Homilies

SOLEMNITY OF THE LORD'S ASCENSION: A "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" FOR CHRIST

IT IS STILL quite common today for children to follow the footsteps of their parents when it comes to choosing their profession. This happens to some because of the children’s admiration to what their parents have accomplished.  What the parents achieve, the children also aspire to reach. Certainly, parents would be overjoyed and proud to see their children following their path.  One would hear them saying ‘I have entrusted my business to my son or daughter,” or “I pass on to them the baton of my success.  Now is their time to build a business empire for themselves.”

We celebrate today the Solemnity of Christ’s Ascension.  Here, we will not discuss the where and the how of Christ’s Ascension, although, we had been taught that Christ ascended to heaven. Yet where is heaven?  Is it up there where the disciples where looking?  Rather, we should look for the meaning of this event. Christ’s Ascension to the Father is His glorification, for he has fulfilled the task given Him by the Father. The Lord’s Ascension is part of the Paschal Mystery – the life, suffering and death, and the Resurrection of our Lord.  Therefore, His ascent to the Father is the affirmation of the mission He has accomplished – the salvation of humanity.  With His coming, the promise of the reign of the Kingdom of God has begun and through His Resurrection we have become sharers of that Kingdom. 

Jesus passed on to his disciples the ‘baton,’ that is, the responsibility of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  He commissioned them to continue the work He had begun.  In the First Reading, Jesus tells His disciples to be His witnesses to the ends of the world.  In the Gospel, He tells them to be His teachers to the nations.  As he commissioned them, He also enjoins us today to do the same.  On this feast of the Ascension, we are commissioned by our Lord Himself… “Go and make disciples of all nations”.  We can do this by simply becoming the person that God meant us to be.  We can become witnesses and teachers of God’s message in our homes, in our work, in our school, in our neighborhood.  This is the simple message of the Feast of Christ’s Ascension: it is to make the mission of Christ as our mission and carry it out wherever we are.

The Ascension of Christ is not a commemoration of His departure.  The Gospel clearly tells us that He remains always with us ‘until the end of age’, though in a different way, no longer as a visible and tangible person in flesh and blood, but surely present with us, in the hearts of those who manifest His love to others.  He ascended to the Father and at the same time we are now being sent to follow the way that He has gone.  It is therefore a feast where we are called upon to recognize our Christian responsibility, our calling, our vocation.  It is a celebration where we are called upon to recognize Christ as the ‘driving force’ of our everyday lives.  He is giving us the task to continue His mission of love to the world.  This mission He came to fulfill with His own words and deeds, hopefully with his inspiration, will be done by us through our own words and deeds.  This is the mission we still need to accomplish. AMEN.

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