Ascension - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2019

Today’s Gospel concluded Luke’s story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus with a brief account of what he called Jesus’ “withdrawing from the disciples and being carried up to heaven”. Appropriately, he closely connected it with Jesus’ resurrection and, you will have noticed, even timed it as occurring on the same day – the resurrection in the morning and the withdrawal to heaven in the evening.

The First Reading tonight was taken from a second volume of Luke’s, the Acts of the Apostles. This volume dealt no longer with the life and teaching of Jesus, but with the beginning of the Church and its early history. You know from your familiarity with the Gospel that Luke prefaced Jesus’ public ministry with a forty-day novitiate in the desert at the end of which he was tempted. In this second volume, Luke prefaced the launching of the Church also with a forty-day novitiate, “For forty days he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the Kingdom of God”. It was only then that he recounted Jesus’ Ascension, connecting it somehow with the coming Kingdom. He described it as he had in his Gospel, with a few significant additions. “He was lifted up… and a cloud took him from their sight”.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, a cloud was often the symbol of the presence of the unknowable God. But here it has a further significance. During his ministry, Jesus regularly referred to himself as the Son of Man. That was a title that he borrowed from the Book of Daniel. It occurred in Daniel’s description of a mysterious vision he had of God, "As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne…” The vision continued, “As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven… To him was given dominion and glory and kingship”.

For Luke, the Ascension is the celebration of Jesus’ sharing in the dominion of God. This is the feast of Christ the King.

The Gospel account of Jesus’ withdrawal had mentioned that Jesus had taken the disciples out "as far as the outskirts of Bethany”. Bethany was the spot from where, six days before he was killed, Jesus had begun his symbolic entry into Jerusalem, where the disciples and the crowds acclaimed him as king. But let us not get too carried away. Quite deliberately, Jesus chose to enter mounted of all things on a donkey. For Jesus, kingship is not about what the world understands as kingship – power and wealth and whatever. His kingship is based on the vulnerability of love and service, of simplicity and humility.

Let us get back to the visions of Daniel. After the "dominion and glory and kingship” were given to the Son of Man, Daniel was then told by the interpreting angel, “sovereignty and kingship … will be given to the people of the saints of the Most High”. So the Church shares ultimately the same experience of Jesus, the Son of Man.

Through his account of Jesus’ Ascension, Luke removed the veil on the ultimate destiny of the Church – not unlike what he had done at the start of his Gospel when, by means of his infancy narratives, he had revealed to his readers the deeper mystery of Jesus.

But Jesus had a job to do before he entered into his glory. He had to preach the Kingdom of God, to demonstrate it through his deeds and his words, to call the world to conversion and to radical and unfamiliar change. His unshakeable commitment to the way of love would lead to his tortured, dehumanising death – as we read about in Luke’s Gospel. Likewise, as Luke would illustrate in his Acts of the Apostles, the early Church called the world to conversion despite experiencing a similar reaction to what Jesus experienced – opposition, often fierce, and for some, martyrdom.

The task continues today. And we are the ones on whom God relies.