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. Jesus’ sky is not closed. The feast of Ascension tells us that the sky is no longer empty; rather it 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, but rather that he escaped a limited way of being among men and women. Jesus is no longer in our possession or in our narrow sky. This is why the sky – ours not God’s - 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 or to make him present in the world. This is the missionary perspective in which each disciple should be involved. The Lord invites us “to ascend” to the ends of the earth. And he will be always with us. We need to leave our narrow sky and welcome the universal dimension of the Gospel. The sky still appears to be closed for too many men and women because of the sin of indifference and wickedness of which we are all accomplices. 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. Sometimes they speak our, others their skin colour is different. And yet, Jesus ascended into heaven for them too, so that they might become a part of the family of which we are part for grace. The Ascension means that there are not many skies anymore, but only the one of God that will gather all people is one family of God,