When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight (Acts 1:9). Rembrandt, Ascension,1636 Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord May 20 th, 2012
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11 In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning 2 until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. 3 After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over the course of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. 4 While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. This, he said, is what you have heard from me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. 6 So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel? 7 He replied, It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. 9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. 11 They said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.
Second Reading: Ephesians 1:17-23 17 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, 18 so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. 20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. Responsorial Psalm: 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9 2 For the Lord, the Most High, is awesome, a great king over all the earth. 3 He subdued peoples under us, and nations under our feet. 4 He chose our heritage for us, the pride of Jacob whom he loves. 5 God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. 6 Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. 7 For God is the king of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm. 8 God is king over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. 9 The princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham. For the shields of the earth belong to God; he is highly exalted.
Gospel Reading: Mark 16:15-20 15 And he said to them, Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. 16 The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover. 19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it. Homily Although we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord on a separate Sunday (or on a weekday in some churches), it is, in fact, not the celebration of a separate historical event because the New Testament considers it as a part of the Easter event. Time in these narratives is in Holy Time, a transcendent time that becomes puzzling if we try to interpret it too literally. We can see in the earliest Easter narratives that Jesus is already risen and ascended, and Paul thus considered his own experience occurring a couple of years later along the Road to Damascus as like these other appearances. But the later Gospel narratives seen in Luke or John separate the events to allow us to contemplate different aspects of what happened after the Crucifixion. Ascension is 40 days later, but in the early church, Ascension was not treated as though it occurred on the 40 th day. But this designation in time became a tradition that was convenient, so that we are led to think about its different aspects. Being on the 40 th day is symbolic of a time of revelation to us. It reminds us of this designation of time in other places in scripture. There was the 40 days of rain that caused Noah s flood. There s the 40 years that the Children of Israel wandered in the desert. These times of testing are part of the spiritual path on which we must journey. There are the 40 days that Moses spent on the mountain and the 40 days Christ spent in the desert being tempted by Satan. And even though today, we tend to talk about the resurrection as occurring after 3 days, the period of time in the tomb was also 40 hours. It is possible to see 40 as the time of completion of the Law, and depicting a time of waiting and preparation. It can be seen as the completion of a stage of life. If it is separate from the resurrection, we see that Ascension is depicted as taking place on Easter Sunday night or the next day in Luke 24. But in John 20, there is an unknown period of time between his appearance to Mary Magdalene who was told not to touch him because he had not yet ascended and then the subsequent appearance to Thomas
who was invited to touch him. It also takes place on a mountain, which is also symbolic. We can recall that the mountain was a place of temptation, a place where Jesus taught, and the place of the Transfiguration. In Mark, which is the Gospel in use in this cycle B, we have no separate account of the Ascension, except as inferred from what is called the longer ending of Mark, which I will describe in our study notes. And of course we don t have to speculate about what it means that heaven is up there, and we are down here. We know that the resurrection appearances couldn t go on forever, nor did they just taper off. Their end was definite. For those in Jesus time and that of the Apostles, depicting this as a definite Ascension should be understood in the light of their cosmology. They saw the cosmos over the flat earth as a solid vault of sky, above which would be God s throne. We tend to view heaven as in another dimension, a state of blessedness with God that can t be determined cosmologically. For them it was necessary for Jesus to go up there, either to vanish or to be seen as visibly disappearing. But in the scripture passages, we also see glimpses of a larger cosmology, where we experience the universe as the place of the creation and works of God, run according to God s mysterious purposes, an awesome place but not one where we are aliens in it. In the Resurrection and the Ascension, we celebrate instead God s involvement with human life, and the conflicts between human beings that threaten to obscure and disrupt God s involvement in our lives. The crucifixion was a cataclysmic event and trauma to the disciples and they were scared and disoriented, not knowing what their future held. We know that heaven is not just future-oriented but is also here and now -- God is with us. We also realize that our confidence in continuation of life on a different plane of awareness is attained through understanding that Jesus communicated a Commission and an authority to continue bringing the human family together after he left this earthly level. Some of you are old enough to recall that the Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who once ridiculed Christian belief, stating that their Cosmonauts didn t see Jesus passing by during their trips to outer space. This suggests that the cosmological assumptions of Jesus time or Khruschev s time or our own may become dated, and we miss the boat in our understanding if we get locked in to such literal interpretations. We will all experience events that are so overwhelming as to threaten loss of God s participation in our lives, and the death of Jesus was one such event and the ascension stories bring out different aspects of the truth of his survival. The celebration of Ascension does not have to do with speculations about the scientific view of ultimate reality, but our confidence in his communication that he is both here and in heaven. We learned last week that if we love him and keep his commandments accept his boundaries which are intended to keep us in his love, we belong to his community. In Acts, the view is looking forward to the future of the Church s mission in the world and not just a final return of Jesus to us. It is the mission, the salvation that we may experience that was to spread from this point forward into all the nations.
We are talking about a series of transitions and changes: The being taken up into heaven alluded to in verse 2 by the writer of Acts and and also in Luke was used as a noun in his Gospel (Luke 9:51). Scholars think it came from the Septuagint (LXX) 1 wording in 2 Kings 2:11, where Elijah was taken up in a Chariot of Fire. There was the transition from baptism with water to baptism by the Spirit. The question is then asked: When will Israel be restored? Indeed, when will we be restored? And we see that it is in the new relationship with the world by the Apostles carried forward. The event depicted of his coming in future time (parousia) was a reversal of his going (exodus, Luke 9:31). Spiritually, we go through a process analogous to that of children, who must learn that absence of the parents does not mean their non-existence. The restoration of Israel, indeed of all God s own people in our own day becomes a reality when we know the hope to which we are called, when the eyes of our hearts are enlightened and go forward with the authority we have been given by Jesus to spread his Gospel. His original disciples were humble people who must have been overwhelmed to receive his commission to go out into all the world, and the commission wasn t an abstraction, but we were asked to take on the real world and its problems. We are plunged into the life of God via our baptism, which was done in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To do something in the name of another designates us as belonging to him, and he brings us to a new way of life. We can then go out to bring new life and relationship to others which we can do only because we are promised that God is with us. The Ascension Feast is a time to realize that we do not have to be silent or inert in the face of evil in this world. We don t just sit around and either wait for some kind of disaster such as the end of the world that some seem so fond of predicting, nor only a delayed awareness, a hoped-for future heaven! He has passed beyond our sight, but he has not abandoned us, and we take his lead and follow him. 1 The Septuagint, also known as LXX is an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures.
Jesus, pray for us. We are as sure of your prayers as we are that the sun will rise tomorrow. So we ask for understanding and knowledge and courage and wisdom. We ask that you be with us all days till the end of our days. We ask your Spirit Our roots need rain. Jesus, through love, in love and with your love, let us proclaim your Gospel to every living thing. Let us cast it about in daylight and in the dark of night, from housetops mansions and cabañas, And, most of all, Let us proclaim it to ourselves. Let us write it on our hearts and minds and across our foreheads as in times of old. Let us work with you, Lord. in love, with love and through love. Amen. Prayers only. Copyright 2011, The Center for Liturgy at Saint Louis University. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.
Study Notes: 2 Long ending of the Gospel of Mark: Scholars universally agree that the earliest manuscripts of Mark ended at chapter 16:8 so the verses covered today in the Gospel are part of a later addition but nevertheless considered part of the canonical Scripture. The ending is said to be a compilation of many traditions, some of which are probably earlier than other Easter narratives available to us. The command to preach the Gospel and to baptize is in an earlier form than is found in the Gospel of Matthew, which was written later than Mark. But you can see in today s passage there is a separation between the Ascension from the Resurrection and location of other appearances. It seems to be a summary based on the end of Luke and beginning of Acts which as you know were believed to be written by the same author as a Volume 1 and Volume 2. The Jewish Commentary 3 I have been using comments that possibly it was an early version of the ending added to Mark to provide a conclusion, but most scholars think it was a pastiche of phrases from other Gospels that were added in the second century CE. They note that the following is also found in some manuscripts before verse 15: And they excused themselves, saying: This age of lawlessness and unbelief is under Satan, who does not allow the truth and power of God to prevail over the unclean things of the spirits. Therefore reveal your righteousness now thus they spoke to Christ. And Christ replied to them, The term of years of Satan s power has been fulfilled, but other terrible things draw near. And for those who have sinned I was handed over to death, that they may return to the truth and sin no more, that they may inherit the spiritual and imperishable glory of righteousness that is in heaven. The Oxford Bible Commentary notes that there are several theories about the ending of the Gospel of Mark and none of them are entirely satisfactory. Some think Mark continued with accounts of the Resurrection and the ending has been lost (by accident or deliberat4e suppression), or he was pre vented from finishing his work (e.g. by illness, or by being arrested). 4 Others believe that the ending at 16:8 was intended. But the prediction of 16:7 is of a renewed relationship with Jesus and the disciples which was fulfilled. The Gospel of Mark depicts Jesus predictions and standing as a 2 Reginald Fuller (May 20, 2012). Scripture in Depth: Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord B. St. Louis University liturgical website 3 Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler [Editors] (2011). The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation. NY: Oxford University Press. 4 John Barton and John Muddiman [Editors]. The Oxford Bible Commentary. NY: Oxford University Press, Page 921
prophet to be reliable, and thus we can believe that the continuation into the world has taken place. For Mark, Galilee is where discipleship begins and the path of discipleship goes from Galilee to Jerusalem which is the way of the cross and the place of suffering. Jesus disciples failed in his lifetime. Perhaps Christian readers of today may assume that failure will be a constant aspect of our own discipleship, but the implication is that such failure will be overcome. Perhaps Mark s abrupt ending shifts away from expectations seen in Matthew and Luke, following the Messianic Secret of the earlier parts of the Gospel, that Jesus divine Sonship is seen most clearly when he dies, a stark, unhappy ending, and the rest of the story is completed by the reader. Epistle of Ephesians: Most scholars now believe that Ephesians probably was not written by Paul himself but one of his close disciples who begins the Epistle as many of Paul s own letters, with open prayer and thanksgiving. And it is followed by a hymn exalting Christ. Fr. Reginald Fuller commented that the NT views Christ s kingship in two circles, the inner circle including the Church where he is known and acknowledged and an outer circle including the rest of the world, where his kingship is not yet realized. And going into all the world is the mission, to extend that circle.