The Glorious Finale: Easter, Ascension, Pentecost

Starting next week, we are entering a triangle of feasts which have everything to do not only with Jesus but with us as his followers. What we make of these feasts will serve as a measuring rod for our connectedness with Jesus’s words and our openness to his Spirit within us. The first of these feasts is Easter, which we continue to observe this coming weekend [May 9-10]. Some years ago, I reviewed for Amazon Father Francis J. Moloney’s The Resurrection of the Messiah [2013]. I have included a link to that review which summarizes in this triangle how each evangelist attempted to describe and explain the Resurrection of Jesus, His return to glory in heaven, and his parting gift of the Holy Spirit.
 
There is some controversy in the United States, going back thirty years or so about a variance of dates, with much of the U.S. observing the Ascension, the second feast of the triangle, on Sunday, May 17. Other dioceses observe the Ascension on Thursday, the fortieth day after Easter, this year on May 14. This three-day divergence is explained rather well at this link. The Gospel for the Feast of the Ascension, whether Thursday or Sunday, is drawn from Matthew 28: 16-20. [See USCCB Bible with excellent commentary attached.] This year May 14 is also the Feast of St. Matthias, the man drawn to replace Judas in the circle of the Twelve. If your parish celebrates Ascension on Sunday, then Thursday is still an important feast to commemorate this apostle. I suggest we look at how the four Gospel authors treated [or did not treat] the Ascension as we understand it.
 
MATTHEW:
 
It is surprising that the longest Gospel, St. Matthew’s at 28 chapters, has modest exposure in the Lenten-Easter cycle of feasts. In the A-Cycle, our present arrangement of this year’s Church readings, Matthew appears on Ash Wednesday [Mt 6:1-6, 16-18]. Matthew’s account of the Passion was proclaimed earlier this spring on Palm Sunday, and his narrative of the resurrection event is proclaimed at the Easter Vigil Mass late Saturday. Matthew 28:1-10 is an option for Easter Sunday Masses, though St’ John’s and St. Luke’s Resurrection narratives are listed ahead of him.
 
The Ascension of Jesus is given to us in detail by St. Luke, and his vivid account is the first reading for the Ascension Mass. [see below] Interestingly, Matthew does not mention an ascending of Jesus in his Gospel text. Rather, the Gospel reading for the Ascension is Matthew 28: 16-20, a text known known as the “Great Commissioning.” It may be that Matthew wished to emphasize the continuing presence of Jesus during a time of considerable difficulty—Roman persecution, the destruction of Jerusalem, the bitter break of Christians from Jews. Matthew does note that when Jesus appeared to the Apostles in Galilee, “they worshipped but they doubted.” In his wisdom Matthew may have thought it better to emphasize the on-going support of Jesus rather than a dramatic farewell.
 
MARK
 
St. Mark’s account of the Passion is read on Palm Sunday, Year B in the Cycle. Mark’s Resurrection narrative Gospel ends on a dime. In Mark 16: 1-8 we read that the women find a young man at Jesus’ empty tomb. He commands them to tell the good news of the Resurrection to the disciples in Galilee. Instead, they fled from the tomb and said nothing to anybody! End of Gospel.
 
Father Moloney, mentioned above, is also the author of The Gospel of Mark [2002]. I reviewed this work, too, when I was younger and more brash. But Moloney’s interpretation of Mark, including this odd ending at 16:8, is emphasis on the cost of discipleship. If you read Mark’s Gospel in its entirety, something we rarely do, you notice that the early enthusiasm of the crowds begins to wane until the formerly faithful followers have all disappeared, even the women on Easter Sunday morning. I entitled my review, “Dropping Like Flies.”
 
In its original form, Mark’s Gospel was so blunt that even the early Church found it hard to accept, and later authors added the “Longer Ending” [Mark 16: 9-20] which the Church declared inspired several centuries later. That is why we hear truly little from Mark in this season of the Church year.
 
LUKE
 
Luke’s two books of the New Testament, his Gospel and his Acts of the Apostles, form the backbone of the Resurrection-Ascension-Pentecost narrative of the New Testament. His Gospel is proclaimed several times during the Lenten Sundays, and his Passion narrative is proclaimed on Palm Sunday in the C Cycle. His opening of the Resurrection Proclamation [24: 1-12] is the reading for the Easter Vigil Gospel in the C Cycle as well. But by far his tour de force is 24: 13-34, read on the Third Sunday after Easter in the C Cycle.
 
Luke, it seems, was the first evangelist to suspect that the Church might endure for centuries, and he arranges his post-Resurrection writing to explain how a long-term community might survive. The disciples on the road to Emmaus—leaving the mother community in Jerusalem—are symbolic of confusion and depression about precisely what happened to Jesus, and in the text, it seems that they have given up. [Themes of Mark’s Gospel?] They do not even recognize Jesus when he joins them, but he brings the Biblical promise to them in a way that lifts their hearts. They invite him to dinner—and will presumably pick up the tab. During the meal, “Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them.” This phrase was probably in use by early Christians as a primitive Eucharistic Prayer. Lukes goes on to say that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. Neither Luke nor I will insult your intelligence with an exhaustive interpretation: simply put, Jesus has gone but he remains with us whenever we eat this bread and drink this cup. Essentially, Luke has defined here the heart of sacraments and the life blood of the Christian existence. What a piece of work.
 
It remains for Luke to give definition to the abiding presence of Jesus for all time, and thus we turn to Luke’s second New Testament work, The Acts of the Apostles. During the Ascension Mass, the First Reading, from Acts, describes Jesus’s return in glory to heaven, as well as the disciples’ anxiety about his departure…which very well may reflect the condition of the early Church when Jesus’s second coming did not materialize over time, at least in the manner they expected. The Ascension is followed in the Church calendar by a week or ten days with the Sunday Feast of Pentecost, another vivid moment depicted by Luke in the Book of Acts. Again, this Acts reading is the first of the three readings at Mass, only this time we have one of the most vivid descriptions of an event in the Bible, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, and then Peter’s sermon and the baptism of the three thousand.
 
We don’t know precisely when Luke composed the Acts. The best evidence places the dating at about 80 A.D., or a full half-century after the death of Jesus on the cross. Luke is on a mission to define an “ecclesiology” or a definition of the Church. Not for nothing is Pentecost referred to as “the Birthday of the Church,” and Luke’s two classics pinpoint the reasons why.
 
JOHN
 
John’s narrative of the Easter-Ascension-Pentecost triad was crafted for a church nearly a century old and brings a new wine to unfamiliar problems. I’m going to need an entire post to walk through the stunning new images by which John crafts the final days of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit.
 
Keep an eye out for a new post on John.