20/05/2007 - THE FEAST OF ASCENSION - Year C
First Reading Acts 1,1-11 Psalm 46
Second Reading Hebrews 9,24-28; 10,19-23 Gospel Luke 24,46-53
Our sanctity or holiness is based on faith. And our faith should be solid,
strong, like the faith of Jesus. Faith pretending that the Lord hears us in
our material wishes, or that laments about the fact that the Lord lets us feel
the cross of poverty or illness, is not a faith of real quality. Adult faith
is the faith of our Mother Mary; it is a faith that offers our life to the plans
of the Lord, although these plans are still unknown to us. The faith of Mary
reflects the faith of her Son Jesus.
The faith of the Apostles went through a long way of change going from a selfish
faith to become like the faith of Mary. Mary is not only a model for our prayer,
but also a model of perfect faith. We may also consider the faith of the saints,
those we venerate as our models. For example, the faith of Martha evolved from
"I believe that you are able to do miracles", to "I believe that
you are the Lord!", i.e. from "I believe you do…" to "I
believe that you are…".. This fact could be expressed like that: "My
Lord, my Father, I adore you and I give you thanks. I thank you, because you
are sending your Son for us; I give you thanks because you raised him; and in
consideration of His merits you forgive us our sins. We give you thanks for
the gift of the Holy Spirit, who makes us similar to Jesus. I am here to do
your will, as he did. Show me what I should do in order to favor your Kingdom!"
St. Luke closes his gospel and begins the Act of the Apostles with the narrations
of the Ascension of Jesus. This fact or mystery happened between Easter and
Pentecost; between the victory of the Lord over death and the gift of the Holy
Spirit. This mystery shows us the glory of Jesus sitting at the right of the
Father and thus being able to send us the gift of the Holy Spirit. In this way
Jesus achieves the sanctification of the poor sinners we are. The Ascension
gives also the answer to the question the disciples asked and we ourselves are
asking: "Where is our Teacher and Lord? Where is Jesus?". Here we
have the answer: He is where God the Father is; He is one with the Father in
the glory where He was even before the world was; because Jesus too is God.
This certainty is for us the base and foundation of joy and confidence. The
faith in this fact and in Jesus is not an illusion, but gives to our life sanctity
and safety; and the cross itself becomes than a light in our daily life.
When Jesus was going back to the Father He blessed the Apostles. By doing so
He entrusted to them the Church; the Ascension of Christ is in some sense the
actual beginning of the Church. Christ gives then the Apostles the order to
go through the whole world and tell everybody that the Lord is alive and is
with us, loving us. When people know and believe that the Lord loves them they
will know also that their life has meaning in the love, and they will begin
to offer themselves.
The Church gives our troubled and worried world a new light, a new life and
the capacity to see that our daily life has a meaning and even an eternal meaning.
Where the words of Jesus arrive the face of the world changes, there arrives
the love. The mission of the Church is not damage or a loss for the people,
on the contrary it is a salvation from the egoism and the divisions; it is a
help to live together with peace and joy, without fright.
This mission of the whole Church is also our personal mission, the mission of
each of us: make Jesus know to others so that they have live and give peace
to the world.