The Feast of the Ascension of the Lord
Year C
Readings: Acts 1:1-11, Ephesians 1:17-23, Luke 24:46-53
“You are Witnesses to this.”
Today the Church celebrates the feast of the Ascension of the Lord; the feast of our Lord’s ascension to heaven. An ascension of promise; promise of sending forth the Advocate, who will teach all things that Jesus taught and will remain and strengthen His disciples. The readings of the day speak of this dramatic event and remind us of the power and support that will be given to us, just because we are His followers. And we, in turn, are invited to “witness.”
In the first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, the author, writes to Theophilus and tells how this dramatic event unfolded. The apostles must have been totally dumbfounded with the enormity of this event; no wonder they stayed gazing at the heavens, even after Jesus disappeared from their sight! The event left a lasting effect on the apostles and prepared them for the next big event that was about to unfold in their life through Pentecost.
The blessing in the second reading fills the followers of Christ with the power that we need to continue to witness to all that we have seen and experienced in Christ.
In the Gospel, we see Jesus talking to his disciples about the need of proclamation, starting from Jerusalem, to all the nations. The call of the disciples is to go forth and proclaim the good news that they had seen and experienced in Jesus. They are to preach repentance, they are to preach love and they are to witness the resurrection of Christ to all the nations. To do this, they need to be strengthened by the power that comes from God and Jesus promises this “power from on high” as He ascends to heaven. Once the disciples receive this power they are to bear witness to all that they have experienced while they lived with Jesus.
We, in turn, dear friends, are walking in the footsteps of the disciples of Jesus. We have been baptised with water and the Holy Spirit. We have been confirmed with the Holy Spirit and we have received the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. We have received these wonderful sacraments and are experiencing the work of Christ in our daily lives. So we are invited to continue to witness what we ourselves have experienced. This witnessing is not just through words, but through our everyday, genuine, Christian living. It is through our love, our care, our thirst for justice, our fight against poverty, decease and hunger, through our kind word to the needy, so on and so forth. We are invited to witness the living Christ who went against the traditional boundaries and reached out to all those who were pushed outside these walls of pure (!) religion. We are invited to witness this Christ, who did not hesitate to touch the lepers who were looked down upon by the whole society. We are invited to witness the liberating Christ, who sat with everyone, no matter what state of life one belonged to, and ate with them. We are invited to witness this dangerous Christ, who put himself in the place of a sinner and went to the cross so we all may be set free.
Dear friends, we are in a challenging situation today, where witnessing to Christ is looked down upon, but we all know that we are strengthened by the Holy Spirit, the power from on high, who guides us always. Let us take upon this power and move forward in our call of witnessing to the Lord. Amen.
As we are celebrating the Mother’s Day, I wish all the mothers and the mother-figures in our life a happy and joyful Mother’s Day. May God bless you every day in your witnessing.