Today’s readings: Acts 1, 1-11; Ephesians 1, 17-23; Mark 16, 15-20.
It must have been rather frustrating for the Apostles and early Christians to believe in Jesus all the way through, expecting at last to see their dream come true, and then all of a sudden to see it sort of postponed. The aftermath of his death and their experience of him risen was now generating confusion in their minds and hearts.
What would now become of them, of the message they received, of what they had believed in? It took them quite some time to start realising what was about to happen and how they were to manage it. Their mission was not just communicating a message, and their message did not consist of words. Their language was basically a sign language. This was actually one of the major challenges facing the early Church and it is still a major crisis facing the Church today. It is a crisis of signs.
St Mark’s account of the ascension today brings his gospel to a close, highlighting the ‘signs’ that accompanied and confirmed the word proclaimed. The signs were what made the Church’s proclamation credible. If there is no inner healing, there is no forgiveness of sins. If the body of Christ is still wounded and suffering in marginalised people, there cannot be a Eucharistic sign of Christ’s presence.
The Church is made up of people, and people who inhabit the world, marked as it is with abuse, violence, lack of justice, indifference. The fact in itself that one believes in God does not make one immune in the face of all evils imaginable. Yet the promise of Jesus is that faith can be a gradual immunisation process: “They will pick up snakes in their hands, and be unharmed should they drink deadly poison.”
We tend to measure any crisis of belief mainly in terms of attendance, decreasing or increasing numbers, and the remedies we seek are mainly in terms of better marketing strategies. Perhaps the issue is much deeper. We do not realise enough that we still use signs and language, in our liturgies, for example, or in the celebration of the sacraments, that no longer connect with people because they do not signify what they are meant to bring to people’s lives.
In his Real Presences, George Steiner writes amply about this. He does not limit God’s presence to the Holy Scriptures or to the Eucharist. God’s presence is, for him, clearly and directly present even in great works of art. The Church’s main task in the world is not to make God present here and now but to discern the signs of His presence wherever that can be discernible.
The fact that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ means, first and foremost, that God entered history, that he subjected himself to time and space, that he identified himself specifically with a culture and a people. But being God, he could not remain bound to all this, as if possessed by one people or one religion. His exodus from the world, the feast of ascension we celebrate today, stands for his universality.
When we say ‘the sky is the limit’, we actually mean there is no limit. God is God, imaginable yet beyond imagination, capable of incarnation yet an infinite spirit.
St Mark’s gospel today, as well as the account from Acts, function to legitimise the ongoing messianic practice of the community. Jesus’s ascension into heaven is in no way advocating non-involvement. His arrest and crucifixion continue to this day in the living and dying of so many. His resurrection represents the apocalyptic hope that the blood of the martyrs will be vindicated and the pain of the world healed.
This hope is marvellously articulated by Guatemalan exile, Julia Esquivel, in a poem entitled They have Threatened Us with Resurrection: “There is something here within us which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest, which doesn’t stop pounding deep inside. It is the silent, warm weeping of Indian women without their husbands. What keeps us from sleeping is that they have threatened us with resurrection! Because at each nightfall, though exhausted from the endless inventory of killings, yet we continue to live life, and do not accept their death!”