Feast of the Ascension

We can sometimes sense in ourselves that our faith in the Lord is not as strong as it could be. We can identify with one of the minor characters of the gospel story who turned to Jesus and said, ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’, and also with the prayer the disciples once prayed, ‘Lord, increase our faith’. In response to their prayer, Jesus replied, ‘if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea” and it would obey you’. Jesus is obviously using imaginative language here, but he is stressing the value of even a mustard seed of faith. He is suggesting that this little faith can be sufficient for the Lord to work powerfully in and through our lives.

The Lord doesn’t wait for us to be perfect in faith before drawing us to himself and calling us to share in his work in some way. In today’s gospel reading, the risen Lord appeared to the eleven disciples. It is said that ‘when they saw him, they fell down before him, but some hesitated’. This special group were a mixture of those who worshipped the Lord and those who hesitated before him. Whatever about hesitation before the earthly Jesus, we would expect them to be full of faith before the risen Lord. If the risen Lord appeared to us, surely we wouldn’t hesitate to worship him in faith. Yet, the evangelist seems to be saying to us that even in the glorious light of Easter, hesitation will still be found among his disciples. At least some of the group of disciples in today’s gospel reading were people of little faith. Yet, it was to this little community, who were far from perfect in faith, that the risen Lord gave his wonderful mission to go and make disciples of all the nations. In a sense, this little group represent the church in every age; they represent us all, with our mixture of faith in the Lord and hesitation before him. The church is like what Jesus described in one of his parables as the field of wheat with weeds growing in it. What is true of the church as a whole is true of each member of it, each one of us.

Yet, the Lord calls each one of us to share in the same mission he gave the eleven disciples. In spite of our weaknesses and failings, he has given us the great dignity of proclaiming him to the world, of making other disciples. He can entrust this mission to us, flawed as we are, because he he will be with us in the carrying out of his mission. As he says to the disciples in the gospel reading, ‘Know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time’. He will be working in and through us to make disciples until the end of time. He will be with us especially in and through the Holy Spirit. This was the message of the risen Lord to the disciples in the first reading, ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and then you will be my witnesses… to the ends of the earth’. The feast of the Ascension is really a celebration of the way that the risen Lord is now present through the Holy Spirit among his disciples in every generation, in every time and place. He may no longer be visibly present as he was to the original disciples, but he is powerfully present among us and within us, here and now, inspiring us to continue his work in our own time and place. As Paul reminds us in today’s second reading, we are all now the risen Lord’s body in the world and he is the head of this body. His risen life, the power of the Spirit, flows through us. In that reading, Paul speaks of ‘how infinitely great is the power that he has exercised for us believers’, and, we can say, continues to exercise.

The mission Jesus gave to the eleven disciples in the gospel reading was not only intended for them. They represent us all. We are all called to be missionary disciples. The Lord has promised that he will be with us to strengthen and sustain us as we engage in this missionary task, the continuation of his own work in the world. Any one of us might wonder, ‘How could I make other disciples’. Yet, in so far as we live our faith in a public way, we will be helping to make other disciples. As we strive daily to witness to the Lord, his values, his whole outlook on life, as we find it in the gospels, we will be nurturing the faith of others. The Lord will be working through us to draw others to himself. The feast of the Ascension is not the feast of the Lord’s going away, but, in the words of the second reading, the feast of the Lord filling the whole creation through the faith, even the flawed faith, of each one of us. Today is a good day to call to mind and give thanks for all those people who helped us to become the Lord’s disciples, his followers, all those who in some way nurtured our faith.