Homily

"Why are you Galileans standing here looking into the sky?" The question asked by the two men dressed in white comes as a surprise to the disciples, who are filled with a sense of emptiness and caught between their longing for the past and their uncertainty about the present. They are wrapped up in themselves and their loneliness, and they are not thinking about Jesus. Their sky really is empty because they are thinking about their abandonment without expecting any comfort. The sky the disciples are looking at is not the heavens of Scripture, but their own hopeless future. It is a closed and inevitably empty sky. God’s voice does not come from the sky they are looking at, they can see no angels climbing and descending there, nor can they see the Son of Man. But the disciples keep staring at that sky. This is the same thing that happens to us when we look at the sky thinking that we already know what can come out of it or when we consider it negatively to be an abstraction and an escape from the concreteness of our immediate, daily life. But the voice that reveals the uselessness of this kind of looking at the sky is an angel’s voice. In fact, it is the word of God that draws us away from a falsely religious way of looking at the sky.
The word of God draws us out of ourselves and our sky-high projections of ourselves. The Word invites us to look at Jesus -- not at the emptiness of our sky, but at the reality and meaning of his Ascension. This sky, no longer closed and empty, has become a place from which we can expect something. One day Jesus will return, "the same way as you have seen him go to heaven." To hope for this is to believe that Jesus was "taken from their sight" and yet is still alive. If Jesus is no longer among us that does not mean he has vanished; on the contrary, his presence has spread among us and over the whole world. This is the meaning of the Ascension. It is not that Jesus abandoned a world in which he had become untouchable, but rather that he escaped a limited way of being among men and women. Jesus is no longer in our possession, and that is why the sky seems empty to us and why we can no longer see him. Like the apostles, we can lift our eyes without seeing anything, because people only see what they want to see. There are so many confirmations of the sad feelings that are in people’s hearts.
But the message of the Ascension is something else. We are invited to follow Jesus as he makes himself present in every part of the world. In Italian in the past the word "campanile" ("bell tower") was used to evoke the kind of human solidarity that existed in a small community that had no connection to the outside world. Today it has become a synonym of selfishness and the breakdown of society, an invitation to think only about oneself while ignoring a world which has become one great big village. But every bell tower invites us to listen to the message of the Ascension, widening our perspective from the particular to the universal, from love for ourselves to love for all men and women, especially the poorest. There are times when the sky appears to be closed and empty because of our sins. But there are many men and women for whom the sky truly is closed and empty also because of our sins. These are all the many crowds who do not hear the message of the men dressed in white saying: "Jesus will come back some day." We do not see these people, just as we do not see the Son of Man who ascended into heaven, and yet they are there. They are the people who live outside our neighbourhoods, outside our cities, and outside our countries. Even if sometimes they do not speak our language and their skin colour is different, Jesus ascended into heaven for them too, so that they might become a part of the family of disciples that he had gathered.