Readings:
Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9
Ephesians 1:17-23
Matthew 28:16-20

Although Easter exceeded the expectations of Jesus’ first followers, it made perceiving Christ’s presence a persistent problem. Anticipating the anointing of a corpse, women confront emptiness and absence at the tomb; the body they hoped to clutch arose ahead of their arrival. Encounters ensue with the Risen One until his Ascension into heaven exacerbates the sense of separation again. Afterward, his disciples, then and now, are invited to be worshipers, waiters, and worldly workers.

Worship was the first instinct of the disciples assembled to witness the Ascension. Matthew’s Gospel reports that, upon seeing Jesus, “they worshiped, but they doubted.” We, too, are allowed to worship while doubts remain, while what is happening in our world sometimes shakes our confidence that God is in control, that Jesus has already overcome the world at its worst, that the Spirit still moves amid chaos to renew the face of the earth. As Christians, we bear now in our own bodies the faith of those first witnesses to Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, the faith professed and bestowed at our baptism as the living inheritance of a Church over which death has no power anymore. The coincidence of the impulse to worship a God whose revelation we do not fully understand and nagging doubts about the truthfulness of what has become untouchable need not disturb us. We can keep beginning again as befuddled beholders, going through the motions with other bodies doing the same thing until together we begin to realize, to make real for others and for ourselves, the paradoxical presence of Christ in the midst of an assembly that prays and sings where even just two or three gather together in Christ’s name (see Sacrosanctum Concilium 7). Even if with all our straining we cannot see with earthly eyes Christ seated at God’s right hand in the heavens, what we can see and be is the part of Christ’s body that remains, the Church that is “the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.” Christ is the head of a body that still worships, waits, and works until he returns in the same way as those first witnesses saw him go away.

Wait, Jesus says before he goes, for “the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak.” Unlike those first disciples, we have already been baptized with the Holy Spirit. Still, we sometimes need a fresh infusion of the Holy Spirit’s activation energy to engage the demands of our days and the loads of our lives as we rise to meet the ongoing invitation to embody the paschal pattern begun in baptism. The prayer the second reading plants in us is that this willed waiting will be rewarded with a perspective shift that draws us from wistful watching after a departing Christ, whose future it is not yet our time to fully share, and from worrying over our apparent (but not actual) abandonment. This Spirit of wisdom and revelation leads us into knowledge of God now. With the eyes of our hearts enlightened by the Spirit, we know the hope of answering God’s call, and, again, “the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power” made manifest already in Christ’s resurrection and ascension. Christ has conquered, glory fills us, and what we biding beholders cannot always boldly believe we can easily experience through the abundant graces the Spirit bestows on our siblings in Christ, ones who still surround us with the promise of Christ’s continuing presence among us.^[1] The Spirit energizes Christ’s body to manage its mission in the world.

Now, there is work to do. “Go,” Jesus says, “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” The identity we are blessed to bear is meant to share. We are compelled, as Christians, to mediate the mystery of Christ’s perplexing yet palpable presence. We have heard Jesus speaking about the kingdom of God, for “it is [Christ] Himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church” [SC 7], and we have tasted the sacrament that is our daily bread and a foretaste of our heavenly homeland, an intensification and extension of Christ’s real presence through time and space. We practice proclaiming this presence, progressively yet persistently, and let the Holy Spirit’s power work through our witness. What blessed beholders we are, lovers of God and beloved by God, of Christ’s parting promise: “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” Through word and sacrament, in the community’s charisms and care, we worshipers, waiters, and worldly workers rediscover Christ who came to us and never really left.

Anne McGowan
Associate Professor of Liturgy

^[1] Communities proclaiming the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (John 17:1-11a) hear Jesus make a similar point, praying to God: “I have been glorified in them. And now I will no longer be in the world, but they are in the world, while I am coming to you.”