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May 10, 2018
Father Mark Doherty
Just as the Passion cannot be understood without the Resurrection, so too the Ascension cannot be understood without Pentecost.
If the Ascension were to stand on its own it would make a mess of the message the Lord spent his earthly life delivering to all who would listen, namely, that God is with us (Emmanuel), and he wants us to be with him always. On its own, the Ascension makes it seem that just when things seemed to be really coming together, the Lord decided to leave us, to return at a later, unspecified time. Onlookers could be forgiven for not grasping how to make sense of this development.
Only in the light – or, more precisely, fire – of Pentecost do we come to understand that the Ascension was a necessary step on God’s quest to draw us ever more intimately into communion with him. Through the gift of Pentecost God comes to dwell with us in an even more intimate way because in the gift of the Spirit the Trinity comes to dwell within the very depths of our being. In ascending to the Father the Lord made way for the gift of the indwelling of God.
The gift of the Spirit helps us make sense of the commission the Lord gives to his disciples to go throughout the whole world and baptize men and women in the name of the Trinity. My experience has taught me that many Catholics (and Christians more generally) do not realize that the essence of the good news, of the Gospel, is the gift of friendship, of communion, that God extends to us. When we speak of salvation, of our being saved by God, what we ought to understand by that is first and foremost the gift of friendship that God extends to us. As creatures, on our own, we are completely incapable of establishing communion or friendship with God, who as the only un-created, is infinitely beyond our grasp. In the gift of the Spirit, through baptism, God divinizes us, he changes our very being, he elevates it in such a way that we are now able to participate in the life of God. In the gift of the Spirit, through baptism, God both gives us the (created) grace by which we are capable of entering into friendship with him, as well as the (un-created) grace by which he himself really does come to dwell within us.
We can now see that being a Christian is not primarily about being a ‘good’ or ‘moral’ person. Christianity is first and foremost about the gift of divinizing friendship that God grants us. Of course, as a result of this friendship we are spurred on to become good and moral people, but it remains the case that Christianity is not simply or primarily an ‘ethical code,’ or that Jesus was simply a wise moral teacher.
There is more.
Friendship means communion, dwelling or being together. It implies a heart-to-heart exchange. What is mine I share with you and vice-versa. This is one aspect of intimacy, and the gift of the indwelling of God gives form to this. But friendship, and the intimacy it entails, also has another aspect that is equally important, namely the sharing in a work, a project, a mission. The fulness of friendship requires a sharing in a mutual work. Hence the Ascension and Pentecost are both characterized by an outward movement. Go out into the world and proclaim the good news! Go out and preach! To be in a relationship is to be entrusted with responsibilities, some share in the work of the family. The reading from St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians speaks to this reality. In the gift of the Spirit, not only are we made capable of friendship with God; not only does God come to dwell within us; but the Spirit also distributes gifts, charisms, by which we are all ennobled with a share in the work of building the kingdom.
That is why the sacrament of baptism is hitched to the sacrament of confirmation. They are both sacraments of initiation. Confirmation ‘completes’ or makes ‘whole’ the gift first given in baptism because the gift of the Spirit at confirmation endows us with the gifts and strength we need to assume our share in the work of building the kingdom.
Let us, then, pray for the gift of the Spirit, and let us embrace and appreciate more fully the proportions this gift entails.
Father Mark Doherty, who serves at St. Peter and St. Anthony parishes in San Francisco, is studying moral theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland