Ascension of the Lord, Year B
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11
Second Reading: Eph 4:1-13
Gospel Reading: Mk 16:15-20
For 40 days after his resurrection, Jesus “presented himself alive” to his apostles “by many convincing proofs,” the First Reading says. In fact, said St. Leo the Great, Pope from 440 to 461, they were so “strengthened by the clearness of the truth” that his ascension did not sadden them, but actually filled them with joy.
We should all rejoice today, for at Christ’s ascension a human man, one of us, “went up above the angels’ ranks,” said Pope Leo, and “sat down at the right hand of God,” as we hear in the Gospel Reading.
“Christ’s ascension is our uplifting,” Pope Leo said. As members of Christ’s mystical body, attached to him as a body’s organs to its head, we can be sure that where he is, we will also be. In Christ, we have already “penetrated the heights of heaven” and gained “greater things” than those we lost “through the devil’s malice.”
“Blest are they who have not seen and have believed,” Jesus told Thomas. The apostles experienced this blessing after the Ascension, said Pope Leo, for “their faith did not fail, their hope did not waver, and their love did not grow cold.”
Instead, they lifted “the whole contemplation of their minds to the godhead of him who sat at the Father’s right hand.” Bodily sight no longer hindered them from directing their minds to him who “had never quitted the Father’s side in descending to earth, and had not forsaken the disciples in ascending to heaven.”
“Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father,” Jesus told Mary Magdalene right after his resurrection. What he meant, said the Pope, was, “I would not have you come to me as to a human body,” nor “recognize me” by bodily senses. “I put you off for higher things; I prepare greater things for you; when I have ascended to my Father, then you shall handle me more perfectly and truly, for you shall grasp what you cannot touch and believe what you cannot see.”
Similarly, the angels chided the disciples as they gazed upward: “Why do you stand looking up to heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go to heaven.” Until then, his presence among us is “a sacramental presence,” the Pope said; “sight” has given way to “doctrine.”
In the meantime, St. Paul says in the Second Reading, we must live a life worthy of our calling. “Minds that have heard the call to be uplifted must not be pressed down by earthly affections,” said Pope Leo; “they who are foreordained to things eternal must not be taken up with the things that perish; they who have entered on the way of truth must not be entangled in treacherous snares.”
It is the devil who sets these “treacherous snares,” the Pope explained. He uses the “enticements” of things that are good, but earthly, to draw us away from heaven. We should remember that we are merely “sojourning” in this world. Although we must thank God for its good things, we must not “sinfully embrace them, but bravely pass through them.”
In our battle against the snares of the devil, our most powerful weapons are “kindly mercy and bounteous charity,” Pope Leo said. However, our use of these weapons entails a continuous renunciation of avarice, the root from which “all evils” spring.
Father John Hardon defines avarice as “an excessive or insatiable desire for money or material things,” the “inordinate holding on to possessions or riches” instead of using them “for some worthwhile purpose,” and a “reluctance to let go” of what we own.
Let us “resist this pestilential evil and follow after charity,” Pope Leo says, so that “by this path of love whereby Christ came down to us, we too may mount up to him.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English.” All the materials (video and print) are available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 35, “The Beatitudes,” will be available May 16.