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Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

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On the Solemnity of the Ascension the Church celebrates Our Lord reaching the finish line. After forty days of being with the disciples after his Resurrection, which we have celebrated during these forty days of the Easter season, Jesus has crossed into Heaven to take His place at the Father’s right hand, as the prophecies foretold for the Messiah. The Father has crowned him with the glory he merited by his Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and in turn he is eternally asking the Father for each of us–by name–to receive the graces we need to join him in eternity.

The disciples thought this was the end of the story. Every Jew in those days knew the Messiah was supposed to clean house and establish a kingdom that would last forever, which is why they asked Jesus right before his departure if he was going to restore the kingdom to Israel. We can think the same thing. Something’s not quite right with the world. There is a despair and decay and violence, and sometimes it seems evil is winning. We want God to come and clean house. We even expect it. Which is why we have to remember Jesus’ answer in the First Reading: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons.” We can’t blame them. We all want results and tidy endings. They were still in such shock that the angels had to come and tell them, “why are you standing there?”

We’re often so guilty of the same thing because we don’t realize that Christ reaching the finish line doesn’t mean that the race is finished: we still have to cross the finish line. Jesus is just the first runner across. We’re all in a race like an open marathon. Some run it, some walk it, some make it a family outing, but everyone is heading for the finish line. There are runners who train all year long, who’ve been running morning after morning, training for the hardest race of their life, striving to be the first across the finish line. In the race of life these runners are the saints, who suffered and sacrificed and beat their bodies into submission with their eyes fixed on the eternal prize. We all want to have that glory of blowing through the finish line tape. But we know to that there are those who have been longing for it, and at the end, battered, cramped, wheezing, just manage to drag themselves across. In this race getting across the finish line is what counts. The common denominator for all of us is that we have to set our sights on the finish line and keep moving. We shouldn’t wait for angels to come and ask us “why are you standing there?”

As we prepare over these next ten days for the Holy Spirit to be poured out on us on Pentecost Sunday, let’s ask the Spirit to show us that one thing in our lives that is an obstacle to uniting ourselves more closely to God; let’s ask the Spirit to help us pick up the pace in order to blow through the only finish line that really matters: eternity.

Readings: Acts 1:1–11; Psalm 47:2–3, 6–9; Ephesians 1:17–23; Mark 16:15–20. Author note: in some dioceses the Solemnity of the Ascension is celebrated on the Sunday before Pentecost Sunday instead of ten days before Pentecost, which is the traditional day for the solemnity. I have opted to reflect on the liturgy today, and on Sunday I’ll reflect on the Seventh Sunday of Easter.

 

6th Week of Easter, Wednesday

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In today’s Gospel we find an applied lesson in how hard it is to wrap our minds around one God in three Persons. If we trace the message heard and shared that Jesus refers to today, we see that the Father has shared something with the Son, who has it completely and shares it with the Holy Spirit, and with the goal of communicating it to us. There is one Gospel that the Father has entrusted to the Son and the Holy Spirit helps to be living and active in the lives of Christians and society.

Yesterday we saw the Holy Spirit as Advocate; today we see the Holy Spirit as the “the Spirit of truth.” Jesus had much more to say that he could put into words during his earthly mission, as he tells the disciples today. The Holy Spirit helps to keep communicating and to keep the message resounding down the centuries. The Spirit also ensures the integral transmission of that message, which is why the Spirit is a Spirit of truth that guides into all truth. In a world often obsessed with cover-ups, conspiracies, and the need for transparency, everyone is looking for the truth, the whole truth. The Holy Spirit wants to lead us into that truth, and is also the guarantor at times of truths we find hard to accept or to believe.

Let’s ask the Holy Spirit today to help us embrace our harder truths, knowing, as Jesus promised, that the truth will set us free (see John 8:32).

Readings: Acts 17:15, 22–18:1; Psalm 148:1–2, 11–14; John 16:12–15.

 

6th Week of Easter, Tuesday

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In today’s Gospel Our Lord describes the Holy Spirit as the Advocate, a legal term that goes well with the language of conviction and judgment that he uses to describe the Holy Spirit’s action in the world and in each one of us. The original Greek word that describes in this passage what the Holy Spirit does (ἐλέγχω) contains multiple meanings; it can mean “to convict,” as today’s Gospel translation puts it, “to convince,” as other translations use, “to rebuke,” or “to expose” something. When we consider all these meanings it gives us a better sense of what Jesus is trying to teach us today about the Holy Spirit.

When we struggle with moral decisions sometimes we don’t realize that we’re not alone in our conscience with just our thoughts and evaluations: the Holy Spirit is there too, and is always trying to shed light on the right thing to do in our hearts, and to inspire us to take the right path in our lives, even in the little day to day decisions we make. Depending on our response we too can say that the Spirit “convicts” us when we choose evil instead of good and “rebukes” us for it, or “convinces” us that we’ve got to do the right thing. The Spirit often “exposes” things about ourselves that we’d rather ignore. In order to make a positive impact on our lives and the lives of those around us we need to work with the Holy Spirit so that instead of being convicted we become convinced of Jesus’ message.

Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us resolve any decision we’re struggling with today, and to “convince” us about the right thing to do so that we don’t find ourselves “convicted” due to our actions.

Readings: Acts 16:22–34; Psalm 138:1–3, 7c–8; John 16:5–11.

6th Week of Easter, Monday

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Our Lord warned the disciples, just as he warns us, in today’s Gospel that persecution for being his witness and disciple is part of being Christian. A common belief in modern society is that the two things you don’t bring up in polite conversation are religion and politics. Even today Christians are being put to death, supposedly in the name of God, by radical religious extremists, but Our Lord is clear today that those people have no idea of who God truly is. He reminds the disciples, as he reminds us, that we must testify to him. That means going out into society, into the public square, to speak the truth that he gives us in the Gospel not just for the good of Christianity, but for all of society.

In some cultures today being Christian warrants death, while in others, the death of your reputation. Christians are branded as intolerant, and some of their teachings as hate crimes and offensive, because they question the true good of certain lifestyle and moral choices and suggest a better way. Ideologues want to relegate religious expression of any kind to the private sphere: no public displays of religion, no influence of religion on state or politics. But it’s very hard to be a-religious, because man is meant for God, and it is natural for him to give expression to that need through religion. In the end attempts to be a-religious simply make a religion out of something else–the State, an ideology, individual liberty to the exclusion of anyone else’s, etc. They lash out at anything that would question who God truly is, but as Jesus says today, “They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me.” How will they find out if we do not tell them?

Let’s pray today for persecuted Christians, and also for the strength to not be bullied into leaving our faith in the privacy of our own home, out of the conviction that the Gospel is not just good for us, but good for society.

Readings: Acts 16:11–15; Psalm 149:1b–6a, 9b; John 15:26–16:4a.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

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Over the last few weeks of Easter readings we’ve seen the Church gradually understand that the Gospel was meant to go beyond the confines of Judaism to other cultures and, ultimately, to every culture, including Cornelius. In today’s First Reading we see one of the culminating moments in the early Church: the Holy Spirit helping the first disciples to take the Gospel everywhere.

With this reading we see a glimpse of what we’ll celebrate in two weeks on Pentecost Sunday: God the Holy Spirit gives life and growth to the Church, often unperceived except with the eyes of faith, and even then in subtle ways. The Holy Spirit also helps the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, to bring souls to the Church and to baptism in Jesus’ name, because God’s action, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, always leads to unity.

Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us over the last two weeks of this Easter season to take our Christian living to new frontiers in God’s service and sharing the Gospel.

Readings: Acts 10:25–26, 34–35, 44–48; Psalm 98:1–4; 1 John 4:7–10; John 15:9–17.