Go Therefore and Make Disciples

"Go, therefore,
and make disciples"



June 2 - Ascension of the Lord



The liturgy for this Sunday is very beautiful and detailed but perhaps we don't appreciate it as much as we should. In a sense the Ascension is a sort of anti- limax: the excitement of Easter and the Resurrection is over and the Master slips away leaving his followers at a considerable loss - little did they anticipate what would happen on the first Pentecost Sunday!


St. Luke gives us the First Reading, a continuation of his Gospel ("the first book"). The Lord explains what is going to happen "in a few days," but - true to form - those who are with him ignore that bit of information and get back to their old theme: "when are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel"? Some people never learn and among these are the disciples. All they want is a great earthly kingdom to be established by the marvellous Man from Galillee ... in which they will have the top jobs. Only the coming of the Spirit will straighten out their thinking - and not even then - they finally accepted a spiritual kingdom but wanted it to be exclusively for Jews!


The Responsorial Psalm needs no special explanation but one hopes that the local choir will sing something on these lines and not some inapplicable piece of music. The music people can make for a beautiful celebration or a very distracting one. The Second Reading finds St. Paul in one of his more serene Letters, telling the Ephesians who Jesus was and what was his final destiny: to be with the Father forever in the supreme position of power and glory. It seems self-evident to us now but the Ephesians - like all Paul's other converts - had to strain somewhat to understand exactly who this Jesus was. I often try to imagine the expression on the faces of his listeners as Paul told them of the remarkable powers of the Master . . . but had to confess that he had died, crucified. But why ... if he were so powerful? St. Paul would have replied in terms familiar to us today and quoted in the Reading . . . but what did the Ephesians (and all the others) think? Our admiration grows for our holy Patron who came up daily against this lack of understanding.


The Gospel, as given, seems obvious enough. But if you take up your copy of St. Matthew you will see that it does not follow immediately from the preceding text which in fact brings us back to the first Easter Sunday. Actually this is also true of Mark and Luke where the time element of the Lord's appearance and farewell varies considerably though the broad outlines are the same. Even Luke's Gospel condenses events like the others and this explains why he goes over the same ground but more thoroughly in his "Acts" - as we have just mentioned in the First Reading.