BENEDICT XVI

] oseph Ratzinger

Dogma and-
Preaching

Applying Christian Doctrine

to Daily Life

UNABRIDGED EDITION

Translated by Michael J. Miller

and Matthew J. O'Connell

Edited by Michael]. Miller

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

 310 Meditations and Sermons
Certainly, the world is not "intact". "No one can wound the world,
only its surface is scratched", says the poet, but that is contradicted b;
the image of the crucified Christ and our knowledge about the world,
which was capable of inflicting deadly wounds even on its God. On the
other hand, neither is the world the meaningless plaything of voracious
death. It provides a room for exiled love, because through the mortal
wounds of Jesus Christ, God has entered this world.
Or, to put it in the language of Teilhard de Chardin and his evo-
lutionary vision of the world: The Omega Point offers us a hope be-
cause we can expect to be taken up into it; because the spirit and love
are stronger than death; because there is something irrevocable about
man, who will not be dissolved [au_igelost] into nothingness but will be
delivered [erlost] from his isolation and incorporated into the unity of
the definitive Man.
At this point, we really should start all over again and try to explain
how this statement gives meaning to the notions found in nature reli-
gion and political religion; how these statements set us a task inasmuch
as they oblige us to live even now as beings who are moving toward
the Omega Point; how at the same time they set us free because they
teach us that man's future is not something that he must build by his
own unaided powers.
But we must conclude, so I will make one final observation. In his
magnificent painting of the Resurrection, Matthias Grunewald depicts
the risen Christ as a theophany, that is, as God's self-manifestation in
this man who has passed through the sacrifice. In so doing, Grunewald
has translated into artistic terms a basic aspect of the biblical and early
Christian theology of the Resurrection and lent to the message a power
beyond what words can attain. Indeed, he has put his finger on the heart
of the matter: The Resurrection of Jesus gives us the certainty that God
exists and that, as the Father of Jesus Christ, he is a God of men. The
Resurrection of Jesus is the definitive theophany, the triumphant an-
swer to the question of which really reigns: death or life.
God exists: that is the real message of Easter. And anyone who even
begins to comprehend what this implies also knows what it means to
be redeemed. He knows why in her prayers on this day the Church
endlessly sings Alleluia, the wordless jubilation that is too intense to
be articulated in everyday language because it embraces our whole life,
with all that is effable and ineffable in it. To grasp something of this
joy is to celebrate Easter.
30. The Ascension of Christ
Of all the major feasts of the liturgical year, none perhaps is more alien
to the modern mind than the feast of Christ's Ascension. It seems too
closely bound up with a mythical vision of the world that we have
long since been unable to share. As a result, many Catholic Christians
today find themselves asking the question Bultmann asked twenty-five
years ago in his now famous essay, "The New Testament and Mythol-
ogy": "What meaning ... can we attach to such phrases in the creed as
, descended into hell' or 'ascended into heaven'? We no longer believe
in the three-storied universe which the creeds take for granted." 1
We may think the famous exegete has oversimplified matters some-
what when he continues, a little farther on: "No one who is old enough
to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local heaven. There is
no longer any heaven in the traditional sense of the word. The same
applies to hell in the sense of a mythical underworld beneath our feet.
And if this is so, the story of Christ's descent into hell and of his ascen-
sion into heaven is done with."2 But how is Bultmann oversimplify-
ing? And what is the permanent content in our profession of the Lord's
Ascension in an age in which the idea of a heaven localized above the
clouds has in fact been eliminated for good?
If our answer is to be more than an arbitrary rationalization, we
must find it by listening more attentively to the Scriptures. These are
the original proclamation of our faith, and we must look to them to
discover what is really signified by the event that the liturgy speaks of
as "the Lord's going up" or "being exalted" and that we usually call
"the ascension of Christ into heaven".
A first point to be made emerges directly from what I have just
said: the liturgy and the Bible make only incidental use of the term
Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell.
1 In R. Bultmann and others, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. H. W. Bartsch,
trans. R. Fuller (London, I953; rev. trans., New York, I96r), 4·
2 Ibid.
311
 ]I2 Meditations and Sermons
Himmelfahrt, "journey to heaven". This is the term to which popular
usage has assigned a content that from the beginning was thought of
with far greater discrimination and in far less imaginative terms than
the German word by itself would suggest.
In speaking of "going up" and "being lifted up", the liturgy is re-
lying primarily on the terminology of the Gospel of John, which Uses
this language to describe the event being celebrated in today's feast and
which has given us what is probably our deepest insight into it. We
shall have to come back to this point; for the moment it is important to
note that we shall find the answer to our question about the meaning
of the "ascension into heaven", not in a single text or even in a single
book of the New Testament, but only by listening to the entire New
Testament. Moreover, since the content of the word is utterly beyond
our powers of representation, it cannot be expressed in a single for-
mula; we can only give intimations of it by approaching it from many
angles and thus making it accessible to our understanding.
As a matter of fact, we must even go back beyond the New Testa-
ment and realize that the term "raise up" or "exalt" originates in the
Old Testament, where it refers to enthronement. To say this is imme-
diately to have an initial answer to our question about the meaning of
"ascension into heaven". As the feast of Christ's exaltation, the Ascen-
sion tells us that the crucified man Jesus now exercises God's kingship
over the world.
In the Acts of the Apostles, from which the [first] reading in today's
Mass is taken, the whole event may well seem to be viewed very con-
cretely and externally. And yet if we examine the text more carefully,
it becomes clear that even here there is a much greater depth than ap-
pears at first glance. What happens in the "ascension into heaven" is
described by passive verbs; we are told that Jesus is "lifted up" (v. 9)
and, a moment later, that he is "taken up" (v. II). In other words, the
event is described as a mighty act of God, who brings Jesus to himself,
and not as a kind of aerial journey into the sky.
Furthermore, the image of the cloud, which seems to indicate such
a journey, is in fact a very ancient image from Old Testament cultic
theology. In this latter context, it is a sign of the hiddenness of God,
who, in his very hiddenness, is close to us and exercises his power for
us; who is always beyond our reach and yet always in our midst; who
eludes our every attempt to lay hold of him and manipulate him, but
by that very fact exercises a providential rule over us all.
The Ascension of Christ 313
Through this image of the cloud, the Ascension narrative is thus
integrated into the whole history of God's dealings with Israel, from
the cloud on Sinai and over the tent of meeting in the wilderness down
to the radiant cloud that shows the nearness of God on the mountain of
the Transfiguration. The Lord present in the hiddenness of the cloud
-the image that is at the center of today's reading-is thus saying the
same thing, in the last analysis, as the metaphorical language of "sitting
at the right hand of the Father". Regarding the latter,John Damascene,
the great Father of the Eastern Church, observes that the Father's right
hand is not a place but an image of his power and glory. "Sitting at
the Father's right hand means, therefore, that even in his human nature
Christ shares in God's world-encompassing power" (De fide orthodoxa
4,2).
What, then, is the meaning of Christ's" ascension into heaven"?
It expresses our belief that in Christ human nature, the humanity in
which we all share, has entered into the inner life of God in a new
and hitherto unheard-of way. It means that man has found an everlast-
ing place in God. Heaven is not a place beyond the stars; rather, it is
something much greater, something that requires far more audacity to
assert: heaven means that man now has a place in God.
The basis for this assertion is the interpenetration of humanity and
divinity in the crucified and exalted man Jesus. Christ, the man who is
in God and eternally one with God, is at the same time God's abiding
openness to all men. Thus Jesus himself is what we call "heaven";
heaven is not a place, but a person, the person of him in whom God
and man are forever and inseparably one. And we go to heaven and
enter into heaven to the extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter
into him. In this sense, "ascension into heaven" can be something that
happens in our everyday lives.
Only in the light of these various connections can we understand
why Luke should tell us, at the end of his Gospel, that after the Ascen-
sion the disciples returned to Jerusalem "with great joy" (Lk 24:52).
They knew that what had occurred was not a departure; if it had been,
they would hardly have experienced "great joy". No, in their eyes the
Ascension and the Resurrection were one and the same event. This
event gave them the certainty that the crucified Jesus was alive; that he
had overcome death, which cuts man off from God, the Living One;
and that the door to eternal life was henceforth forever open.
For the disciples, then, the "Ascension" was not what we usually
 314 Meditations and Sermons
misinterpret it as being: the temporary absence of Christ from the
world. It meant, rather, his new, definitive, and irrevocable presence
by participation in God's royal power. This is why Johannine theo-
logy for practical purposes identifies the Resurrection and the return
of Christ (fo: exam~le, 14:1 8ff.); with the Resurrection of Jesus, by
reason of which he IS now with his disciples forevermore, his return
has already begun.
That Luke did not have an essentially different understanding of the
situation is again clear from today's reading. In it Christ rebuffs the
disciples' question about the restoration of the kingdom and instead
tells them that they will receive the Holy Spirit and be his witnesses to
the ends of the earth. Therefore, they are not to remain staring into the
future or to wait broodingly for the time of his return. No, they are to
realize that he is ceaselessly present and even that he desires to become
ever more present through their activity, inasmuch as the gift of the
Spirit and the commission to bear witness, preach, and be missionaries
are the way in which Christ is now already present. On the basis of
this passage, we may say that the proclamation of the Good News ev-
erywhere in the world is the way in which the Lord, during the period
between the Resurrection and the Second Coming, gives expression
to his kingship over all the world, as he exercises his dominion in the
humble form of the word.
Christ exercises his power through the powerlessness of the word
by which he calls man to faith. This fact reminds us once again of
the image of the cloud, in which the Lord's hiddenness and nearness
are combined in a unique way. John the Evangelist has depicted this
fusion even more comprehensively by the new meaning he has poured
into the Old Testament term "raise up", or "exalt". This word, which
had hitherto expressed only the idea of elevation to royal dignity, also
refers in John to the crucifixion, in which Christ is "lifted up" from
the earth. For John, then, the mystery of"Good Friday, of Easter, and of
Christ's Ascension form but a single mystery. The Cross has a second,
mysterious dimension: it is the royal throne from which Christ exer-
cises his kingship and draws mankind to himself and into his wide-open
arms (cf Jn 3:14; 8:28; 12:32-33). Christ's royal throne is the Cross;
his exaltation takes the form of what seems to the outsider the extreme
of disgrace and humiliation.
This final New Testament explanation of the "Ascension into heaven"
The Ascension of Christ 315
implies at the same time the claim that faith makes on man and the
promise that faith offers him. For, the Christ who became king of the
world through complete self-surrender and radical self-despoliation on
the Cross and whose embrace is big enough to include everyone is
the counterpart of the first Adam, that is, of all of us-that first Adam
who sought in arrogant independence to exalt and divinize himself but
thereby only destroyed and lost himself Thus the exaltation of Christ,
which makes its appearance in this eon only under the sign of the
Cross, expresses the law of the grain of wheat, a law that holds good
for all of us: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it
remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" On 12:24).
The feast of Christ's exaltation, which we are celebrating today, is
evidently marked by great seriousness, and yet its fundamental feature
is hope and joy. God has a place for man! Should we not react to this
Good News as the disciples did who returned home from the Mount of
Olives "with great joy"? Today there are only too many people trying
to convince us that it is absurd to imagine that God, who encompasses
the world, can spare a thought for man or be bothered with him at all.
How petty their conception of God must be, since they think of him
as being like us, who are forced to choose because we cannot survey
everything at once! How far superior an understanding of God that
unknown thinker had to whom we owe the splendid sentence that the
poet Holderlin took as a motto for his Hyperion: "Not to be contained
by even the greatest reality, and yet to contain even the smallest-
that is divine." In God there is a place for us! The confident words
with which the African ecclesiastical writer Tertullian summed up the
meaning of Christ's Ascension over fifteen hundred years ago are no
more outdated today than when they were written: "Be consoled, flesh
and blood, for in Christ you have taken possession of heaven and of
God's kingdom" (De carne Christi 17)·