Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to the great feast of the ascension of

the Lord. It's one of my favorite feasts of the year because it shed so much

light on who we are as Christians and what we're supposed to be about as church.

I want to talk about the ascension of Jesus from two perspectives. The first one

I'm going to call more political and you'll see what I mean. The second I'm

going to call more liturgical. I think both are very important to understand

what it means to speak of the ascension of Jesus. Okay, let's take the first

thing first. We say that Jesus ascends to heaven. Now we shouldn't over

literalize this and think of this as a journey through a space. You know, as

though Jesus is somewhere out in the deep reaches of space now. Heaven's being

used here as a metaphor for God's manner of being. The resurrected Jesus, if I

can put it this way, appeared for a time on a kind of event horizon to use that

language from speculative physics. Think of the horizon between two

dimensional systems, ours and a transcendent one. For a time, he appeared on the

horizon and you know how strange the risen Jesus seems. We're passing through

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