Dear Sisters, dear Brethren in Christ, in the Collect prayer of today’s Mass we prayed that ‘we may celebrate with heartfelt devotion these days of joy which we keep in honour of the risen Lord.’ Since Easter Day itself, just five Sundays ago, we have indeed principally been celebrating the Resurrection of our Lord, His appearances to the Apostles after His rising from the dead, and His teaching given to the Apostles, mainly at the Last Supper, but recollected after Easter in the light of the Risen Lord. Well, these precious days of Eastertide are about to take a different turn of direction. On this coming Thursday, which was as St Luke tells us the fortieth day after His resurrection, we will celebrate the day on which our Lord was taken up into heavenly glory. Thereafter He would no longer be seen by His Apostles as He had been seen by, say, Mary Magdalene in the Garden, Cleopas and his companion at Emmaus, Thomas and the other Apostles in the Upper Room, John and Peter and the others by the shore of Lake Galilee. All that is about to come to an end with His Ascension. Having made Himself visible to the Apostles after His rising from the dead, He will henceforth become invisible to them and, of course, to all of us in all later ages.
But there are two important reasons for us not to think that in leaving the Apostles visibly, He was abandoning them. We have just heard Him say to them in the Gospel: ‘I will not leave you orphans; I will come back to you.’ Although He is about to leave them, He says, He will be with them still. But how? How will it be the case that the last three years, and the recent forty days since Easter, will be more than a memory?
The first reason for us to recognize that our Lord has abandoned neither His Apostles, nor us, lies in what He says a few moments before promising not leave them orphans: ‘I shall ask the Father, and He will send you another Advocate to be with you for ever, that Spirit of truth…’ This is the first mention we have heard of the coming of the Holy Spirit as a distinct event, an event at a particular moment but also an event without an end. Last Sunday we heard a very important pronouncement about the relations between two persons sharing the divine nature: Father and the Son. Now our Lord introduces a thrid Person into His discourse: The Holy Spirit. This Spirit, also called the Spirit of Truth, our Lord describes as the ‘Advocate’, which is a translation of the Greek word ‘Paraklitos’. That word, which we also have borrowed into English as ‘Paraclete’, means many things; defender, counsellor, friend, supporter, assistant and consoler. Consoler, by the way, does not mean merely someone who says comforting words when you are sorrowful, but rather more. It means one whom you call to your aid, who comes to strengthen you, who gives you the courage and confidence to carry on in otherwise impossible circumstances. Think, for instance, of the martyrs of the Church over the two thousand years since Pentecost; none of those could possibly have endured all that they were made to suffer were it not for the strengthening and joyous comforting of the Holy Spirit. We should take comfort from that ourselves, too, should it at some time be our lot to be treated by the world in the same way. Who knows? At least we have the assurance of our Lord that the Advocate will not abandon us. That is the first reason why we should not think that the Ascension of our Lord is His complete departure from our world, the world of our faith and its practise.
Here comes the second reason: that our Lord will also come to us in the Holy Spirit in a new way. No longer visible to our eyes as before in His own body, He will become visible in a totally new way, and if I may say so, a better way than even when He was with the Twelve in the days of His public ministry. Such a claim may sound like false boldness or just hoping against hope, trusting to the power of imagination as a substitute for reality, but in truth it is not. For the Holy Spirit ensures that our Lord is present to us in the wonderful manner that we call the Sacraments and the Mass.
Admittedly this will seem pretty unreal to those who do not believe in His words, but to those who do believe, this is revelatory. As Pope St Leo the Great, one of the greatest fathers of the Church, said of the Ascension, in the Ascension of our Lord, all that He was in His incarnation passes over into the sacraments. What was visible before in the flesh now becomes visible in the sacraments. This is a different kind of ‘seeing’ from normal. Often in the Gospel our Lord has spoken about ‘seeing’ and ‘not seeing’ as more than just what our eyes can do. It is a matter of inward sight and understanding. So did the man born blind come to see Jesus as the Messiah, by the eyes of faith. So did St John see the truth of the resurrection at the empty tomb, and he also saw by faith the Lord present on the seashore by the Lake of Galilee after the miraculous draught of fish.
And then we remember how three Sundays ago we heard how Cleopas and another disciple came to see our Lord, not because they recognised Him as He walked with them on the road to Emmaus, but rather because they recognised Him in the ‘breaking of the bread’. But at that very moment, paradoxically, although they recognised Him, now they saw Him by faith as it were, and they no longer saw Him with their bodily eyes. This is why the Emmaus event is so important for us now. It is not about an event in the past, but about an even that had begun with the resurrection and was being made known in a new way.
This new way of seeing cannot be learned other than by obeying the commandment of love as God loves. Then we will ‘see’ our Lord in the sacraments, and most of all in the Eucharist. For us, every Mass is Emmaus, and the more we love as our Lord loves, the more powerfully will we see Him present. This is the Holy Spirit’s work and furthermore it is He, the Holy Spirit, who makes known to us the presence of the Father and the Son.
This is the ‘showing’ or revelation of God in His very innermost self and nature. This is the doing of the Holy Spirit. The event of the Resurrection and the event of the Ascension are not lost in the remote past, but continue ever present in the life of the Church, in the life of the Mass and of the Sacraments. Easter is about now and about the future, a future beyond this world and this life. Two Sundays from now we will celebrate the great solemnity of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit who enlightens the eyes of our faith to recognise the hidden yet real presence of God in the Mass and the sacraments, and the following Sunday after that we will pause to reflect on the wonderful revelation that has been steadily going on throughout these Sundays of Eastertide: the revelation that God is three co-equal persons: Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and the three share exactly the same divine nature. God has in this way revealed Himself to us as the Blessed Trinity, one eternal God, to whom be all glory and praise for ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.
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