Sermon: "This Jesus, who has been taken up..."

Fourth Sermon for Ascension

This Jesus, who has been taken up (Ac 1, 11)

4. Jesus then said: "You must be my witnesses in Samaria." The name Samaria signifies union with God. The truest and most certain of all testimonies is to be truly united with God. In this state, the spirit detaches itself from itself and from all creatures, for it loses, in divine unity, all multiplicity, being raised above multiplicity. There, in this testimony, the higher faculties are carried up to heaven, the abode of divine unity, where they taste their bliss and enjoy God in truth; they draw after them the lower faculties as much as possible. Man can then disappear and has nothing left to do but praise God for all the gracious and special gifts the Lord has granted him in particular, for he recognizes them in God and attributes none of them to himself.

He is then raised to another heaven, up to the divine essence. There, in this heaven, the spirit so completely loses everything that it loses and entirely annihilates itself. What happens to it then, what it experiences, what it tastes, and what it feels—no one can say, imagine, or understand. Indeed, how could anyone represent and comprehend such a thing? The spirit itself does not comprehend it, for it is so fully plunged into the divine abyss that it knows, feels, and tastes nothing but God alone in His purity, His absoluteness, and His simplicity. Then the spirit looks far back, to the depths of the most humble practices it ever undertook, to see if there remains anything to perfect, regenerate, or revivify.

Man is thus truly suspended between heaven and earth. Through his higher faculties, he is raised above himself, above all things, and dwells in God; but in his lower faculties, he is brought below all things, into the depths of humility, and is absolutely like a beginner. He can stop at the simplest practices with which he began; nothing appears contemptible to him, no matter how lowly it is; he finds true peace in each of them. In this way, he essentially bears witness that Our Lord is the one who, having descended from heaven, ascended back to heaven and reigns above all the heavens. All those who wish to reach this place must be united with Him and can only attain it with Him, in Him, and through Him.