Solemnity of the
Ascension of the Lord
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The Ascension of our Lord forty days
after the resurrection is intimately connected with the
coming of the Holy Spirit. The risen Lord, about to leave
his disciples finally to return to his Father, tells them,
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you,
and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.”
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This is important for two reasons at
least. First of all, Jesus was not abandoning his disciples.
He would remain with them through the Holy Spirit. They were
told that they would be clothed from power from on high. For
this reason, they went back to Jerusalem “full of joy”. He
was gone from their sight and from their midst, and yet they
were full of joy. I think this relates to our own religious
experience. Jesus is not physically in our midst, yet we
know he is near. We pray to him and we know our prayers are
heard. We know he is in heaven, yet at the same time we can
say that he is with us, not least in the sacraments, in the
word of God, and in our prayer. So, contrary to superficial
appearances, the Ascension is really a mystery of the
nearness of the Lord and of his presence. As such, it is
mystery of salvation because the Lord is always present to
save us. Like the disciples, then, we too are full of joy
for this feast.
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Secondly, the Feast of the Ascension has
to do with our mission to witness to the Lord. Right to the
last moment, some of the disciples still had the wrong idea
of Jesus’ purpose. He is just about to ascend to his Father
when they ask him: “Lord, has the time come. Are you going
to restore the kingdom to Israel.” His heart must have sunk
as they he heard these sentiments yet again! I find that
people today can sometimes have the wrong idea of God’s
purpose. They want God to be the guarantee of their
happiness and aspirations, and when that does not happen,
they get angry at God or reject him. Either God does what
they want or they have no use for him. Jesus never accepted
this kind of interpretation of his mission and he tells his
disciples simply, “You will be my witnesses.” The vocation
of the believer is not to turn Jesus into an image of
himself, nor to regard Jesus as the answer to all our human
needs and wants. The lure of the false god is an
ever-present danger. The vocation of the disciple, rather,
is to witness in the Holy Spirit to the true Jesus, to his
death and resurrection, to the coming of his kingdom, to the
forgiveness of sins, and to the promise of eternal life.
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The Ascension of the Lord definitively
closes the period of Jesus’ visible presence on the earth.
He will not be seen again in his glorified flesh until he
comes in glory at the end of time. In the meantime, He is
deeply present to us in the power of the Spirit and invites
us to be his witnesses to the end of the earth.
St. Mirin’s Cathedral
17th May 2007
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