Rising with Christ

“With Christ there is no need to be upset or depressed. Because Christ is with us in every crisis and in every circumstance, we can live peacefully in his love.”

“Through our everyday lives, we can choose small things, small witnesses, to prove in many ways that God is truly alive and that we are witnesses to that life”

“Resurrection is not just a return to the kind of life we have now, life in this world. It is the beginning of a new world, a human bodily life in the Kingdom of God.”

“The promise of the Ascension is that since Christ has been exalted to the heights of heaven, we too can share in this exaltation”

“The message of the Apocalypse, like the message of the Ascension, is the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of God in Jesus Christ, such that every power that is not yet in thrall to the Lord of love must in the end disintegrate and pass away”

“since we are incorporated into him by faith and baptism we are members of his Body, which means that where he has gone we shall also follow. That is a promise.”

“Where Christ has gone, we hope to follow. Our newly found humanity is properly lived in the intimate presence of God. Christ’s invisibility to our eyes is a measure of the bliss we cannot comprehend.”

“There is no one present who is another me or another you and yet here we all are, perfectly diverse and deeply loved as God's own”

“With the spirit of Jesus in them, they will start to bring Heaven to Earth and Earth to Heaven. They will become agents of this reconciliation.”

“Joy at the beginning of Luke’s gospel and joy at the end. Joy at the Incarnation and joy at the Ascension. But is joy characteristic of our life and our living out of the gospel?”

“This is why we rejoice at his departure, because his return to the Father establishes a new bond between heaven and earth. In sending the Spirit, Jesus fulfils his promise to remain with us always. We become his physical presence in the world, his body alive with his love.”

“Do we worship Jesus in his glory—or do we imitate Jesus in the way he lived? This year I have come to better understand that Jesus’ Ascension calls us to do both.”

“It is often said that Acts is the story of the Church, which is not wrong. But from beginning (Acts 1:4) to the end (Acts 28:31) Acts is about the kingdom, of which the visible Church is the earthly manifestation.”

“Ascension does not just mark the beginning of the new story of the nascent Church, but also another new movement, the movement of the virtue of hope”

“On the road of faith, there’s always bad news and good news. The bad news is that invariably our understanding of Christ gets crucified. The good news is that Christ is always very much alive, present to us still, and in a deeper way.”

“When Jesus ascended into Heaven, He connected the human race...His ascension opened up a door to Heaven for all of us, a door that remains open today. He wants us to follow Him.”

“No matter our age or state in life, as a Christian community we can help each other to live out our vocations as missionary disciples of Jesus with confidence and joy, and with the absolute assurance that we are connected to the source of all life from which that no one or no situation can separate us.”

“Christ has entered from earthly glory into the Father’s heavenly glory where He prepares a place for us and from where he intercedes for us until He comes again. And this Good News is not only worth talking about but worth celebrating!”

“Could we be inspired to not only relish our Lenten meditations, the ensuing joy of Easter and this mysterious period of Jesus’ teaching and promise, but also to be ready disciples, mature witnesses of Jesus’ Good News to our neighbors in these days?”

“So the message of Christ’s Ascension into heaven and the promise he gives us that he will come again, tests our powers of imagination, while at the same time assuring us of the power given to each one of us by the gift of the Holy Spirit”

“Jesus has entered God’s space, a different kind of space, with a different kind of time. God’s space and ours, what we call heaven and earth, are different but not far from each other, different but not distant.”

“The mystery of love and intimacy contains that paradox: To remain present to someone we love we have to sometimes be absent, in ways big and small. In the paradox of love, we can only fully bless each other when we go away.”

“Jesus must not belong to this universe, because we must not belong. It is not our final home; our goal is to abide with Jesus ‘in the Father’s bosom’, as John puts it.”

“What stands at the center of our faith is not warning and fear, not rules and commandments. What stands at the center of our faith is good news—the good news that Jesus who was crucified has been raised up and has entered into glory.”

“what we mean is, no, he's gone into this higher realm, he's actually closer to us, more available to us than he was before”

“What Jesus demonstrated and showed in that act is that vengeance, violence, anger, resentment, fear, anxiety have nothing to do with God. He doesn't want any of those things for us and he doesn't want us to do any of those actions on his behalf.”

“All of us experience our own ascensions and that of others. It's all part of letting God do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Giving us new life and new spirit in all our relationships. Christ Jesus shows us that our lives can only be fully received after we ascend.”

“the preaching, miracle working, ministry, sacrifice of Jesus was not the end, it was the beginning of something...which is now going to continue in the Acts of the Apostles”

“think of the ascension of Jesus not as his going away but his going to a place of command. Where he is now going to direct the great work of his church.”

“The Ascension does not mean basically that Jesus goes through a journey within space and time but, rather, that Jesus undergoes a journey out of space and time into a different and higher dimension, into the dimension of God's own life”