In each and every one of our lives, we have seminal experiences
that are pivotal to our lives. We go back to these experiences time and time
again in order to learn and to gain new insight for our lives. One such seminal
experience for me was the death of my dad 10 years ago. He died in the early
morning hours of Nov 13th 2004. I received a call from Queen of
Peace hospital at 4 in the morning that he was dying, I called my mom, picked
her up and we went straight to the hospital, only to be told that he had died 5
minutes before we got there.
As my mom was calling the funeral director, I sat deep in
thought by the side of my dad’s lifeless body. He was 89 years old. He was one
of the most brilliant, compassionate, honest human being that I had ever known.
A man of great integrity, he possessed great wisdom. Relatives, acquaintances,
people in high places throughout the nation sought him for his wisdom. And, as
I sat there, the sudden, scary thought hit me, that with his passing from this
life to the next, he passed on the responsibility to be that wisdom figure for
the family to me. That was an incredibly intimidating thought, which drew from
me the response, that anyone coming to me for wisdom was going to be so
out of luck! The overall question that hit me at that moment was, “So now what
am I going to do?”
As overwhelming as the thought of becoming the wisdom figure
of the family was to me at my father’s death, imagine how overwhelmed the
apostles felt when Jesus told them to carry on his mission. Here they are in
today’s gospel, Jesus is just telling him that he is going to leave them and
that they were to go and continue his mission of proclaiming the gospel to
people everywhere. What do you think is running through their minds? Probably
the same thing that was running through my mind as I sat next to my dad’s
lifeless body. “Who us? The greatest
doofuses in the world?! Now what are we going to do?” This is especially
evident in Luke’s account of the Ascension from the Acts of the Apostles in
which the angel basically says to them to quit looking up in the sky like a
bunch of idiots and get busy
As a kid, this great commission of Jesus to go and proclaim
the gospel to every corner of the earth had very little impact on me as a kid.
As an adolescent and throughout my early adulthood, I thought that the great
commission of Jesus to go and proclaim the gospel was something that only
priests and nuns did. However, the bottom line is that the great commission of Jesus
is a mission that is not just given to clergy and religious, it is given to
each and every one of us.
When we were baptized, following the pouring of the water,
the crown of our heads were anointed with the oil of chrism. During that
anointing we heard the priest or deacon pray that as Jesus had been anointed
priest, prophet and king, so we, too, had been anointed priest, prophet, and
king, and that our mission from this point on in our lives was to proclaim the
Good News of Jesus Christ to people everywhere. “Now what are we suppose to
do?”
Over this past week while on vacation, I had some time not
only to relax and be with Ruthie, but also some time to read and study. One of
the books I read over this vacation was The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom
of the Twenty-third Psalm by Rabbi Harrold Kushner. He, like many pastors
in New York City, had many parishioners affected by the tragic events of 9/11.
He observed that Psalm 23 is one of those prayers that has a profound impact on
people undergoing crisis in their lives. In the book he devotes a chapter to
each passage of the Psalm.
In the chapter on the passage, “He anoints my head with oil,
my heart overflows,” Rabbi Kushner writes that Isaac Luria, a great Jewish
theologian from the 16th century pictured the world as shattered
into little pieces “because it was too fragile and delicate to contain the
intense holiness of God.” Humanity lives in a world filled with these broken
fragments, each of them containing God’s presence. Luria believed that our mission as human beings is
to repair the world by finding these fragments and painstakingly fitting them
back together as we would fit pieces of a jigsaw puzzle back together. In a
way, this is a great image for all of us Catholic Christians on this Solemnity
of the Ascension for it answers the question, “Now what are we suppose to do?”
Jesus came to us to sanctify and heal a humanity that had
been broken into irreparable pieces by Original Sin. In his death and
resurrection he gave to you and to me the ability and the power to take these
shattered pieces of humanity, including ourselves, to begin to rebuild into
one, the humanity that God created at the beginning of the world. Each and
every one of our lives is a piece of that one great humanity. Our mission in
life, the Great Commission, is to join our lives, our piece, with that of
others.
How? We were given that at our baptism, too. We are to live
the great commandment of loving God and loving neighbor. The Great Commandment
is at the very center of everything we do as Catholic Christians. It is the
main point of each and every teaching of the Church. It is the central point of
each and every homily. In loving God with all our heart, all our soul, all our
mind, and all our strength, we find ourselves here today at Mass in this church
so that we may become one with the God who created us and find the grace, the
power to go forth and love our neighbor as ourselves, thus taking our piece of
humanity and joining it to the pieces of humanity around us.
This is why the Church as a community of believers is so
very important to us and to the world. As greater and greater pieces and
sections of humanity are joined together in the Great Commandment of Jesus, we
will become a living sign of Christ Jesus to all the other broken and shattered
pieces of humanity in the world. This is the mission that Jesus gave to the
apostles on that Ascension, and the mission continues today in you and in me.
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