After the Allied victory in the battle of El Alamein in 1942, Winston Churchill said,
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
In a sense this is true of the Ascension of Our Lord. It is not the end of His life on earth, although it is the end of the first phase of the work of Redemption. For the second phase to begin with the sending of the Holy Spirit, Jesus must return to the Father.
Today's very simple gospel gives us a picture not only of Jesus' final words but also of His disciples as they will remain. The eleven are there for the rendezvous, but even when they see Jesus, even when He meets them at the appointed hour and place, "some hesitated". On another occasion, Jesus rolls His divine eyes at this kind of apostolic wobble. What exactly are they hesitating about now? Have they not been convinced of His bodily resurrection by seeing Him eat, by touching His blessed wounds? We are what we are in all our weakness. Thank God we have a Saviour who priced our hesitations in to the generous outpouring of His love. No doubt the wobblers had time later to reflect on this reminder that only by His wounds they would be healed.
Then, comes the apostolic command to carry the good news to the four corners of the world. And this begs the question: how? Certainly not by the hesitations that gripped some of them a few moments before, but neither should it be by a kind of self-sufficiency, as if the work to be done was their own work which they could bring to fruition by their own hands.
How then? This work could only be done through their fidelity to the life of intimate friendship that so many of the gospels in recent weeks have pointed out. The gospel can only be carried to the world by those who live in Christ and in whom Christ and the Father live. For us in COLW, we see in this moment the power of our call to become another humanity to Christ. O Jesus, living in Mary, come and live in thy servants. All the hesitations of the weak and all the brutality of the hardheaded must yield to the true source of evangelical fruitfulness. We are to become channels of his life so that Jesus can continue His earthly life through us to the glory of the Father.
Then, we glimpse that truth about Jesus captured by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnet As kingfishers catch fire:
[...] - Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
