Acts of the Apostles 1,1-11. In the first book, Theophilus, I dealt with all that Jesus did and taught until the day he was taken up, after giving instructions through the holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them by many proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While meeting with them, he enjoined them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for "the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak; for John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the holy Spirit." When they had gathered together they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" He answered them, "It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven."
Psalms 47(46) All you peoples, clap your hands; shout to God with cries of gladness. For the LORD, the Most High, the awesome, is the great king over all the earth.
God mounts his throne amid shouts of joy; the LORD, amid trumpet blasts. Sing praise to God, sing praise; sing praise to our king, sing praise.
For king of all the earth is God; sing hymns of praise. God reigns over the nations, God sits upon his holy throne.
Letter to the Ephesians 1,17-23. Brothers and sisters: May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of him. May the eyes of (your) hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe, in accord with the exercise of his great might, which he worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens, far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things beneath his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew 28,16-20. The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them. When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted. Then Jesus approached and said to them, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."
HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS "The Holy Spirit reminds us how to access the Father" Sunday, 17 May 2020
...As He says farewell to His disciples (see Jn 14:15-21), Jesus gives them tranquility, He gives peace, with a promise: “I will not leave you orphans” . He defends them from that pain, from that painful feeling of being orphans. In today’s world, there is a great sense of being orphaned: many people have many things, but they lack the Father. And in the history of humanity, this has repeated itself: when the Father is missing, something is lacking and there is always the desire to meet, to rediscover the Father, even in the ancient myths. We can think of the myth of Oedipus, or Telemachus, and many others: always in search of the Father who is missing. Today we can say that we live in a society where the Father is missing, a sense of being orphaned that specifically affects belonging and fraternity.
And so Jesus promises: “I will ask the Father and He will give you another Paraclete” (v. 16). Jesus says, “I am going away, but someone else will come who will teach you how to access the Father. He will remind you how to access the Father”. The Holy Spirit does not come to “make us His clients”; He comes to point out how to access the Father, to remind us how to access the Father. That is what Jesus opened, what Jesus showed us. A spirituality of the Son alone or the Holy Spirit alone does not exist: the center is the Father. The Son is sent by the Father and returns to the Father. The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father to remind us and to teach us how to access the Father.
Only with this awareness of being children, that we are not orphans, can we live in peace among ourselves. Wars, either small ones or large ones, always have a dimension of being orphans: the Father who makes peace is missing. And so when Peter and the first community respond to the people regarding why they are Christians (see 1 Pt 3:15-18), it says: “do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear” (v. 16), that is, the gentleness that the Holy Spirit gives. The Holy Spirit teaches us this gentleness, this tenderness of the Father’s children. The Holy Spirit does not teach us to insult. And one of the consequences of this feeling like orphans is insulting, wars, because if there is no Father, there are no brothers, fraternity is lost. They are – this tenderness, reverence, gentleness – they are attitudes of belonging, of belonging to a family that is certain of having a Father.
“I will pray to the Father and He will send you another Paraclete” (Jn 14:16) who will remind you how to access the Father, He will remind you that we have a Father who is the center of everything, the origin of everything, the one who unites everyone, the salvation of everyone because He sent His Son to save everyone. And now He sends the Holy Spirit to remind us how to access Him, of the Father, of this paternity, of this fraternal attitude of gentleness, tenderness, and peace.
Let us ask the Holy Spirit to remind us always, always about this access to the Father, that He might remind us that we have a Father. And to this civilization, with this great feeling of being orphaned, may He grant the grace of rediscovering the Father, the Father who gives meaning to all of life, and that He might unite humanity into one family.
ASCENSION-BLESSED XVI ... "The Ascension into heaven was the last manifestation of the Risen One ; the disciples knew that they would never see Him again in this world. Certainly this parting is not comparable to that of Good Friday, for then Christ had appeared publicly i.e. a failed man, and all past hopes were now to prove nothing more than a big blunder. By comparison, Jesus' farewell forty days after the Resurrection bears something triumphant and hopeful about it : this time Jesus goes before us not in death but in life. He is not the defeated one. God has done him justice. No doubt, then, there is cause for rejoicing. But when intellect and will rejoice, it is not necessarily the case that feeling must also do the same. While understanding Jesus' victory, one may grieve the loss of his human closeness. But here we come across the undenied statement of the great joy of those who were going home. We could never fully decipher these words, any more than we are able to fully comprehend the gladness of the martyrs: Maximilian Kolbe singing in the starvation bunker, the joyful praise of God that Polycarp utters at the stake, and so many others. But from such experiences we can at least surmise that the joy of Christ's victory touches not only the intellect, but can penetrate hearts as well, and only then really prevail. Only when something like this happens in us, too, can we understand the meaning of the feast of the Ascension. What happens here is the victory of the finality of Redemption in the human heart, so that knowledge is transformed into joy! (Bavarian Radio 16-5- 1985)
FAUSTI - The text gives a synthetic overview of whole Matthew's Gospel. Like the finale of a symphony, he resumes and merges into one single harmony ,the themes developed in his Gospel . The text is addressed to readers so that they too the experience of the first disciples They have to go to Galilee, "on the mountain" indicated to them by Jesus. There they see Him and worship Him. It is also part of the meeting the doubt , the faith represents the overcoming of it . Whoever goes up to the mountainmeets "the Son" and to this person it is given His own power. It is that of becoming brother of all, so that every man be immersed in the only Love of the Father and of the Son, who makes able to do what Jesus has commanded. In this way He is God-with-us, to lead the world to its fulfillment. His being with us makes it possible our being with Him. The Nazarene, Crucified and Risen, is present every day. He meets us each day and every hour when, faithfully and wisely, we listen and do what He has done and said. His ascension - exalting his humanity to the dignity of the Son of God - is certainty of blessing for every man. In Him we see the hope to which we have been called, the treasure of glory that encloses our heritage. (Eph 1:18). In Jesus ascending to heaven, we fully know the mystery of man and his body. We know where He comes from, because we see where He goes: He comes from the Father of light, and He returns to Him. Our life is no longer suspended in the void, it found its principle and its aim. Jesus does not leave us orphans and without homeland . Precisely with His staying away He shows us the Father and His home, where He preceded us. Our homeland is in heavens and our life is now hidden with Christ in God. In Him we too have already been resurrected, have sat down in heavens and glorified. (Fil.3,20). Where is our treasure, there is also our heart, and where is our heart, we will be there too. The commandment of love is the way to reach it. Now we finally know the One whom we are looking for and how to find Him. For this reason the disciples are filled with joy! The Lord, ascending up, He has accomplished the greatest wonders in our favor. He has destroyed slavery that separates us from the homeland of desire, winning our death and giving Himself as the sense of our life; He has distributed all His gifts, offering to us His Spirit and the opportunity to live His life. Now we are free, similar to Him and we see through Him what we are: sons in the Son, finally adults and responsible, we can testify and proclaim to the brethren Father's Love, going on to do and to teach to the extreme ends of the earth as much as He began to do and to teach from Galilee to Jerusalem. "Go therefore and make disciples of all peoples," says Jesus to eleven ones. When He ended His own mission, those who welcomed Him ,they begin their journey. It is the same one of the Son, who witnesses Father's Love to the brothers who do not yet know Him. The one who, in Him, has discovered his son's name, realizes, as He does, going toward his brothers, until the Father's name is sanctified throughout of the earth. Time is a journey, the goal of which is to be with He who is always and forever with us. This will be when, through the testimony of the disciples, we all will become sons and brothers.
P. E. Ronchi - The disciples have returned to Galilee, to that mountain they knew well. When they saw Him, they prostrated themselves. Jesus left the world with a deficit: He was left with only eleven afraid and confused men and a small group of courageous and faithful women. They followed Him for three years on the streets of Palestine, they did not understand much but they loved Him very much. And they are all there on the last mountain. This is the only guarantee Jesus needs. Now He can return to the Father, reassured that he is loved, even if not completely understood. Now he knows that none of those men and women will forget him. But they doubted... Jesus performs an act of enormous, illogical confidence in people who still doubt. There He not yet remains a little, to explain better, to clarify the dark points. But He entrusts His message to people who still doubt. There is no true faith without doubt. Doubts are like the poor, we will always have them with us. If you question them with courage, from apparent enemies they will become defenders of the faith, they will protect it from the assault of superficial answers and sentences. Jesus entrusts the dreamed world to the fragility of the Eleven, and not to the intelligence of the first of the class; he entrusts the truth to the doubters, he calls the claudicants to go to the ends of the earth, he has faith in us who have no firm faith in him. I have been given over to every power in heaven and on earth... Go then. That therefore is beautiful: therefore my power is yours; therefore all things mine and yours also: therefore I am the one that dwells in you and presses you. Therefore, go. Make disciples of all peoples... To what end? Enlist devotees, strengthen the ranks? No, but for a contagion, an epidemic of life and birth. And then the last words, the will: I am with you, every day, until the end of the world. With you, always, never alone. What Ascension be, we understand from these words. Jesus did not go far or high up, in some remote corner of the cosmos, but he became closer than before. If before He was with the disciples, now He will be inside them. He did not go beyond the clouds, but beyond the forms. He has ascended into the depths of things, into the depths of creation and creatures, and from within He presses as an ascending force toward more luminous life: "The Risen One mysteriously wraps the creatures and orients them to a destiny of fullness. The same flowers of the field and the birds that He contemplated admired by his human eyes, are now filled by His luminous presence" ( Pope Francis -Laudato si', 100). He who knows how to feel and enjoy of this mystery, walks on the earth like inside a tabernacle, inside an endless baptism.
Acts of the Apostles 1,1-11.
RispondiEliminaIn the first book, Theophilus, I dealt with all that Jesus did and taught
until the day he was taken up, after giving instructions through the holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.
He presented himself alive to them by many proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
While meeting with them, he enjoined them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for "the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak;
for John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the holy Spirit."
When they had gathered together they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"
He answered them, "It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority.
But you will receive power when the holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight.
While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them.
They said, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven."
Psalms 47(46)
All you peoples, clap your hands;
shout to God with cries of gladness.
For the LORD, the Most High, the awesome,
is the great king over all the earth.
God mounts his throne amid shouts of joy;
the LORD, amid trumpet blasts.
Sing praise to God, sing praise;
sing praise to our king, sing praise.
For king of all the earth is God;
sing hymns of praise.
God reigns over the nations,
God sits upon his holy throne.
Letter
to the Ephesians 1,17-23.
Brothers and sisters: May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of him.
May the eyes of (your) hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones,
and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe, in accord with the exercise of his great might,
which he worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens,
far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age but also in the one to come.
And he put all things beneath his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church,
which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ
according to Saint Matthew 28,16-20.
The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.
When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.
Then Jesus approached and said to them, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."
HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
RispondiElimina"The Holy Spirit reminds us how to access the Father" Sunday, 17 May 2020
...As He says farewell to His disciples (see Jn 14:15-21), Jesus gives them tranquility, He gives peace, with a promise: “I will not leave you orphans” . He defends them from that pain, from that painful feeling of being orphans. In today’s world, there is a great sense of being orphaned: many people have many things, but they lack the Father. And in the history of humanity, this has repeated itself: when the Father is missing, something is lacking and there is always the desire to meet, to rediscover the Father, even in the ancient myths. We can think of the myth of Oedipus, or Telemachus, and many others: always in search of the Father who is missing. Today we can say that we live in a society where the Father is missing, a sense of being orphaned that specifically affects belonging and fraternity.
And so Jesus promises: “I will ask the Father and He will give you another Paraclete” (v. 16). Jesus says, “I am going away, but someone else will come who will teach you how to access the Father. He will remind you how to access the Father”. The Holy Spirit does not come to “make us His clients”; He comes to point out how to access the Father, to remind us how to access the Father. That is what Jesus opened, what Jesus showed us. A spirituality of the Son alone or the Holy Spirit alone does not exist: the center is the Father. The Son is sent by the Father and returns to the Father. The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father to remind us and to teach us how to access the Father.
Only with this awareness of being children, that we are not orphans, can we live in peace among ourselves. Wars, either small ones or large ones, always have a dimension of being orphans: the Father who makes peace is missing. And so when Peter and the first community respond to the people regarding why they are Christians (see 1 Pt 3:15-18), it says: “do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear” (v. 16), that is, the gentleness that the Holy Spirit gives. The Holy Spirit teaches us this gentleness, this tenderness of the Father’s children. The Holy Spirit does not teach us to insult. And one of the consequences of this feeling like orphans is insulting, wars, because if there is no Father, there are no brothers, fraternity is lost. They are – this tenderness, reverence, gentleness – they are attitudes of belonging, of belonging to a family that is certain of having a Father.
“I will pray to the Father and He will send you another Paraclete” (Jn 14:16) who will remind you how to access the Father, He will remind you that we have a Father who is the center of everything, the origin of everything, the one who unites everyone, the salvation of everyone because He sent His Son to save everyone. And now He sends the Holy Spirit to remind us how to access Him, of the Father, of this paternity, of this fraternal attitude of gentleness, tenderness, and peace.
Let us ask the Holy Spirit to remind us always, always about this access to the Father, that He might remind us that we have a Father. And to this civilization, with this great feeling of being orphaned, may He grant the grace of rediscovering the Father, the Father who gives meaning to all of life, and that He might unite humanity into one family.
ASCENSION-BLESSED XVI
RispondiElimina... "The Ascension into heaven was the last manifestation of the Risen One ; the disciples knew that they would never see Him again in this world. Certainly this parting is not comparable to that of Good Friday, for then Christ had appeared publicly i.e. a failed man, and all past hopes were now to prove nothing more than a big blunder.
By comparison, Jesus' farewell forty days after the Resurrection bears something triumphant and hopeful about it : this time Jesus goes before us not in death but in life.
He is not the defeated one. God has done him justice.
No doubt, then, there is cause for rejoicing.
But when intellect and will rejoice, it is not necessarily the case that feeling must also do the same. While understanding Jesus' victory, one may grieve the loss of his human closeness.
But here we come across the undenied statement of the great joy of those who were going home.
We could never fully decipher these words, any more than we are able to fully comprehend the gladness of the martyrs: Maximilian Kolbe singing in the starvation bunker, the joyful praise of God that Polycarp utters at the stake, and so many others.
But from such experiences we can at least surmise that the joy of Christ's victory touches not only the intellect, but can penetrate hearts as well, and only then really prevail.
Only when something like this happens in us, too, can we understand the meaning of the feast of the Ascension. What happens here is the victory of the finality of Redemption in the human heart, so that knowledge is transformed into joy! (Bavarian Radio 16-5- 1985)
FAUSTI - The text gives a synthetic overview of whole Matthew's Gospel. Like the finale of a symphony, he resumes and merges into one single harmony ,the themes developed in his Gospel .
RispondiEliminaThe text is addressed to readers so that they too the experience of the first disciples
They have to go to Galilee, "on the mountain" indicated to them by Jesus. There they see Him and worship Him.
It is also part of the meeting the doubt , the faith represents the overcoming of it . Whoever goes up to the mountainmeets "the Son" and to this person it is given His own power. It is that of becoming brother of all, so that every man be immersed in the only Love of the Father and of the Son, who makes able to do what Jesus has commanded. In this way He is God-with-us, to lead the world to its fulfillment. His being with us makes it possible our being with Him. The Nazarene, Crucified and Risen, is present every day. He meets us each day and every hour when, faithfully and wisely, we listen and do what He has done and said. His ascension - exalting his humanity to the dignity of the Son of God - is certainty of blessing for every man. In Him we see the hope to which we have been called, the treasure of glory that encloses our heritage. (Eph 1:18).
In Jesus ascending to heaven, we fully know the mystery of man and his body.
We know where He comes from, because we see where He goes: He comes from the Father of light, and He returns to Him.
Our life is no longer suspended in the void, it found its principle and its aim.
Jesus does not leave us orphans and without homeland . Precisely with His staying away He shows us the Father and His home, where He preceded us. Our homeland is in heavens and our life is now hidden with Christ in God. In Him we too have already been resurrected, have sat down in heavens and glorified. (Fil.3,20).
Where is our treasure, there is also our heart, and where is our heart, we will be there too.
The commandment of love is the way to reach it.
Now we finally know the One whom we are looking for and how to find Him.
For this reason the disciples are filled with joy! The Lord, ascending up, He has accomplished the greatest wonders in our favor. He has destroyed slavery that separates us from the homeland of desire, winning our death and giving Himself as the sense of our life; He has distributed all His gifts, offering to us His Spirit and the opportunity to live His life. Now we are free, similar to Him and we see through Him what we are: sons in the Son, finally adults and responsible, we can testify and proclaim to the brethren Father's Love, going on to do and to teach to the extreme ends of the earth as much as He began to do and to teach from Galilee to Jerusalem.
"Go therefore and make disciples of all peoples," says Jesus to eleven ones.
When He ended His own mission, those who welcomed Him ,they begin their journey. It is the same one of the Son, who witnesses Father's Love to the brothers who do not yet know Him. The one who, in Him, has discovered his son's name, realizes, as He does, going toward his brothers, until the Father's name is sanctified throughout of the earth. Time is a journey, the goal of which is to be with He who is always and forever with us. This will be when, through the testimony of the disciples, we all will become sons and brothers.
P. E. Ronchi - The disciples have returned to Galilee, to that mountain they knew well. When they saw Him, they prostrated themselves. Jesus left the world with a deficit: He was left with only eleven afraid and confused men and a small group of courageous and faithful women. They followed Him for three years on the streets of Palestine, they did not understand much but they loved Him very much.
RispondiEliminaAnd they are all there on the last mountain. This is the only guarantee Jesus needs. Now He can return to the Father, reassured that he is loved, even if not completely understood. Now he knows that none of those men and women will forget him. But they doubted...
Jesus performs an act of enormous, illogical confidence in people who still doubt. There He not yet remains a little, to explain better, to clarify the dark points. But He entrusts His message to people who still doubt. There is no true faith without doubt. Doubts are like the poor, we will always have them with us. If you question them with courage, from apparent enemies they will become defenders of the faith, they will protect it from the assault of superficial answers and sentences.
Jesus entrusts the dreamed world to the fragility of the Eleven, and not to the intelligence of the first of the class; he entrusts the truth to the doubters, he calls the claudicants to go to the ends of the earth, he has faith in us who have no firm faith in him.
I have been given over to every power in heaven and on earth...
Go then. That therefore is beautiful: therefore my power is yours; therefore all things mine and yours also: therefore I am the one that dwells in you and presses you. Therefore, go. Make disciples of all peoples...
To what end? Enlist devotees, strengthen the ranks?
No, but for a contagion, an epidemic of life and birth.
And then the last words, the will: I am with you, every day, until the end of the world. With you, always, never alone.
What Ascension be, we understand from these words.
Jesus did not go far or high up, in some remote corner of the cosmos, but he became closer than before. If before He was with the disciples, now He will be inside them. He did not go beyond the clouds, but beyond the forms.
He has ascended into the depths of things, into the depths of creation and creatures, and from within He presses as an ascending force toward more luminous life:
"The Risen One mysteriously wraps the creatures and orients them to a destiny of fullness.
The same flowers of the field and the birds that He contemplated admired
by his human eyes, are now filled by His luminous presence"
( Pope Francis -Laudato si', 100).
He who knows how to feel and enjoy of this mystery,
walks on the earth like inside a tabernacle,
inside an endless baptism.