Stay in the city
The Feast of the Lord’s Ascension - celebrated on Thursday past - is a glorious high point in the Easter season. The first reading we heard that day was the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus had shown himself alive to his disciples on many occasions, and then one day at table he told them not to leave the city of Jerusalem but to wait there for what the Father had promised. When Jesus told us to stay in the city he wants us to live where we are situated, to bloom where we are planted as the Old Testament puts it. His disciples wanted to follow him where he was going and he assured them that they would follow, but not yet. They wanted to follow him because by doing so they would be where he is. He told them to stay where they were and that he would be where they are.
When we come to realise something of the works of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we may be surprised. He breaks through all the nooks and crannies of our lives. We know Christ has died—we were there on Good Friday. We know Christ is risen - we were there at the fire from which the candle was lit to acclaim his rising. He has promised us, as he promised his first followers that he will come again—and we proclaim that truth with vigour and with alleluias at every Easter Mass – Christ will come again, alleluia. But meanwhile the question remains, as we await, as we stay in the city - how will we live, how should we behave, what do we look for, how do we cope?
Paul John Paul II, in a brilliant encyclical letter entitled Faith and Reason wrote: “History becomes the arena where we see what God does for humanity. God comes to us in the things we know best and can verify most easily, the things of our everyday life, apart from which we cannot understand ourselves”.
What are these things which are in the earthly city? We tend to say: “When this or that is over, or when this worry is past, I will get on with my life”. It takes a real breakthrough (often painful, I know from experience) to realise that this is my life”. Where I am now, the people around me here, the responsibilities as well as the graces of this day - this is life! Life and grace are here now. Stay in the city! The reality of our own redemption: living, dying, and rising, our own paschal mystery is in the experiences of each day—God is here!
The disciples were asked on Ascension Day - “Why are you men of Galilee standing here looking into the sky?” We are all men and women of Galilee, for Galilee is the place Jesus said he would meet us after the resurrection. Wherever we go: back to Galilee, the city, Jerusalem, he goes before us and meets us there.
So, like the first disciples, we wait, we stay in the city—until the day when he will come to take us to the place he has gone to prepare for us. We knew that he will come again because he has told us, just as surely as he told us he would rise from the dead. Of course many did not believe he would rise from the dead and it was as great surprise. It will be the same with us when he comes again. Meanwhile, here, in the city, we live in community and try to keep to the way of life he taught and gave us, But we don't just wait in idleness; rather to live, to pray and work like the first disciples, who planted a Church that would grow beyond their wildest dreams.
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