how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?
You teach us, LORD. You are willing to use the earth to reveal the things of heaven.
No one has gone up to heaven
except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.
You yourself are the perfect example of this. You are the word spoken by the Father from all eternity. Yet you take on flesh and become visible to us. Heavenly things are mysterious and distant but your coming allows us to say "we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen" just as you do. This is what excites John so much in his first epistle.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us (cf. 1 Joh. 1:1-3).
You bring heaven down to a level where we can begin to see it and understand it. You give us your Spirit when we are washed in the waters of baptism. You give us your Spirit when we are anointed with oil and hands are laid upon us. You give us your forgiveness at the spoken words of a priest. And most extravagantly of all you give us yourself under the appearance of bread. These earthly things call us to lift our eyes to the things of heaven with which they put us in contact.
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
When we do this, we begin to taste the life which flows from heaven to earth through you. You are the source of eternal life if we have eyes to see and faith to respond. If we don't lift up our eyes when you are lifted up we see someone who is merely a man. Then water is just water, oil just oil, words just words and bread and wine are just ordinary food and drink. But when we lift our eyes up we realize that the truth of the unseen hidden just behind the veil of these symbols.
It takes the apostles a while to fully lift up there eyes. They begin to look up but then they lower their gaze. But you are patient with them. You reveal yourself to them until they are changed to the core:
With great power the Apostles bore witness
to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,
and great favor was accorded them all.
And you want to change us as well. You want to make us people who hold nothing back from the kingdom. You enable us to create a society where there "was no needy person among them" even here on earth by the power of your resurrection. All this if we just lift up our eyes to you!
Let us look to you, especially when the host is elevated at Holy Mass. Let us behold the king whom the Father sets on Zion:
The LORD is king, in splendor robed;
robed is the LORD and girt about with strength.
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