At Christmas, we celebrate the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity: God the Son descends and joins his divinity to our humanity. But today, on this solemn feast of the Ascension, God the Son takes that humanity and ascends to the right hand of the Father. At Christmas, divinity is humanized; today, that divinized humanity is raised and glorified.
This is interesting because God the Father loves God the Son; the Son is the Father's "Other Self". But the Son joined himself to a human nature, and in doing so, he joined himself to every man. If this is the case, then our humanity has become the Father's "Other Self". The result is that when the Father looks upon humanity, he sees his Son, His 'other self', and when He beholds His Son, he beholds our humanity and every individual who shares in that humanity.
And so, there is a tremendous dignity in being a human person. But the point I want to emphasize is that there is a real dignity associated with all that belongs essentially to humanity, namely the limitations imposed by matter, and the wounds and scars that our material nature makes us vulnerable to.
First, the human person is both spirit and matter, and because of the spirit's union with matter, the human person is profoundly limited: we depend upon the environment, we depend on one another, human intelligence is profoundly limited by matter and sense perception, we learn very slowly throughout our lives, etc., but the problem is we still have an aversion to our limitations. The first sin was fundamentally a rejection of the limitations that constrain us. The first parents of the human race desired to be more than human; they chose to taste independence from God, to be their own God; they rejected their status as "child" of God, dependent upon God. That choice has affected each one of us; for each and every one of us has a propensity to reject the limitations that constrain us, we have an inclination to self-sufficiency, an aversion to that child-like status, which is why Christ said: "Unless you change and become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven". In Christ we become that original child. In him we choose to depend upon God. We become entirely his, to be used by him in whatever way he wishes. Christ's ascension is the glorification of our humanity, and so it is the glorification of those limits. We should not be ashamed of those limitations, but at ease with them. The glory of man is not intelligence-intelligence is the glory of the angels; the glory of man, on the contrary, is humility, the total embracing of our limitations and radical dependency upon God and upon one another.
The next point I want to make has to do with the wounds of Christ. He still had his wounds when he rose from the dead. He invited Thomas to touch them. But those wounds that he touched were glorified wounds; they were not ugly scars, but they reveal the glory and beauty of his love. They became badges of glory.
All of us have wounds of one sort or another. Some of those scars are physical, and some are invisible. If we have no physical scars, we all have invisible scars, to some degree or another. We cannot live in this broken world without acquiring these invisible wounds. And some of us have even had to go through life battling mental illness of one kind or another, to one degree or another, and you might carry deep but invisible scars that this illness has left-whether that is clinical depression, or bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, paranoia, etc. What is so remarkable about the ascension is that Christ's humanity, with all his scars, has been raised and glorified, placed at the right hand of the Father. And so those invisible scars that you might carry will achieve that glorified status, and those scars, even the invisible ones, will become badges of glory that will reveal the depth of the friendship that your illness has helped to establish between you and the suffering Christ. Whatever scars we possess from the battle of earthly life will, in the end, glorify us and reveal who we really are before God.