The Ascension of the Lord

“… why are you standing there looking at the sky?”  Acts 1:10

The historic bodily presence of Jesus has ended.

Those disciples who walked with him and talked with him and dined with him; those faithful ones who followed him and watched him heal the sick and cure the lepers and make the blind see and the deaf hear; those people who left family and jobs and many other commitments to listen to this son of a carpenter teach them to do such radical things as forgive 70 x 7, love even their enemies, feed the hungry, be servants of all – those very same ones stand sadly in today’s first reading and look up to the sky as Jesus ascends into the heavens.

Now what do they do?

They’re in grief. They’re overwhelmed with loss. They’re overcome with a profound sense of abandonment.

All of us have experienced this feeling to one degree or another in our lives. All of us have lost jobs or homes or important possessions or deep personal relationships that were extremely dear to us.

And many of these losses have brought us to tears, maybe even to deep anger. Some have possibly triggered behaviors on our part that we now wish we could take back.

That’s the situation these people, these followers of this great prophet named Jesus – now risen from the dead – were on the very day that we now celebrate as the feast of Ascension.

But notice that the angels in the story, the messengers from God, don’t let them stay stuck there. Instead, they jar them back into reality not with a command, but with a question:

“Why are you standing there looking at the sky?”

Which, translated, means: There’s no time to mope, no time to feel sorry for yourselves. There’s a message of Good News to be preached. There’s a continued presence of Jesus to be lived out by each of you.

Remember the gospel message of this past Sunday:

“I will not leave you orphaned.”

The angels are reminding them – and each one of us – that Jesus made a whole series of promises to us before departing physically:

I will be ever with you through the Spirit who will be available to you whenever two or three are gathered in my name. I will be there in the reading and praying of Sacred Scripture. I will be there in the Eucharist by entering physically into your body. I will be there in the feeding of the hungry, the housing of the homeless, the visiting and care of the sick.

I will be there with you, and in you, and for you, and among you in all these ways – and so many others.

You are not alone, Jesus told his disciples over and over again. That terrible feeling of abandonment, Jesus assured them, would be fully addressed.

And it was.

That earliest community of people did as the angels told them – and caught fire in the process, a fire lit by the Spirit, as we will celebrate on the feast of Pentecost.

And that fire that came to engulf them raged so brightly and so strongly that within less than a two-hundred-year time span most of the known world at that time became aware of a group called “Christians.”

What is even more astounding, in a time period in which few “books” were published, and fewer read, there were so many manuscripts written about Jesus and what he meant to people, that it took the Church the better part of 500 years to decide which of these published materials were to be included in what came to be called the New Testament – which we now possess and regard as “inspired.”

When you consider that there was no “social media” in those days, no TV or radio or Facebook or Twitter or even a printing press, it is truly remarkable how exciting and how freeing the Good News of Jesus Christ was to so many people – and how hungry they were to hear it.

For over two thousand years, in the midst of sometimes very flawed and even shocking emissaries, this same message is being presented to you and to me to this very day:

We are loved, not abandoned. We are cherished, not forgotten. We are treasured, not dismissed.

Our beloved Pope Francis possibly put it best when he said:

“The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free – free from sin, free from sorrow, free from inner emptiness, free from loneliness. With Christ, joy is constantly born anew …. Whenever we take a step toward Jesus; we come to realize that his is already there, waiting for us with open arms.”

Knowing all this, perhaps we can better understand what those angels were trying to tell those first disciples way back then – and you and me now – when they asked that startling question:

“Why are you standing there looking at the sky?”

After all, we are the messengers Jesus is counting on to continue to tell the story of love that is the life of Jesus – the story of a love that “recognizes no boundaries … that jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.

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5/25/17