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Seventh Sunday of Easter: the Sunday after Ascension Day Year A

  • Acts of the Apostles 1: 6-14

Luke uses language and symbolism similar to his description of the “transformation” of Jesus to now describe his “ascension.”  Both events in Luke’s language validate a direct link between the earthly life and ministry of Jesus to God’s universal work in the whole world.  Mt. Olivet, where Luke places Jesus’ return and departing words to his followers, was identified by the prophet Zechariah as the place where God will manifest God’s reign.  The disciples return to the “upper room,”  in which so many crucial conversations between Jesus and his followers had taken place to prepare them for the time when they would continue his work after he was gone.

  • Psalm 68: 1-10, 33-36

“The Hebrew text [of this psalm] is a mixture of strong and memorable lines with phrases and whole clauses that look fragmentary and scrambled,” writes Robert Alter, (The Book of Psalms, p. 229)

  • I Peter 4: 12-14, 5: 6-11

The epistle which honors Peter makes a promise: God will “restore, support, strengthen and establish you.”

  • John 17: 1-11

In John’s narrative, Jesus has just told his disciples that they will scatter and abandon him.  Next, Jesus “looked up to heaven” and addressed “the Father” directly, (and we listen in) “the hour has now come….”  He prays that the Father will “glorify” the Son, so that “the Son may glorify you….” Still addressing the Father, Jesus identifies the way he has glorified the Father: “by finishing the work you gave me to do.”  John’s narrative references the bold, opening lines of his gospel with Jesus asking the Father: “glorify me in your presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.”  Jesus’ prayer now returns to the purpose of his “work,” which can further be described as “to make your name known to those you gave me from this world.”  These followers were “yours, and you gave them to me.”    Now the full-blown purpose of the Father’s entrusting these followers to Jesus is stated explicitly:  “The words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.”  It is for their sake, Jesus asks, that you, “Holy Father, protect them in your name… so that they may be one, as we are one.”

“The words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them…”

Biblical  texts are a self-affirming loop.  The texts themselves, which are testimonies of words from God and about God, are alive in each individual who encounters these words and inculcates them in their mind, heart and action.  These words present the opportunity to experience personally their continuing and enduring impact.  Reading, learning and continuous re-reading with endless interpretation and endless testing their validity in our lives to our own personal satisfaction and ownership means the words are ever life-giving.

Jean-Luc Marion describes this process of  personal ownership: it is

“less an undetermined, ambiguous and sterile groping, than the absolutely infinite unfolding of possibilities already realized in the Word, but not yet in us and our words; in short, the infinite freedom of the Word in our words and reciprocally.  We are infinitely free in theology: we find all already given, gained , available.  It only remains to understand, to say, to celebrate.”  (God Without Being, p. 158)

All that needs to be said has been said in the biblical texts, but that settles nothing.  Where and in whom they are personally appropriated, the words will “restore, support, strengthen, establish.”   

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