Homily from the Parish Priest for the Feast of the Ascension
We are all called to some definite service. Words of St John Henry Newman which I believe hold as much significance to us today as when they were first written in the 19th century. In fact I think especially poignant as we begin to move out of the pandemic and listen to what it’s saying to us personally, to our Church and to our world. This, as Pope Francis keeps saying, is a change of era, not just an era of change, and we are called, every one of us, to discern and discover to what we are called as humanity, to learn from this time and to rebuild. And called – called by God from all eternity as part of God’s plan.
Today’s great Feast of the Ascension is one which speaks to us of our Christian vocation in two interconnected spheres: the sphere of our life on this earth and the sphere of our call to the next life. As we are invited to ask ourselves those existential questions about the meaning of life. This was how the disciples were challenged on this day. The words of the angel in the First Reading from Acts echoes in our Christian community today. “Why are you men from Galilee standing here looking into the sky?” - indeed why are you here on earth at all? We are here on this earth because God willed it to be so but he made us in his own image and likeness so we could give him glory through the risen Christ now living in us. “Go out to the whole world”, he tells us in the Gospel we hear today, “proclaim the Good News to all creation”. The Second Reading from Ephesians sheds light on what that might mean. Through the wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit promised to his first apostles and to us, sealed now in our baptism, we are called to proclaim the salvation made possible through his death and resurrection. We are all called just as we are. And of course that may be far from easy right now. The experience of loneliness, loss of jobs and livelihoods, bereavement, is so much part of the experience of this last year. Yet our lives, in their complexity and tragedy too, are for a singular purpose as part of God’s plan for our world. This calling indeed joins us together in our interconnectedness with each other and with our planet.
Yet there is another dimension, that of the call to the next life. As the Second Vatican Council document Lumen Gentium (‘Light of the Peoples’) teaches, we are, above all, called to holiness, to glory, to our destiny in heaven. As Pope Benedict put it so succinctly in a homily he gave on this feast day a few years ago, the deeper question the apostles are asking now, in their grief that Jesus is removed from their sight, is surely: “is this all there is? Is this earth on which ‘we stand’ our final destiny?” As such the Word of God we hear today throws out a particular challenge to us if we think deeply about our Christian faith because it gets to the very heart of who we really are: that is the importance of our common heavenly call – as we are God’s adopted children, beloved by him, and we are called in Christ and through the Spirit to be given to us once more, to orient ourselves towards heaven.
We stand with the apostles today gazing on as the Lord is taken from our sight but let us not look back. Let us pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit so we may look forward to living out our faith authentically, confidently and prophetically in our so fast changing culture today. And in these days of Ascensiontide, as we prepare for that wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, can we rekindle that confident faith which alone gives ultimate meaning to our lives as pilgrims on this journey of life? Can our faith speak to our soul, mind, and heart, of what for us Christians is most real and makes sense of our fragile lives on this fragile planet graced by God in ways we are called to uncover and celebrate anew?
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ