According to St Leo the Great, and many other commentators, Jesus kept appearing to his disciples for forty days so that they would recognize as truly risen One whom they knew as truly born, as him who truly suffered, and truly died. “The result was that not only were they not afflicted with sadness, but were filled with great joy when the Lord went into the heights of heaven” (Sermon 73:4). The implication is that, had Jesus ascended prematurely, before the faith of his disciples was fully formed and confirmed, there could still be sadness instead of joy, a sense of loss and confusion in place of hopeful expectation. Most likely the disciples simply wouldn't know what to do, and they would humanly long for the presence of their friend and master. That is why Our Lord kept on appearing to them in the flesh – to build up their faith and joy, both necessary preconditions for receiving the Holy Spirit. Once that was accomplished, he told his disciples to just wait in Jerusalem, wait “for the promise of the Father”: “for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:5).
Personally, I find the mention of the Baptist very interesting here. You could be forgiven for thinking that John belonged to a kind of pre-history by the time we get to the Acts of the Apostles – with Jesus's own ministry forming the more immediate “history”, with the Paschal Mysteries as the climatic event, to be followed only by these last days and the Second Coming. Why even mention him? And yet, just as John baptized, so you soon will be, said Jesus, only the Holy Spirit will replace water. And then you are to proclaim the very “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” which John also used to proclaim, only in the name of Jesus, and “to all nations”. Even at this point then, it would seem, we've got plenty to learn from what John the Baptist did, from his prophetic ministry. There are still parallels to explore.
Now John used to live in the wilderness, in total dependence on God, and precisely into that very experience he baptized men and women who came to him. He baptized them with water for repentance. They used to confess their sins beforehand, because every sin is a form of idolatry: that is, reliance on something other than God. John had to have lived in the wilderness himself, in total reliance on God, in order to administer this baptism. We know that he did – he ate locusts and wild honey, he let his hair grow, he dressed and slept rough. And yet people went on pilgrimages just to see him, to hear him speak, to get a taste of his life, and to take his radical dependence on God, his freedom, back into their own lives. To repent of their sins, in other words.
Just as John had to live in the wilderness the life of repentance, so now Jesus has to depart and live the life of the Trinity as a man, in order that we may be baptized into heaven; to taste this life and bring it back down to earth.
In the Letter to the Hebrews we read: “Christ has entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf”. We can go there even now by “the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh” (Heb 9:24,10:20). And so, just as people were happy to have been finally given a prophet in the person of John, someone living apart and yet quite accessible, so must we learn to rejoice in the fact that Jesus no longer walks among us, that he has ascended to the Father. It's a strange thing, to rejoice in the fact that Jesus is not here as one of us, as one among many. But unless we come to this joy, there is no place for the Holy Spirit in our lives and we will miss out on the countless ways in which Jesus could in fact be present to us.
And so, wilderness is followed by heaven, water by the Holy Spirit, repentance is followed by faith and joy, grace and eternal life, John the Baptist is followed by Jesus Christ. You can't separate them, you can't have the latter without the former, you can only reach heaven by way of the desert. I can still remember many lines from Dom Bernardo Bonowitz's retreat which he gave to us in 2009. One of them was something like: however harsh it may seem at any given moment, the wilderness is in fact in radical continuity with the promised land, and in radical discontinuity with the land of captivity. That is why the greatest sin in the wilderness is murmuring and longing for one's past life, a willingness to give up one's freedom and dignity of being a child of God, for the securities of a life of slavery in the fertile land of Egypt. It's a good sign when things are rough. In other words, you are probably in a good place, but when you find yourself leading a comfortable but meaningless existence: that should be a cause for worry.
There is an obvious monastic point in all this. St John the Baptist has always been seen as one of the great precursors of our way of life. He was “filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb”, we read in Luke (1:15); precisely, it seems, so that he could survive life in the wilderness, in harsh conditions, exposed to evil thoughts incited by the demons who live there. “O God, when you went out before your people, when you marched through the wilderness, the earth quaked, the heavens poured down rain, you restored your inheritance as it languished; your flock found a dwelling in it” says one of the Psalms (Ps 68:8ff). God's flock found a dwelling, a foothold in the wilderness. That's what a monastery is supposed to be, a kind of permanent John the Baptist for the people. You need the Holy Spirit to survive here, and to prepare others for receiving this same Spirit, even if you cannot directly bestow Him on anyone. Repentance, reliance on God (true freedom, in other words) is the foundation on which faith and joy can be placed and then built up. It is our task to preach repentance and true freedom with our lives. We always stray when we try to preach something else or with something other than our very lives. It is also our task to wait for the coming of the Spirit, and to teach others to wait for Him. We call that waiting “prayer”.
DSP