Thursday, May 29, 2025

Ascension of the Lord – Year C

Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

1st reading: Acts 1,1-11

Psaume : 46 (47),2-3 6-7,8-9

2rd reading: Hebrews 9,24:28-10,19; 23:XNUMX-XNUMX

Gospel: Luke 24,46:53-XNUMX

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The Feast of the Ascension makes us turn our eyes resolutely toward Heaven, toward the homeland. It is a word that often recurs in the writings of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus: the Homeland or Heaven. And I was happy to hear this word, homeland, from the mouth of Pope Leo XIV, on the very evening of his election. He said:

“I am a son of Saint Augustine, an Augustinian, who said: ‘With you, I am a Christian, and for you, I am a bishop.’ In this sense, we can all walk together towards the homeland that God has prepared for us.”

It is she who gives meaning to our entire existence. We are not “walkers” in life, we are “high mountain climbers” walking towards the summit. We know where we are going. We know our vocation. We know our purpose.

The fullness of human life, the flourishing of human life, is holiness, it is sharing the life of God, it is being totally a child of God, it is being with the eternal Son of the eternal Father in the very heart of the Holy Trinity, it is entering into the fullness of life, of love, of joy… we are made for this! And if we lose sight of Heaven, our life no longer has meaning.

The day after his election, Leo XIV, again, said this:

Even today, there are many contexts in which the Christian faith is considered an absurd thing, for weak and unintelligent people; contexts in which other values ​​are preferred to it, such as technology, money, success, power, pleasure.

These are environments where it is not easy to bear witness to and proclaim the Gospel, and where those who believe are mocked, fought against, despised, or at best tolerated and pitied. And yet, precisely because of this, they are places where the mission is urgently needed, because the lack of faith often leads to tragedies such as the loss of the meaning of life, the forgetting of mercy, the violation of the dignity of the person in its most dramatic forms, the crisis of the family, and so many other wounds from which our society, and beyond, suffers.

When there is no more Heaven, when there is no more Savior or salvation, when the horizon is the cemetery, then, when it becomes too hard, one must put to death, and it is important that the law proclaims this. This is where we are… (You can look in the Gospel of Saint John for whom Jesus calls the “liar,” the “father of lies,” “a murderer from the beginning.”) And the Pope thus invites us, following in the footsteps of all his predecessors, to continue to live and proclaim the Gospel.

Today's readings strongly encourage us to do this, in particular the words of the Lord in the Acts of the Apostles: “You will be baptized in the Holy Spirit in a few days. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”.

I open a parenthesis: if there are among you baptized people who are not confirmed, who have not received the sacrament of Confirmation, you go see your priest very quickly and you say to him: "Mr. Priest, I am in the same state as a loaf of bread that is not baked. Can I be baked in the fire of the Holy Spirit by receiving the sacrament of Confirmation, please?" Baptism calls for the sacrament of Confirmation and I truly urge all those who have not received this beautiful sacrament, which gives the fullness of the gift of the Holy Spirit, to receive it without delay.

We are therefore called—and we heard this a few Sundays ago—by Christ. We are instituted by Christ to bear fruit and for this fruit to remain. The witness we have to give to the Lord is not primarily a word, it is primarily a life: a life transformed by the Lord. If we have, in one way or another, experienced the living presence of Christ Jesus in our lives, if we have experienced his mercy, if we have experienced salvation in one way or another, we cannot keep it to ourselves. Pope Francis said this very clearly in his Encyclical on the Joy of the Gospel:

Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Jesus Christ; we no longer say that we are "disciples" and "missionaries," but always that we are "missionary disciples." If we are not convinced of this, let us look at the first disciples, who immediately, after recognizing the gaze of Jesus, went out full of joy to proclaim: "We have found the Messiah" (Jn 1,41:XNUMX).The gospel of joy No. 120) What is asked of us is not to make speeches, but to live the Gospel; what is asked of us is to truly be disciples of Jesus: then the Gospel will become visible in our lives. It is not because I am going to speak first of all about Jesus, it is first of all because people will notice: look, such and such a person never speaks ill of their neighbor; look, such and such a person, how is it that they take care of the least of them? Look, such and such a person is faithful in marriage to the end, even though their spouse has left them. And we could have a very long list of examples... Paul VI in his exhortation on the proclamation of the Gospel, Evangelii nuntiandi, in number 21, which I invite you to read up to number 24, describes this whole process of evangelization which begins with the testimony of life: why does this person live like this? Why does he live differently?

In this feast of the Ascension, we have our gaze turned towards the Fatherland, towards Heaven, and at the same time our gaze turned towards our world. This world of which Jesus said to Nicodemus: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (Jn 3,16:XNUMX). If we have experienced Christ the Savior, how can we not desire that those who do not know him discover him and have this same experience of salvation, of a joy that has a flavor that nothing can equal in the joys of this earth? The feast of the Ascension is a moment in the liturgical year, but, ultimately, every Sunday, the first day of the week, brings us back to that point where we raise our eyes once again to the Heaven toward which we are walking, and we welcome the Lord who makes this Heaven present. As Thérèse writes in this beautiful poem, "Your face is my only homeland," the presence of the Lord makes the Kingdom manifest, makes Heaven manifest in our midst:

Your Face is my only Homeland

She is my Kingdom of love

She is my smiling Meadow

My sweet daily Sun (PN 20§3)

In the Lord, heaven is present. Learning to live with the Lord is learning to live in Heaven. And in another poem, Thérèse will speak of love as the fire of the Fatherland:

Love, this fire of the Fatherland

Keep consuming me. (PN 45§7)

Learning to love as Jesus loves is already living from the Fatherland, it is already living the grace of the Kingdom, it is like anticipating Heaven, it is making Heaven present on earth... On condition that this love is truly in imitation of that of Jesus. “Love one another as I loved you" (Jn 13,34:XNUMX) says the Lord.

This Sunday on which Pope John Paul II wrote a magnificent letter Dies Domini — which I invite you to read if you have never done so. At one point in this letter, he speaks of Sunday as the “day of hope”:

If Sunday is the day of faith, it is no less the day of Christian hope. Participation in the “Lord’s Supper” is in fact an anticipation of the eschatological banquet for the “marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19,9:38). By celebrating the memorial of Christ, risen and ascended into heaven, the Christian community is in expectation “that this blessed hope may be realized: the coming of Jesus Christ, our Savior. (No. XNUMX) The prayer that amplifies the last petition of the Our Father in the Mass has an eschatological aim, that is to say, it looks to the end of time. It is in the coming of the Lord in glory, in this second coming, in the completion of all things that we will be free from all sin, that we will be safe from any test. And it is in this hope that we move forward. And because of this hope, which is founded in God's mercy, we cannot be afraid of tomorrow, we cannot let ourselves worry about tomorrow: we know that the Lord is victorious. We sang this in the Easter sequence: life and death confront each other in a tragic duel, but it is life that prevails and it is the living Christ who is victorious! (Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando, Dux vitae mortuus, regnat vivus.)

This is what we are witnesses to. If Pope Francis wanted us to be "witnesses of hope" in this Holy Year by walking in this hope, it is because our world is sorely lacking in it.

May this feast of the Ascension nourish our courage.

May we move forward resolutely towards Heaven, our Homeland, move forward together and bring with us those among whom we live.

Therese rejoices when she sees that it is written: Draw me, we will run.

And Therese said:

O Jesus, it is not even necessary to say: "As you draw me, draw the souls I love!" This simple word "Draw me" is enough […] Just as a torrent, throwing itself impetuously into the ocean, carries with it everything it has encountered in its path, so, O my Jesus, the soul that plunges into the shoreless ocean of your love, draws with it all the treasures it possesses… (MsC 34v°)

Let us keep our eyes fixed on Heaven, not to turn away from the earth, but so as not to forget what the end of the road is, what all we do is for... What we do is to make the Kingdom already present in this so painful world.

Amen

Father Emmanuel Schwab, Rector of the Shrine