You’ve heard the advice: when you have the right information, you can easily make the right decision. Let me illustrate with a story.
One night, the captain of a ship at sea saw what looked like the lights of another ship heading directly toward him. He had his signalman blink: “Change your course 10 degrees south.”
A reply came: “Change your course 10 degrees north.”
The captain answered: “I’m a captain. Change your course.”To which the reply was: “I am a seaman first class. Change your course.”
That infuriated the captain, so he signaled back: “I say change course. I’m on a battleship!” The reply was: “Change your course. I’m in a lighthouse.”
Yes, with the right information, we can easily decide what to do. And if we grasp our true purpose in life, we can begin to shape our attitudes and behaviors in light of that purpose.
Now we celebrate the one Easter Mystery under different aspects during these forty-some days: first, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, gloriously alive; today, his ascension to His and our heavenly Father; and next Sunday, Pentecost or the descent of the Spirit of God upon the disciples in Jerusalem.
The death, resurrection, ascension, and descent are all different aspects of the one Paschal or Easter Mystery, the passage of Jesus from this earthly life through death into a new, transfigured, heavenly reality. This Jesus, gloriously alive, anticipates our own future. Yes, one day God also will transform us into a new kind of spiritual embodiment.
The ascension that we celebrate today is Jesus’s final leave-taking from the disciples so something awesome can happen: the descent of the Spirit on Pentecost.
Yes, Jesus Christ is gloriously alive among us, ever active through the power of the Spirit.
In today's word, the ascension connects the Gospel of Luke and the book of the Acts. The Gospel signals the close of Jesus’s earthly ministry, and Acts heralds the beginning of the Church's ministry, yours and mine, proclaiming that Jesus is gloriously alive and that because He lives, we live forever.
Paul in his letter to the community at Ephesus prays that we will grow in wisdom and enlightenment so that we will engage more eagerly in Jesus's saving ministry. Jesus, Paul writes, is indeed the head of the church, the mystical Body of Christ, the community of disciples, called to herald the good news and wash the feet of our fellow human beings in service.
In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus tells the disciples, who are eye witnesses to his death and resurrection, that He will send the promise of God, the Spirit, to them so that they and future disciples can continue the ministry of Jesus until he comes again at the end-time to transform this universe into a new, indescribable reality. And then Jesus is taken up into heaven; and the joyful disciples are filled with hope.
That’s my theme for today: hope. Hope is a confident anticipation of something yet to come. Pope emeritus Benedict XVI captured its meaning magnificently in his encyclical Saved by Hope. This hope looks forward to seeing God as God really is—face-to-face.
Hope looks for the good, instead of harping on the worst.
Hope discovers what can be done instead of grumbling about what can't.
Hope propels us forward when it would be easy to quit.
History is filled with people who have kept hope alive: Churchill, Gandhi and Mandela, to name but three in the last century. One of my favorites is Helen Keller, writer, lecturer, and inspiration to many. Helen overcame physical obstacles that most of us can’t imagine. Here is a thought of hers that reminds me of the Easter mystery and the hopes of the disciples. Helen wrote,
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
Helen Keller also observed, “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an unchartered land or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.” Yes, with a positive can-do spirit, we too can discover a world of possibilities.
Hope points to the future. We all are fascinated with the future. What will it be like? We see change everywhere: political, economic, technological, scientific, and religious. People want to know what will happen before it actually happens. I suppose that's why so many psychics are thriving. But sometimes, we may not like what is unfolding before us. And so, how react?
There is only one Christian response to the future: hope. We are forever seeking to reach beyond ourselves for that which is to come, to go beyond the here and now. Think about it. How many here may be waiting to hear me say “The Mass is ended. Go in peace.”
For many philosophers, hope expresses what human existence is all about. Images of hope weave in and out of the bible. Initially, the hopes of the ancient Hebrews were concrete: land, offspring, peace and prosperity. When their hopes were dashed with the fall of the Southern Kingdom in the sixth century BC, God began to build new and better hopes for them—a Messianic era, a Messiah.
The New Testament is rooted and grounded in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is our hope. At the very core of Christianity is the central reality that Jesus appeared alive to the disciples after his death. The tomb was empty. He suddenly and unexpectedly appeared and then disappeared, in Jerusalem and Galilee.
This risen Christ anticipates God’s future for all of us. By virtue of the life-giving waters of baptism, we begin now to experience that future—life in relationship with God forever.
Christian hope is the conviction that the universe in which we live has an ultimate purpose, that Jesus Christ in his Second Coming will bring to completion the process of transformation inaugurated in his resurrection.
This hope challenges us to do everything we can now to usher in that future: always to be in relationship with God and in relationship with one another as compassionate, generous, forgiving and fair human beings. Above all, this hope challenges us to reach out to that which alone is of everlasting value—the human person, the image of God, no matter how unkempt the appearance. In the end, all hope will be realized when the risen Christ, by the power of the Spirit, hands over the universe, transformed at the end of time, to his heavenly Father.
May God fill us with hope in our future, this Ascension Day, and every day of our lives.
