Bishop Robert Barron Come, Lord Jesus! - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon Daily Gospel Reflection – The Ascension of the Lord Friends, on ...
Bishop Robert Barron
Come, Lord Jesus! - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon
Daily Gospel Reflection – The Ascension of the Lord
Friends, on this Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us the privilege of hearing the very last words of the Bible. If you're reading poetry, a novel, or even a great work of history, the last words are of tremendous importance. We hear today a kind of coda or denouement after the great climax of the biblical story, and it gives us a clue as to the identity of the Church.
May 29,2022
The Ascension of the Lord
Gospel: Lk 24:46-53
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer
and rise from the dead on the third day
and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,
would be preached in his name
to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses of these things.
And behold I am sending the promise of my Father upon you;
but stay in the city
until you are clothed with power from on high.”
Then he led them out as far as Bethany,
raised his hands, and blessed them.
As he blessed them he parted from them
and was taken up to heaven.
They did him homage
and then returned to Jerusalem with great joy,
and they were continually in the temple praising God.
*United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Bishop Robert Barron
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus prays for our unity with him and for us to be immersed in God’s love. “I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.”
We are not simply supplicants or penitents, calling to God from without; we are sons and daughters, friends, calling to him from within. The Paschal Mystery is intelligible only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, even to the limits of godforsakenness, even into sin and death, into the darkest corners of human experience, in order to find us.
But this acrobatic act of love is possible only if there is in the very being of God a sender and one that he can send, only if there is a Father and a Son. The language Jesus uses—“that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me”—shows us that the Father and the Son are united in love, and this love is itself the divine life. Thus there is a Spirit, coequal to the Father and the Son.
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