommunity.org.