Today’s readings: Acts 1, 1-11; Ephesians 1, 17-23; Matthew 28, 16-20.

In his first exhortation, Pope Francis speaks of a new “missionary style”, not imposing, not excluding, concentrating on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most appealing and at the same time most necessary. He speaks of the Church’s missionary transformation, seeing evangelisation as taking place “in obedience to the missionary mandate of Jesus” as expressed in today’s gospel. That mandate is first and foremost to make disciples.

The need for a new style of mission must be taken seriously. There are signs today that we no longer seem to be living in the grips of a culture which had as its foundation the claim that ‘God is dead’. Gradually we seem to be emerging from that phase and heading towards a new phase that in spite of all appearances is marking our age. There are experts who way back had hailed secularisation as here to stay and who today claim that what really is in crisis is secularisation itself and not faith.

It must have been a difficult task for the early Christians to proclaim as Lord someone who had been condemned and killed as an outcast. It must have been hard for the communities Matthew is addressing with his gospel to believe and proclaim that Jesus of Nazareth was given “all authority in heaven and on earth” when the same Jesus of Nazareth had been so ridiculed and considered to be a criminal.

What made the early Church so powerful as to claim and uphold truths that in the mainstream were considered anathema? At a time when we lack cultural supports in the world, what is it that can give us such power as to proclaim the same victory, salvation, and redemption with the same force of persuasion?

For the early Christians, belief in the ascension of the Lord signified belief in his glorification, meaning that all prophecies and promises of old were seen as fulfilled in him. They gave a cosmic rendering of their faith, attributing to Jesus messianic titles that go back to Old Testament Judaism. Today it may sound anachronistic or mythological to speak in terms of heaven and earth, or of someone being taken up into heaven. So we need to find different ways of expressing the same truths as, for example, when we speak of the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Paul in the second reading speaks of the “spirit of wisdom and perception of what is revealed” that brings us to full knowledge of him. The issue of style and language in our missionary mandate is most crucial at a time when the traditional ways of teaching and learning are being challenged and when a deepening is called for both at the level of questions and at the level of answers.

The mandate of the Church in the world, strictly speaking, is not to teach and preach but to make disciples, because it is only in discipleship that we can listen to the Spirit. It is only as disciples that we can learn how to navigate in the midst of all the powers that claim authority on us. And before we come to confess the lordship of Jesus, we have first to acknowledge the many powers that can be so dominating in daily life and in the choices we make.

We need a different form of teaching and a different way of learning. Discipleship puts us all on one and the same footing in the face of God’s mystery and of the mystery of our existence. It is the Spirit who gradually, along the way empowers through his revealing wisdom. We read today from Acts that a cloud had taken him from their sight. So many ‘clouds’ can take God away from our sight and veil the true sense of our being.

Our religion may very easily make us simply stare into the sky, expecting who knows what from above. Commenting on the ascension in his Confessions, St Augustine writes: “He withdrew from our eyes that we might return to our own heart to find him”. It is only a new missionary style that can keep us in tune with the Spirit of wisdom that our age needs because, as Pope Francis warns in The Joy of the Gospel, “If this invitation does not radiate forcefully and attractively, the edifice of the Church’s moral teaching risks becoming a house of cards, and this is our greatest risk”.

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