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

One of the basic narratives of the Christian faith has always been that humanity’s fallenness has been redeemed through Christ’s death and resurrection; in the sense that the wrongs have been repaired and the damages accounted for. Yet we all know, acknowledge and experience that all sorts of wrongs are still there and that all sorts of distortions that disfigure the face of humanity still hold their ground.

Redemption is still under way and much of what gives shape to creation, to our lives, and to the fate of humanity on planet Earth rests within our own responsibility, personal and collective. It is not the case here to enter into thorny and old theological disquisitions as to what extent this project rests on God’s power and grace or on our workings. Perhaps there is a demarcation line. Or it may be there isn’t.

The readings from Acts and Matthew today portray this very issue in terms of our “staring into the sky” awaiting things to come ready-made from up and the so-called great commission that Jesus gave to the disciples gathered in Galilee to “go and make disciples”. There is nothing magical about the Christian religion. We are not born disciples or Christians just because we are born in a Christian culture.

Today’s feast of the Ascension highlights the shift from the time of Christ to the time of the Church. St Augustine, in his Confessions, puts it very clearly: “He departed from our sight, so that we should turn to our hearts and find him there”. This is, in a nutshell, the mission of our churches in time: to facilitate the turn to our hearts. Because it is in the heart that the seed of God’s kingdom was placed. It is in the heart that it can germinate and come to fruition.

Sadly enough, very often we mistook the Gospel for a blueprint of how society should be. Our efforts were always addressed from the outside towards the inside, believing that Christ sent his disciples to transform the world into a Church. But it was meant to be the other way round. We always thought that a Christian environment creates and generates Christians. Today we acknowledge that the outcome of that was a cultural Christianity, with nominal Christians but not disciples.

We can no longer dream of a Christian society. We can only dream of Christians whose discipleship impacts on society. In a powerfully symbolic language, St Paul in the second reading speaks of “the strength of God’s power at work in Christ”, he who “puts all things under his feet as ruler of everything”.

This language needs to be decoded to understand and grasp better how God’s power in Christ still manifests itself in today’s world in the face of the powers of evil that very often seem to take over. Paul himself speaks also of the spirit of wisdom and perception that we need so much in order to come to a reading in depth of the happenings around us.

It is so easy for us mortals to run out of hope and patience and, like the disciples, keep asking when is the time. But God has no deadlines. His kingdom can only be restored in the hearts of people, not culturally or in any other form of the old Christendom. The restoration of God’s kingdom can never be dreamt of in terms of a return to the past. The “sky” language indicates a world radically different from the one we know, because we actually belong to God.

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