Ascension - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2010 

What is it about our being who we are – Christians, Catholics – that is different from what we would be if we weren’t? Do we feel different? Perhaps, for most of us, that’s hard to answer because we have never not been Christian, Catholic. 

But, then … perhaps it’s not so hard, because being Christian is not a simple question of Yes” or “No”, but a question of “how much”. Being a follower of Jesus is not a once-and-for-all given. It is a process – a process of growing – or, at least, it can be. And, I think that, for most of us, the very fact that we are here tonight is an indication that it has been an unfolding process: to be a Catholic today calls for a much more deliberate, more aware, decision than it might have been for our mothers or fathers.

Be that as it may, the fact that we have grown across the years gives us the chance to reflect on what has changed in us. 

To-night’s Second Reading spoke of progress, of growing: May the God of Jesus bring you to full knowledge. May the God of Jesus enlighten the eyes of your mind. What have you come to see and to appreciate more clearly as you have grown and matured?

The Gospel helps us to recognise and to put words on what might have been our experience. It talks about something happening to us, happening in us, that it colourfully describes as being clothed with power from on high something, then, that hasn’t happened though our own efforts (though it has called for our openness and willingness to let it be), but something that has happened all the same, something that we didn’t precisely seek, or expect, but that we can  recognise now as we look back. Because we somehow see and evaluate things differently, life affects us differently.

The Gospel called it the forgiveness of sins – a really rich and complex experience. The sin that cripples is not the mass of mistakes that we make from weakness and inattention, or sheer laziness, (and that we are only too well aware of). The sin that cripples is the sin that blinds us, that we are not aware of, that that we don’t see as sin, that we are used to, and take for granted and assume as normal.

A painful example has been the instinctive defensiveness shown by certain bishops in the light of the sexual abuse of children by clergy. It went on for so many years without coming to the surface. (Thank God that the media finally allowed victims to be heard.)

The blinding power of sin is all too alive and well in ourselves personally, but, in ourselves largely because it is embedded in the air we breathe – in the unquestioned attitudes of our culture and our sub-cultures: in the general, unrecognised violence, in our competitiveness, our instinctive defensiveness when criticised, our unthinking collusion in injustice.

As the power from on high slowly gives light to eyes of our mind, as we slowly grow in wisdom and perception (to use the words of tonight’s Second Reading), we begin to make out our sin more clearly. It’s everywhere.

But the wonderful thing that we also see, the wonderful thing that enables us, in the face of it all, not to despair, but to hope and to draw on the energy for change that hope releases is the dawning awareness of the powerful and liberating certainty of forgiveness.

Our God is really a God whose instinctive, and constant, life is love. The difference that can happen to us across life is that we become humble, able to love, ourselves and others, and irrepressibly hopeful.

The insight usually comes the hard way – within and through the experience of life and life’s inevitable hardness. No one can duck that hardness. It crushes some; it leads others to wisdom, to understanding, to gentleness and humble acceptance.

What confirms us in all this is the memory of Jesus about whom it was written that the Messiah would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead (as tonight’s Gospel insisted). 

That he rose from the dead enables us to do more than simply remember him. Mysteriously, though he has undeniably withdrawn from us (as the image of Ascension endeavours to express the reality), equally undeniably, he transforms us. He changes us by the power from on high. Slowly, gradually, we are undergoing God.