THE FEAST OF ASCENSION [B]  (Acts 1:1-11; Eph 1:17-23 or 4:1-13; Mk 16:15-20)

Today, we are celebrating the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. The Ascension marks the completion of Jesus' earthly and bodily presence on earth.  Jesus had to return to his Father so that he could send the Holy Spirit to make his work continue in and through his disciples.

The feast of the Ascension is not about the departure of Jesus somewhere above us, but, rather, about the ways that the Lord is present among us, helping us to share in his work of proclaiming the gospel everywhere. How do we proclaim the gospel? We do so not so much by our words but by our lives.

 Rebecca Pippert, the author of Out of the Salt Shaker: Into the World, tells of a time she was sitting in her car at a traffic light with her window rolled down. As the light turned green a car drove by and its occupant threw something into her car hitting her on the cheek. It didn’t hurt but she was so startled that she pulled over immediately. When she unrolled the paper, she discovered it was a Gospel tract. She says she was the apparent victim of what she refers to as “torpedo evangelism.” —the torpedoer meant well. But he or she did the wrong thing for the right reason in the wrong way. We can engage people in conversation about their Faith and their relationship with God in a non-judgmental manner. We can encourage. We can invite. We can offer counsel. But we leave the hard work, the heart work, up to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

It is through the Holy Spirit that the risen Lord works among us and within us to enable us to become fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself. Today’s feast is very closely related to next Sunday’s feast, the feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. The period after the resurrection, when the risen Lord was present to his first disciples in visible, bodily form, had to come to an end before he could be present to disciples of every generation, to us today, in and through the Holy Spirit.

In the first reading, it is said that the risen Lord was lifted up while the disciples looked on, and after he was lifted up, they were ‘staring into the sky’. It is as if they did not want the visual connection between themselves and the Lord to end. They peered after him, anxious to see him and to know that he saw them. After the crucifixion they thought they would never see him again; then he appeared to them in bodily form, although in a transformed state. Now, that period of his visible risen presence to them was coming to an end, he took his leave of them again. According to that first reading, while they were staring into the sky, two men in white put the question to them, ‘Why are you men from Galilee standing here looking into the sky?

The question that the two men ask in our first reading today suggests that the disciples were looking in the wrong direction if they wanted to see the Lord. They won’t see him standing there, looking into the sky. They will have to look elsewhere to see the Lord. The Lord remains visibly present to his disciples, although in a different way from how he was visibly present immediately after his resurrection. The second reading suggests where the disciples need to look to continue seeing the Lord. That reading makes reference to the Body of Christ, the church. According to that reading, when the Lord ascended, he gave gifts to his followers. ‘Each of us’ - in the words of Paul - ‘has been given his or her own share of grace, given as Christ has allotted it’. Because of the Lord’s return to God, we have each been greatly graced and gifted through the sending of the Spirit. The sending of the Spirit and the gifts that accompanied the Spirit’s sending brought into being the Body of Christ, of which we are all members through faith and baptism. It is above all in and through his Body, the Church, that the risen Lord is present and visible in the world. Rather than looking up into the sky to see and meet the risen Lord, we are invited to look towards the members of Christ’s body. We, the baptized, are all called to be the sacrament of Christ, the place where Christ is powerfully present in the world.

Though, the Lord was taken up, was taken away, yet he was working with them. The Lord did not ascend to distance himself from the church, but to be closer to the church. Again, St. Paul understood this very clearly as a result of his meeting with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. After persecuting the church with great zeal, the risen Lord appeared to him and asked him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ In persecuting the church, Saul came to realize that he was persecuting the Lord because, as today’s gospel says, the Lord was working with those who were witnessing to him. Today’s feast then is more about presence than about absence. We celebrate the Lord’s presence in the church. His Spirit has been poured into our hearts and, together, we are his body.

We pray on this feast of the Ascension that we would be faithful to the task that the Lord has given us, and that we would come to recognise the ways the Lord is working with us as we seek to do that task.