Mission accomplished

The Church today celebrates Our Lord's Ascension into Heaven, which prepares us for the solemnity of Pentecost next Sunday, thus concluding the Easter season of her liturgy.

After completing the mission assigned to him by the Father, Jesus is now ready in his humanity to return home to his Father in Heaven. We gather from today's reading that he is now feeling a sense of 'homesickness', as much as we ourselves would after saying good bye to all our friends with whom we may have spent three full years, teaching them and sharing our joys and sorrows with them.

We see this sense of nostalgia clearly expressed in today's Gospel, where we read that Jesus, before ascending into Heaven, addressed a moving prayer to the Father in the presence of the disciples. "I have made your name known to the men whom you have entrusted to me, chosen out of the world... They belonged to you, Father, and have become mine through your gift".

How would we have felt if we had been there instead of Christ, knowing that we were never to see our closest friends again? What is astounding is the fact that Jesus, after all, was to 'remain' with them in any case, not in a visible way, but through the eyes of faith. Then Jesus went on praying to the Father in these words: "It is for them that I pray. They belong to me... and in them my glory is achieved'."

All is set by now for Jesus to take the final leap and ascend to Heaven, leaving the community of his disciples and his other followers deprived of his visible presence.

This scene, not quite describable by human words, is presented to us in the Gospel of St Matthew in the form of a stupendous tableau, as it were.

Jesus is in the midst of them for the last time, imparting to them his final instructions for the accomplishment of their new mission: "Go and teach all nations and baptise them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them everything that I have taught you".

Then, after assuring them that he would remain invisibly with them till the end of time, he disappeared from their sight.

Our Lord's promise has come true and we see it verified to this day. The friends he was leaving behind soon developed into a community, the Christian community which is the Church, which soon began to grow fast and to establish itself in that part of the world and eventually throughout the whole world. As Christians we belong to this community, and each one of us is called to do his part, no matter how small and apparently insignificant, in order to carry Christ's message and give witness to him in all we say and do, spreading it in the little world around us and throughout the whole world.

This is, we can say, the great mystery of our faith: Christ has ascended into heaven, and yet he has remained with us and will remain in the Church to the end of time. While this is something which we fail to understand, it is nonetheless the object of our Christian faith.

It is therefore up to us to go on living it, giving witness to it in all our thoughts and actions. This challenge is addressed to each one of us today: we are to give our contribution, no matter how small, in order to build a better world and give it a soul: the belief in the abiding presence of Jesus Christ and in his salvific message.