On mission, as eleven!
Year A – Easter – 7th Sunday – The Ascension of the Lord
Matthew 28:16-20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”.
We have arrived at the feast of the Ascension of the Lord, which the book of the Acts of the Apostles symbolically places forty days after Easter (cf. first reading: Acts 1:1-11). It is particularly significant to note that this is the only appearance of Jesus to his disciples narrated in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. Before this, in fact, he had appeared only to the two Marys who had gone to the tomb, entrusting to them the task of telling the disciples to go to Galilee: “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Matthew 28:10).
This is not a historical inconsistency between the Gospels. The main events of Jesus’ life, handed down by the apostles, had by then become the common heritage of the Christian communities. When the evangelists wrote the Gospel, they gathered together certain accounts and gave them a literary structure, with a particular theological and catechetical orientation, bearing in mind the needs of their communities.
I share with you a few reflections, keeping before our eyes today’s Gospel — a text of just five verses — and seeking to interiorise its message. It is the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel and therefore its summit, as well as the key to rereading the whole Gospel. It would be difficult to overestimate its significance.
1. Galilee, the place of the appointment
“The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.”
Jesus appoints a meeting with the apostles far from the religious and political centre of Jerusalem: in Galilee, a place of periphery and frontier, where everything had begun. From there they set out again, no longer towards the centre, but towards the ends of the world, towards all peoples. It is the beginning of the great adventure of the Church, which will last “until the end of the world”. Jesus, who had set out from Galilee to bring his journey to completion in Jerusalem, now seems to leave behind the holy city and its temple: they are now realities whose time has passed!
Galilee is the place of ordinary life, where Jesus had met and called his disciples. It is the symbol of daily life. After Eastertide, the Risen Lord sends us back to our everyday life. It is there that we shall see him.
The appointment is on the mountain. This is the seventh and final mountain in Matthew’s Gospel: the mountain of mission. It corresponds to the first, the mountain of temptation, where the devil had tried to divert Jesus from God’s plan by offering him the power and glory of the world (Matthew 4:8).
2. The eleven disciples, the protagonists
They are eleven, only eleven, and no longer twelve. That absence will be heavy, embarrassing, full of questions, a cause of sadness and dismay. For this reason Peter will propose filling that empty place by choosing Matthias (Acts 1:26). But Matthias could represent each one of us.
It is with these eleven — a number that speaks of incompleteness and imperfection — that we too are summoned for the great mission. Given the immensity of the task, we would be tempted to take a census of the forces on which we can rely, as King David did, provoking God’s anger (cf. 2 Samuel 24:9). Are not many of our statistics, deep down, just this?
God seems almost to mock our calculations and continually reduces our forces, as he did with Gideon’s troops marching against the Midianites: from thirty-two thousand to three hundred men, so that “Israel might boast against me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me’” (Judges 7:2). And now it will be with eleven men that Jesus will cause the world to ferment!
3. The doubt that makes faith true
“When they saw him, they worshipped him; but they doubted.”
They saw him, they worshipped him, yet they doubted! The women at the tomb, when they saw Jesus, “came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him” (Matthew 28:9). Here, however, there is doubt, and it is Jesus who has to draw near to the eleven.
The evangelists make no allowances for the apostles! They highlight their limits, their weaknesses, their misunderstandings, their slowness: in a word, their inadequacy. They are men like us. Thinking of them, no one will ever again be able to say: “But how can you want to choose me, of all people?” We must not be ashamed of our doubts. Doubt takes seriously the greatness of faith.
4. All power to the… “cursed one” on the cross!
“Jesus came near and said to them: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
He who had been judged by the religious authorities to be a blasphemer and accursed by God receives from the Father “all authority in heaven and on earth”! What irony! It gives us pause for thought, especially those of us who exercise “power” in the name of God!
Everything is now in his hands (John 13:3): in the hands of Love. Nothing and no one can snatch us from those hands (Romans 8:35; John 10:28). It is a consoling and liberating certainty, capable of untying the paralysing bonds of our fears.
5. The missionary mandate of the Church
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising 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.”
Go is the first command. To take up again the path of mission, the mission of Jesus. It is striking to see how, from the very beginning, the Church — a tiny and insignificant reality — had such a strong awareness of being sent to the whole world!
To make disciples: his, not ours. Baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that is, immersing them — this is the meaning of the Greek verb “to baptise” — in the Love of the Trinity. Teaching them not as masters, but as disciples and witnesses of the one Master (Matthew 23:10).
6. The Ascension, the fullness of the Incarnation
“And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This is the final word of Jesus, Emmanuel (Matthew 1:23). It is his incarnation in each one of us. Presence is something difficult to define. One can be present in body and absent in mind and heart.
The Ascension is not a departure, but a new and deeper mode of presence: Christ is “more inward to us than we are to ourselves”, to put it with Saint Augustine. For this reason Saint Paul could say: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
7. A suggestion
When it seems to you that Christ is the great absent one in your life or in our society; when it seems to you that the “prince of this world” has taken power back into his hands… take up this Gospel again and listen to this word that will never pass away: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
And remember the final and definitive promise of Jesus: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Fr Manuel João Pereira Correia, MCCJ
Fr. Manuel João, comboni missionary
Sunday Reflection
from the womb of my whale, ALS
Our cross is the pulpit of the Word
