By Ron Rolheiser
IT is better for you that I go away! These are some of Jesus’ parting words on the night before he died.
How can it be better for us when someone we love deeply goes away? That would make sense only if the relationship is dysfunctional or abusive. But how can that be true in a case where we love someone deeply and will painfully miss him or her?
The ascension of Jesus supplies the roots for an answer. He tells his disciples that it is better for them that he goes away because, if he doesn’t, they will be unable to receive his spirit. Why not? Why must he go away in order that those who love him can receive his spirit?
This plays on the mystery of presence and absence. We bring something to others with our presence, but we also leave something with them in our absence. In brief, what we leave in our absence is a new space within which they can receive our person more purely. This may sound hopelessly abstract, but we experience this in ordinary ways in our lives.
Here’s an example: Imagine a young woman, deeply loved by her parents, who has just graduated from high school and is leaving home to attend college, or train for the work force, or begin working in a job. Her childhood years are forever over and she senses it, as do her parents. There’s pain and sadness on both sides. She probably won’t have the words, but if she did, she could say to her parents what Jesus said to his loved ones as he spoke his words of farewell: It is better for you that I go away; otherwise you cannot receive my spirit.
Except, for her, the words would sound like this: It is better for you (and for me) that I go away; otherwise I will always be your little girl and will be unable to gift you with my adult presence. I need to go away so that my absence creates the space for me to come back to you as an adult.
Such is the mystery of presence and absence. Such too is the mystery of Jesus’ ascension, how new spirit can be recognized and received only after there has been an absence, a going away.
This is depicted powerfully in the scene in John’s Gospel where Mary Magdala meets the resurrected Jesus on Easter Sunday. Initially, she doesn’t recognize him; but, after she does, her immediate reaction is to embrace him in a familiar hug. However, Jesus stops her with the words, “Don’t cling to me because I have not yet ascended to my Father and to your Father.”
Why? Why is Jesus seemingly reluctant to receive a familiar embrace from a longtime friend?
The hesitancy has precisely to do with the familiarity. Mary wanted to welcome back her old Jesus, but this wasn’t her old Jesus. This was the resurrected Christ, who now had something new to give her. What Jesus was gently telling her when he asked her not to “cling” to him was that if she continued to cling to his old person, to the way she once had him, she would be unable to receive his new presence and what he was now bringing to her.
Mary Magdala’s attempt to embrace the risen Jesus is akin to loving parents who, having painfully missed their now adult daughter while she was away, welcome her home with a hug and the words: Our little girl is back home! Hearing these words, the daughter, whether she voices that or not, would need to say gently: If you cling to the little girl you once had, you will be unable to receive the riches which your adult daughter can now bring you.
This dynamic, how the painful absence of someone we love can transform their presence so that they can now nurture us in a deeper way, is the essence of the mystery of the ascension, Jesus’ ascension and our own.
Still, it’s hard not to cling. As we watch those around us change, grow, move away, and become something other than how we have always known and loved them, like Mary Magdala, it can have us both weeping in joy and regret: in joy to see our little girl now a vibrant adult woman; in regret because we have lost her in how we once had her as our beautiful little girl.
It is better for you that I go away. Jesus spoke those words on the night before he died. I was at the deathbed of both my father and my mother. Our family clung them. There was no way we believed that it was better for us that they were going away. It’s been fifty years now since they died and, painful as their leaving was, we realize they are now able to give us something we could not receive from them before they went away.
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is currently serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his website, www.ronrolheiser.com. Follow on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser.
