In the “farewell discourse” of St John’s Gospel, chapters 14-16, Christ prepares his disciples for his departure. In fact there is some deliberate ambivalence here: his initial departure will be his death by crucifixion, but just as Jesus speaks of his being “lifted up” to refer simultaneously to his death and his heavenly exaltation, so his departure in the farewell discourse can mean his Crucifixion and his Ascension. But is the Ascension really a departure?
Certainly it marks the end of the presence of his resurrection body as the tangible, visibly recognisable, crucified-and-risen Jesus in the form familiar to his disciples. But the Ascension is certainly not the end of Christ’s presence in the world. I think that St Paul and all of the evangelists, in their different ways, want us to understand that, because of the Resurrection, Jesus is able for the rest of human history to be more present in the world now than when he walked the fields of Galilee or the streets of Jerusalem.
For St Paul, the continued and more real presence of Christ now is expressed in terms of the Church: the Church is the Body of Christ. This is not simply a metaphor – one can think of any group of people as a “body” – but it is clear that Paul means much more than this because the Body that is the Church is, like individual members of that Body, animated by the Holy Spirit (cf 1 Cor 12:13). It is also important to notice that the first time St Paul speaks about the Body of Christ is in 1 Cor 10, where he is speaking of the Eucharist. It is because the Church is fed by Christ’s Risen Body sacramentally that it become the corporeal presence of Christ in the world.
We should notice that this same link between Christ’s new mode of presence and the Holy Spirit is also found in the Gospels. This is supremely the case in the passage of John I have already mentioned: Christ actually says “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate [the “Paraclete”] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). This introduces a section of the Gospel in which Christ speaks of the role the Spirit will play in leading the community of his disciples into the truth and supporting them in their ongoing life in the world. Here Jesus repeats what he has already told them: “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:26).
Between these two very similar sections Christ speaks of himself as the Vine and us as the branches. Although the language is very different from St Paul’s “Body of Christ” terminology, the overall message is almost identical: it is the life of Christ that dwells in his followers and makes them, as a single entity, the presence of his life in the world. But what is that life? It is the Holy Spirit. As Christ speaks of how he must “abide” in us and we in him if we are to be branches of the True Vine, so he tells us that the Spirit “abides with you and he will be in you” (John 14:17). In a similar way St Paul can say “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Romans 8:11).
We have seen how St John’s Gospel conflates the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension into one great sweeping “lifting up” movement (see John 3:14, 8:28 and 12:32). You might have noticed on Good Friday how Pentecost is also made simultaneous to the Crucifixion: when Jesus died he “gave up his spirit”, or we might say “handed over the Spirit” (John 19:30). By contrast St Luke keeps these things separate, just as we celebrate them separately in the liturgy, and as the Apostles experienced them separately. But in the eyes of God, the eyes of eternity, the Passion, Resurrection and exaltation of Jesus and the gift of his Spirit that makes his Church the continued presence of Christ in the world are ultimately one single mystery: the Paschal Mystery.
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