TEXT: Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, June 1, 2025

June 1, 2025 Father De Celles Homily

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Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

June 1, 2025

Homily by Fr. John De Celles given at WAY retreat

St. Raymond of Peñafort Catholic Church

Springfield, VA

Today is the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord,

which was celebrated in most of the world last Thursday,

but was moved by the Bishops in our area to today.

The main reason for moving it

was that many Catholics apparently skipped observing it in mid-week

                  because they didn’t think it was important.

By moving it to Sunday, the Bishops are hoping

we can make Catholics more aware of just how important it is.

So, why is the Ascension so important?

Most obvious is the reality that Jesus Christ acted in history,

and, in historical time, actually physically rose into heaven

and is now physically seated at the right hand of God the Father.

But there are also many other reasons.

Today I’d like to talk about three of them.

First, it is a pledge of future glory to us: If we love Him, someday we too will follow Christ into heaven.

Second, it is a promise that Christ is truly and fully alive and still with us, and “will be with us always.”

Third, it is a revelation of the great dignity of human body.

First consider the Ascension as the pledge of future glory.

Today’s 2^nd reading from Ephesians:

“May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened,

that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call,

what are the riches of glory

in his inheritance among the holy ones,

for us who believe.”

This is speaking about the glory of the ascended Christ,

but also it speaks of our “hope”

         –this is the promise to us!

Elsewhere in Scripture St. Paul says,

         “Christ is all, and in all,” and

         “All things were created through Him and for Him.”

So for Christians, we can only truly be happy when we’re with Jesus.

And Jesus promises us this: With Him we will have

“life in abundance,” and our “joy will be complete.”

So St. Luke tells us in today’s first reading from Acts,

         “This Jesus who has been taken up from you

into heaven will return in the same way.”

Elsewhere, St. Paul tells us when Jesus comes again,

“We who are alive…shall be caught up together…in the clouds

to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

And St. John tells us,

         “We know that when He appears we shall be like Him.”

For those who love Jesus, the Ascension is a promise

that He will come back for us, and we will be with Him forever in heaven.

This brings us to our second important reason for this feast:

         As much as we may love Jesus, He loves us even more.

So He tells us, “Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”

And so, even as He tells His apostles,

“All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me,”

the all-powerful Jesus makes it possible that, even

as He sits at His Father’s right hand in heaven,

He can still be with us here and now.

And so, before He ascends into heaven, He tells His apostles,

         “In a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

That Holy Spirit came down just nine days later at Pentecost,

and the power of Jesus remained with His Church ever since.

But Jesus is not just spirit, and He does not want to be with us just in spirit;

He wants to be here in person, in the flesh, in His body.

And so He leaves us His body.

He comes to us in His real presence, His real body blood, soul and divinity.

Think: The real day of this feast is a Thursday.

What other Thursday is important in the life of Christ?

The only other important Thursday mentioned in Scripture

is the night before He died, the night of the Last Supper.

On that night, as at the Ascension,

He gathered His apostles with Him.

And where at the Ascension He told them,

         “Teac[h] them to observe all that I have commanded you,”

         at the Last Supper He commanded them, “Do this in memory of me.”

At the Ascension, the apostles watched in amazement

as He took His body into heaven,

         and at the Last Supper they also watched in amazement

                  as He gave them His body to eat.

Acts tells us that at the Ascension, “He was lifted up,”

and the apostles “were looking intently at [Him].”

At this Mass, He will also be bodily lifted up,

         and all here present will look intently at Him.

The Gospel tells us that when He came to them at the Ascension,

     “When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.”

Today when you see Him, you will worship, but some will doubt Him.

At the Ascension, He ascends into heaven, body, blood, soul, and divinity;

     at the consecration today, He descends down from heaven,

body, blood, soul, and divinity.

Ascension Thursday points to Holy Thursday,

and the Ascension points us to the Eucharist,

                  where Christ’s promise to be “with us always” is fulfilled.

Finally, the third important point: the dignity of the human body.

In the days when Jesus and His apostles walked the earth,

there was a very popular philosophy

—according to the teachings of Plato and other Greek philosophers—

that maintained that the essence of the person was his soul,

and his body was like a prison, keeping his soul from freedom.

Today we’ve sort of returned to this kind of Platonic view of the body;

         we tend to see it as a machine,

a thing apart from us to be manipulated and even manufactured.

All sorts of anti-human evils arise when we start to do this,

including the evil of secular feminism

and the total distortion of the meaning of femininity.

At one extreme, we see the bodies as having no significance at all,

and so people ignore what their bodies tell them about who they are,

and men pretend to be women, and women pretend to be men.

On the other extreme, they see their bodies as something

to be used and abused by one another

without any consequence to our souls or our eternal salvation.

Look at the rise of pornography—especially on the internet.

What is that but viewing the body of women as a thing to be manipulated?

And the acceptance of Christians

of all sorts of abuses of the gift of the sexuality of the human body

         accepting and celebrating the perverted abuses of

         sodomy, oral sex, masturbation and contraception.

And worst of all, we have doctors sworn to heal the human body,

         instead attacking the healthy bodies of mothers and their unborn babies in the barbarism of abortion.

This has only led to more atrocities against the human body:

         manufacturing and experimenting on the bodies of unborn babies

         and harvesting their parts.

And of course, wives not understanding submission to their husbands,

and husbands not understanding their headship.

Then you have the Ascension—Christ takes His body into heaven.

His body is not a shell to shed at death, a prison to be freed from in heaven.

It’s not something to be ignored as meaningless

or to be used for amusement or experimentation.

His body is sacred and part of Him, a gift from His Father.

And so is ours.

In his body, born of the body of His beloved Mother, Mary,

         Christ was able to communicate His love for us

by speaking to us, performing miracles,

         and ultimately giving and laying down His life

         through His bodily death on the Cross.

And in His body, He promises us new and eternal life

in His bodily resurrection and ascension.

Our male and female bodies were made to be part of us forever–

the perfect joy of life in heaven is only perfect

when our bodies are perfected in the resurrection and ascension

of our bodies on the last day.

Our bodies are created for heavenly glory, not for earthly degradation.

I could go on and on.

All this serves to remind us that this day of the Ascension

is truly one of the most important days in the history of the world

and, as such, it demands our attention

and our devout and solemn celebration.

I pray that some day

—when it has returned to its proper place in the hearts of Catholics—

it will also be returned to its proper day of the week.

Until then, as we come together to celebrate the Holy Eucharist,

         let us remember Christ’s promise that He will be with us always;

His pledge that if we love Him in this life,

we will be with Him completely and perfectly in the next;

and His command that if we love Him,

we must recognize and honor the gift of the human body

—His, ours and our neighbors.

Let us go now and cast our eyes up to heaven,

and from heaven to the altar of Jesus Christ,

as Christ descends from His heavenly throne to be with us

now and always, even to the end of the age.