Most of us carry, somewhere beneath the surface, an image of how we think we ought to appear before God. It is usually the image of our best self — and more often than not, it is also our younger self. Strong, unbroken, theologically coherent, morally uncomplicated, capable of the kind of sustained prayer and clarity that we may have managed on some good days decades ago and cannot quite manage now. We imagine that to stand before God we must first somehow get back to that self. We have the instinct of the Capitol fresco of George Washington being made a God: the ascension will complete us by removing what time and failure and grief and illness have done to us.

But the prayer that Jesus prays in John 17 is not prayed from strength. It is prayed from within the knowledge of imminent betrayal, within the shadow of the cross that is hours away. And it is in that prayer, that wounded, clear-eyed, unflinching prayer, that the tradition hears the voice of the great High Priest, the holiest intercession in the Gospels. God is not waiting for us to be unbroken before God can hear us.

The Ascension, properly understood, says something startling about your body. About your memory. About the specific and particular history that has made you who you are at this moment. The marks of aging are not disqualifications. The wounds, the ones that healed badly, the ones that didn’t heal at all, the accumulated grief of long life faithfully lived, are not obstacles between you and God. They are part of what is being received.

This is what it means that Christ ascends with his wounds still present. St. Thomas touches them. The disciples recognize him by them. They are not removed in the resurrection; they are transfigured. They become the very marks by which the risen Lord is known. What the light of God does is not erase them – it illuminates them. It passes through them and makes them luminous in a way that unmarked, unwounded glass simply cannot be.

You can view the full sermon here.