Thursday 14 May 2026
Early on the first day of the week, the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee all the way to Jerusalem, went to the tomb, “but they did not find the body of the Lord”. And “while they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel” and said to them: “why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you.” Mary Magdalene, when on her own in the very same place, was asked: “Woman, why are you weeping?” Today men of Galilee are approached by the same two figures presumably (Moses and Elijah perhaps) and asked “why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
But then, what else would all these people do? What else but stand perplexed in the face of this glaring contradiction, the empty tomb? Why not weep at the disappearance of the body of your beloved teacher, as if his death was not enough? And today, even though the mood has changed dramatically over the past 40 days, what else should they be but stunned and dazed, rooted to the spot, with their eyes fixed on where they last saw their Lord?
First the women and then the men of Galilee were not wrong in their reactions, I dare say. Those were normal, healthy human reactions. And consequently they were not really being corrected or rebuked by the two figures in white. The voices they heard were calm, I imagine, the faces they saw were smiling faces. They were not being upbraided but rather gently prompted: Ask yourself, converse with your heart, get in touch with what you are hoping for deep down, with what you want to believe, (but what you scarcely dare allow to surface), with what you are afraid to even formulate in thought: because it is too good to be true. Get in touch with that, remember what Lord Jesus himself said, and then match it all with what you have just witnessed.
Blessed Isaac of Stella, the 12th century Cistercian abbot, has a glorious line in a homily for today's feast. Having first playfully dangled in front of his monks the many apparent contradictions which Our Lord's Ascension presents us with, he then turned to them and said simply, as if in conclusion:
“But let us grant, beloved, that these things are wonderful and therefore true.”
Wonderful and therefore true! You can't get more medieval than that! But it is “being medieval” in the best possible sense of the word – because this is in fact the divine logic behind our salvation in Christ Jesus, summarized for you in one short phrase. Wouldn't it be wonderful if God did such a thing for us? Yes, and in our Christian logic that's one of the best reasons for presuming that He has done, is doing or will do precisely this very thing. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Our Lady was assumed, body and soul, into heaven, and crowned as Queen there by her own Son? Yes, it would. And although you can read, or even write, whole volumes on these doctrines, in a way the fact that it would be wonderful if they were true is the decisive argument in favour of them. After Our Lord's resurrection from the dead, having ourselves believed in the Good News of salvation that it brought us, we can with good reason expect the wonderful to be true. We don't always agree what would truly be wonderful among ourselves, but that's another story; and one way of looking at the various doctrinal controversies that followed. Yet the principle still stands.
That's all very well, you may say to yourself, but this picture is a bit too naïve, a bit too rosy. There is another side to it all. Did not Our Lord himself appear to the Eleven shortly after his resurrection, and did he not rebuke them for their lack of faith? Yes, he did. And so there is plenty of scope for things to go wrong, even with such great graces and privileges as meeting the risen Lord. And yet, as we heard Pope Leo the Great saying this morning at Vigils, perhaps this initial period of doubt, the period between hearing of the resurrection from Mary Magdalene and actually experiencing the presence of the Risen Lord for themselves, was desired by God? Allowing doubts to trouble them was God's way of digging foundations for a deeper faith. So maybe even Our Lord's rebuke was in fact more like a gentle prompt after all. But a prompt to what? Well, they have just witnessed something and it was wonderful to behold, but witness is the key word here. There is nothing more to see. Get up, now it's time to go and testify!
Another quintessentially medieval figure, the almost exact contemporary of Abbot Isaac, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, has this to say about the passage in question:
“Those who had not yet risen to perfection were lying in laziness. Fear of the Lord appeared to them in revelation. And he said to them: Go, and preach the gospel to every creature. Go from impurity to purity, revealing the goodness of God's justice. The one who leaves behind evil things and begins good things will be called a friend of God. Even if they partake of evil, it will not hurt them, because through penance they will rise up again in the good”.
Again, in a typically medieval manner, St Hildegard sees Jesus as impersonating a virtue. He is “fear of the Lord” here, the beginning of wisdom, and as such he prompts, he gets people going. Witnessing to the Risen Lord is ultimately all about beginning to move in the right direction at every moment of your life, because every such movement reveals God to creation. And then the fear of the Lord ascends into heaven, as it were, and “the monk quickly arrives at that perfect love of God which casts out fear. Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue,” as the Rule puts it.
But what is so wonderful about the Ascension, what is so wonderful that it's too good to be true? The very sight of Jesus being taken away into heaven on a cloud would be more than enough to overwhelm anyone, of course. But by then, I dare say, the apostles were beginning to get it. Like Elisha, they have been granted to see their Master being taken away from them. “Please let there be a double portion of your spirit in me,” asked Elisha. And he got a reply: “if you see me as I am being taken away from you, it shall be so for you”. What stunned the apostles was the thought of inheriting a double portion of Jesus's spirit, the thought that, as Church, they would go on to perform greater signs, that Our Lord will be more present to them than when they knew him in the flesh, and that one day they would follow him into heaven. This is indeed wonderful, and therefore true.