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In the name of the Father, of the Son and of
the Holy Ghost.
During the Last Supper our Lord Jesus Christ
told His disciples that separation was near, that He was to
ascend to His God and to His Father as He would repeat again to
the women who came to the grave. And when their hearts were
filled with sorrow at the thought that they will not see Him
again, He said, “Your hearts are full with sorrow and yet, you
should rejoice for Me that I am returning to My Father. But I
will not,” he added, “leave you orphan, I will send you the Holy
Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, whom I will send to you
and who will teach you all things.” And so do we here now while
we are still in the light of the Ascension.
St. Paul grieved about the necessity of
living in the world and in the flesh. He said, “To me life is
Christ and death would be a gain, a blessing, because as long as
we are in the flesh, we are separated from Christ.” And yet,
this separation is not total, we are not separated irremediably,
we are not separated desperately from Christ if we only long for
Him, if we only love Him as St. Paul who longed to die to be
inseparably forever with Him. Because according to the promise
the Holy Spirit has come on the day of Pentecost, the Holy
Spirit whom we call the Comforter by a word, which in ancient
languages has a much wider meaning. It means the one who
consoles, the one who gives strength, the one who brings joy.
His presence indeed can console us from our separation from
Christ because the Holy Spirit, if we only live according to the
Gospel, if we become not only in word or in imagination but in
all truth, in action and in thought, in our heart and in our
being disciples of Christ, the Holy Spirit dwells in us. We
become His temples and He speaks to us either in unutterable
groaning or with that wonderful clarity that allows us to call
‘Father’ the God of Heaven because in Christ and by the power of
the Spirit we have become the children of the Living God.
So the separation from Christ is a separation
in space, it is the loss of that moving, wonderful contact of
humanity as we know it on earth but it is the beginning of a new
discovery of Christ, the Christ not only risen but ascended, the
Christ who according to today’s Gospel is resplendent with the
glory, the shining that belonged to Him before all ages, the
shining, the resplendence, the splendour of Divinity. And it is
this Christ whom we meet in prayer, whom we discover through and
in the Holy Sacraments, to whom we can get united only by a
faithfulness in life, it is this Christ of whom Paul speaks when
he says, “We no longer know Christ according to the flesh”. We
do not touch Him as Thomas did, we do not hear and see Him as
Apostles and the women, and all crowds of people did, but we
know the Christ of the Spirit, the risen and ascended Christ,
who is everywhere where two or three are gathered together, who
is everywhere when a lonely soul cries for Him, when a life is
being dedicated to Him.
And so we are confronted with this mystery of
a separation, which is a victory, a separation, which leads us
to a new knowledge, to a new discovery of Christ. His Divinity
is no longer veiled for us by His human presence, He is revealed
to us as God resplendent not only in His Godhead but also in His
humanity. And so it happens also all the time when people meet
on a human level and then discover one another in the Holy
Spirit, a discovery that makes humanity resplendent with
eternity.
Let us rejoice in the Ascension but also let
us remember that in a week’s time we will stand here remembering
the day of Pentecost, not only remember it as an event of the
past but bringing it back by presenting ourselves to the descent
of the Holy Spirit as the Apostles offered themselves to Him in
the Upper Room nearly 2,000 years ago. But to do this we must be
disciples of Christ, we must be His own, we must be faithful to
the word of His preaching, we must follow the example which He
gave us, we must truly be in the world in which we live an
incarnate presence of Christ and a temple of the Spirit, a
vanguard of the Kingdom.
Let us devote the coming week to preparing
ourselves by searching our lives, by rejecting at least in
intention and determination all that is unworthy of our calling.
Let us prepare ourselves to come open, empty - to be filled with
the Spirit, so that we truly may be also in an ever-increasing
way become the temples of His presence. Amen.
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