Ascension of Our Lord

Free Will and the Right Choice

Recently, the son of an old farmer was sent to prison for bank robbery. It was springtime and the farmer needed his large field plowed for planting. With his son now gone, and the old farmer too feeble to plow it himself, he wondered what he would do.

He went to visit his son in prison and explained his dilemma of which his son was already aware. But his son apparently did not want to do much about it. He told his father as they visited that he did not want his father to plow that field. For as his son explained, that was where he had hid the money from his bank robbery.

His father went home depressed and dejected. He loved his son and thought his son loved him. But he wondered how his son could be so callous in not suggesting how his father could solve his dilemma. The next morning, the old man was shocked to see about two dozen representatives of the sheriff’s office plowing his field. Then he understood what his son had done. Anticipating that their conversation in prison was being overheard, he had led the sheriff’s office to his father’s backfield. In a search for money that they never found, the sheriff’s office had unwittingly plowed his field for nothing.

Now with due respect for God’s seventh commandment, thou shalt not steal, let me suggest that in some ways God himself can be as clever as this bank robber. For God never stops looking for ways for us to plow his field of salvation, only this time the plowing is fruitful, if only we will just do it.

Thinking about this story is most appropriate this weekend. For we celebrate today the feast of the Ascension. This feast, coming about 40 or so days after Easter is a key and actually quite underrated feast in our liturgical calendar.

It would be easy to focus on the magnitude of the actual event. After all, we don’t see people levitating off the ground and ascending skyward, at least not on their own. Our Church teaches this event actually happened, as described in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning. The Ascension represents the final event of Jesus’ public life on earth.

But the end of Jesus’ public life obviously does not end God’s relationship with us. And it is a good thing. Because at this point let me something that might seem controversial. If all that Jesus did was enter our world as a human, die a horrible death for our sins, rise from the dead to show that sin and death could be conquered, and then perform this remarkable miracle of the Ascension, it would still not have been enough for us to achieve heaven.  He would still need, like the bank robber, to lead us back to him.

God loves us so much that he not only came to this earth to save us, he did not and does not compel us to follow Him. He gives His creatures free will so that our love of Him, our decision to live as Jesus did is our choice. The choice to return to him is ours. We don’t need God if we choose not to follow Him or return to Him.

God’s providing man with free will establishes the fundamental choice and contradiction of the human condition.  But this is more than just a philosophical point.  We need only look around us.  Humans have enormous gifts from God that enable them to design, engineer and produce marvelous airplanes.  We also have the evil to ram them into the World Trade Center and kill thousands.

Humans have incredible initiative and entrepreneurial spirit that helps to produce enormous wealth and prosperity.  We also have the ability to forget how that wealth was generated and tolerate a world in which two-thirds of humanity lives in poverty and income disparities in our own country continue without much concern.

The great beauty of God’s creation is managed with careful stewardship at times; just look at our national and local parks.  But humanity can also pollute our water and air and trash our green space with litter and careless setting of fires.

Great technology can generate mineral wealth and a very productive economy.  But would we really care about the politics and conflicts of the Middle East quite so much if inhabitants of the region grew broccoli for a living?

Human beings have been willing to endure enormous sacrifices in defense of human rights and individual and societal freedoms. They also have the ability to pursue wars of dubious or nonexistent moral value, killing thousands, tens of thousands, and millions for unclear or even evil purposes.

Some might say that following God’s laws to love Him and others, to follow the message of the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and the teachings of the Church is the absence of freedom, or somehow a failure of leadership.

This is just wrong.  Choosing to love God and one another is the ultimate freedom and enmeshes us with the free expression of love among the persons of God.  We seek to live the truth in love. As our Lord tells his apostles in our Gospel from Matthew this morning, we try to bring others to the Christian life by example and not coercion. We have the ultimate freedom to communicate with God through prayer, Scripture, sacrament, and Scripture. Living out God’s word brings a love, joy and peace that is so far superior to anger, jealousy, violence and the quest for possessions at the expense of others. As St. Paul tells us in our second reading this morning, living the faith gives us the amazing and wonderful fullness of communion with God and other believers.

If we really want to be a Christian, admittedly the choice is not easy. And we would not have the strength to make the choice of a genuine Christian life without God. To make that choice work, God would need to send us the third person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit, completing and making permanent the intervention of God in the lives of human beings. The constant presence of the Holy Spirit, who offers us fruits, gifts, and charisms strengthens us and give others and us what we need to return forever to God.

So there we have it. God the Creator brought humans to life. God the Redeemer restored the loving covenant that God gave us, the best model for us to live our lives. God the Counselor and Guide pours out his very three-part divine completeness for us through the special arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This is the faith essence of the Ascension.

So the Ascension is not a mere historical event. It is a critical progression in God’s saving plan for all of us. It helps enable our souls to ascend as well. And it reminds us of the ability of God through the tools and spiritual gifts God gives us to ascend, if you will our human spirits to the joy of the Christian life. Like the clever bank robber, the Lord puts people and things into our life to help us to understand that love of God and others is the best way to live. But we do have a choice. Plow the field of salvation or let it lie and watch weeds grow in our souls. Let us pray that the feast of the Ascension helps us to make the right choice.