A SERMON FOR ASCENSION DAY
Since his Resurrection from the
dead, our Lord has appeared many times to his beloved disciples. For forty days now, he has been seen amongst
them, walking with them on the road to Emmaus, entering the Cenacle through
locked doors, calling to them from the shore as they were fishing in the Sea of
Genesareth. He has explained many things
to them, things for which they were not ready before his death on the cross,
but which now they would need to remember and take with them on their voyages
over the seas and beyond to evangelize the nations. He had called Peter to be his rock, the rock
upon which he would build his Church, he had instructed the apostles to go
forth unto all nations, teaching and baptizing in his name. Finally, on the fortieth day of Easter, which
is today, he appeared one last time to them near Bethany on the Mount of
Olives, and there he gave them their final instructions—that they should remain
in Jerusalem and there wait for their baptism with the Holy Ghost.
It is difficult to imagine the
feelings of the apostles that day. There
were only eleven of them. One of them
had taken another path, betraying his friends, and then committing suicide in a
final act of despair. The others had
lived to see our Lord put to death, and then to see him walking again in their
midst, the miracle of the Resurrection.
These were men that had seen so much!
So many miracles. Healings,
exorcisms, walking on water, feeding thousands of people with a few loaves of
bread, and then finally that indescribable moment when they first saw our Lord
after the crucifixion, after the third day.
What had all these events done to the psychological makeup of these
simple men from Galilee? I could hardly
say, I’m no psychologist, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what was the
reaction of these men, who probably thought they had seen it all, what on earth
could have gone through their mind, when our Lord finished speaking to them
today, and started rising up into the air…
In our childish fantasies, we
think of the Ascension of our Lord, and we think of him floating up to the
clouds with the apostles standing on the ground and maybe waving. Like a navy family on shore watching their
son’s ship pulling out into the harbor.
Only one member of the family hadn’t come along to see him off. There’s no mention of Our Blessed Lady in the
account of the Ascension. It’s possible
she was there, but I doubt it. I prefer
to think that our Lord had a private meeting with his Mother before his
Ascension in front of the Apostles, a meeting where he made his own private
farewell, in words that were never meant to come to the ears of the
Evangelists, never meant for our ears.
So with no Blessed Mother to look
to for guidance what did the Apostles do now when they saw him gradually
getting smaller, smaller, until he disappeared into the clouds and was seen no
more? What does one do after such a
spectacle as this? Banal conversation
would seem so out of place, the shock of the scene could not have left them
much in a mood for discussion or even for prayer. It must have been one of those moments when
all you can do is just stand there and give your brain time to adjust to the
enormity of what it had just seen. Our
Lord certainly knew they would need help with this, and so he sent them two men
clad in white apparel—angels obviously.
And as the eleven apostles gazed into the sky with their mouths wide
open, these angels break the shocked silence and say to them: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into
heaven?”.
And with a jolt these eleven
apostles returned to the practical consideration of what to do next. They had their instructions—not to depart
from Jerusalem. So they obeyed their
Master’s last command, and journeyed back to the Holy City, about a day’s
journey away. They went back to the
Cenacle, that same Upper Room where our Lord had celebrated his Last Supper
with them, where the Holy Mass had been instituted, where they had been
ordained, where they had returned a day later overcome with horror and grief at
their sight of our Lord in the agony of his final Passion and death. This was their comfort zone, the place to
which they returned. And they remained
there nine days.
The first order of business was
to take care of the group. Christ had
called Twelve Apostles, mirroring the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Judas had died a traitor’s death, and now
they were only eleven. And so Peter,
called by our Lord to be their leader, made his first act as first Pope, and
called an election to fill the vacant chair left by Judas. Accordingly they drew lots and chose Matthias
to be the Twelfth Apostle. And then they
sat back and they waited.
By now they had been joined by our
Lord’s Mother, the other faithful women, like Mary Magdalene and her sister
Martha, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and the rest. Many of the other disciples also flocked to
the apostles to hear of our Lord’s Ascension and to find out what they should
do next. But they didn’t really know
what else to do. They had been told to
wait. And so wait they did. They waited and they prayed. Prayed for nine days. You’ve often heard this time called the First
Novena. They prayed their Novena, not
knowing it was a nine-day novena, not knowing what would happen next or when.
Let’s come back to the 21st
century now. Two thousand years later,
and the last anyone saw of our Lord was this day twenty centuries ago. He has not been seen since. We are still waiting for his Second Coming,
still praying, still not knowing what will happen next. We live in a world where certainly, anything could happen at any moment. There are nutcases all over the world who
could pull the trigger any minute and plunge the world into catastrophe. Most of us here today will remember that day
in September 2001 when our smug peace was shattered as those planes flew into
the Twin Towers and our lives changed forever.
When is the next big event going to take place? When are we going to get a phone call in the
middle of the night from some relative telling us to turn on the news: “You’re not going to believe this…” What scenes of horror lie out there in that
dim and scary, oh so uncertain future, waiting for us? And so we wait and we wonder.
We are just like the twelve
apostles, aren’t we? We cling to our
comfort zone, and there we stick like glue.
And we wait. And hopefully we
pray like they did. But we wait and pray
with fear.
The apostles need not have
feared. Look at all the promises our
Lord had given them. For example, he had
just promised them he was going to heaven to prepare a place for them, for
us. He promised them he would send the
Holy Ghost, the Comforter. He had
promised that wherever two or three are gathered together in his name, there is
he in the midst of them. That he would
be with his Church until the consummation of the earth. But they continued to fear. And so do we.
We have not learned that lesson yet.
The lesson not to fear. Learn it
today on this feast of the Ascension of our Lord into heaven, when our Paschal
Candle is extinguished for the last time and the Light of the World is hidden
from us till the end of time. Hidden,
Christ may be. But absent he is
not. He ascended into heaven, but where
is heaven. Heaven is where God is, and
God is everywhere. Only a thin veil
separates us in this hell on earth from our heavenly paradise. Only a thin veil separates us from the
tabernacle here in which is contained God himself. But again even in the tabernacle he is hidden
in the veil of the host, unseen to our eyes.
Some of the saints learned to see beyond this veil, to see the angels,
and the demons too, as they winged their way to and fro, influencing us for
good and evil. We need to learn to look
in the right way for God, beyond our fears, our distractions, our needs, and
our trivialities. Learn how to see God
where he truly is, which is everywhere. Don’t
take this too far. We don’t want to
become scientologists or pantheists, where God is a tree, every tree, every
blade of grass. No. God is not a tree. But remember that indeed his majesty and his
awe, his delicacy and his love for us is reflected in the nature he
created. And in his greatest creation of
all, mankind, fashioned in his own image and likeness, then surely there, in
our fellow man, we can find the face of God.
In the smile of a baby, sure that’s an easy one. But look too in the face of your enemies, for
there God is surely also.
And finally, take a lesson from
God’s supreme creation, the Blessed Virgin Mary, conceived without sin, Mother
of God and Virgin most pure. When all
else fails, let us do what surely those apostles must have done as they waited
for the coming of the Comforter, and that is to turn every now and again to
Jesus’ mother, now their mother, and now ours.
How much solace they must have drawn from her presence there with them, from
that face that resembled his, as they waited and prayed. Don’t stray far from her side. For she is the one, the only one who has been
given the privilege to follow Christ, body and soul, by being assumed into
heaven. She is our inspiration that we
too shall one day join them both, in in blessed bliss, forever and ever. Amen.
