Ascension Sunday. Today’s readings: Acts 1: 1-11; Psalm 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9; Ephesians 1:17-23; Matthew 28:16-20
El Evangelio en Solentiname (1979), by Ernesto Cardenal.In El Evangelio en Solentiname (1979), Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020), a former member of the Sandinista Liberation Front in Nicaragua and later a revolutionary priest who was suspended from priestly ministry in 1984 for his political activism as Minister of Culture, speaks of the spreading of the Gospel in terms of a revolution.
El Evangelio en Solentiname is a collection of dialogic ‘homilies’ on the Sunday Gospels. Sunday mass on the Solentiname Islands, where Cardenal founded a lay ‘monastic’ community made up mainly of peasants, was celebrated either in a church building or in the countryside, there where the majority didn’t practise for reasons varying from political ideology, disenchantment, fear of the regime, or also because Cardenal’s community didn’t match the traditional devotional features of religious practice. ‘Homilies’ took the form of a dialogic verse to verse commentary on the gospel of the day, “in a relaxed and spontaneous atmosphere”, sitting at the altar, sometimes even smoking a cigarette to help those present calm down from a tense, hostile social context.
Undoubtedly, Cardenal’s monastic formation, under the mentorship of Thomas Merton, and later on, his experience with Latin American priests, taught him the intrinsic value of ecclesial communion, which is born out of the readiness to share one’s experience of the risen Christ and to listen to one’s brothers and sisters. The Church is rooted in the communion of the Triune God in whose name Jesus instructs his disciples to baptise whoever comes to faith.
There is a revolutionary power in the Gospel for the building of God’s reign in this world. Cardenal saw himself as a revolutionary without retaliation for God’s reign, walking in the footsteps of Jesus, who in today’s gospel is revered by the disciples as Sovereign, having “all authority in heaven and earth”. On the mount in Galilee, the Risen Christ brings to completion what he had started on the Mount of the Beatitudes and the Mount of the Transfiguration. It is from Galilee that the disciples were summoned to faith by Jesus himself, and now it is from Galilee that they are sent on a mission to announce the Good News to subvert earthly powers and structures, transforming the world and freeing it to welcome God’s reign.
There is indeed politics in the Good News, as there are beliefs and principles forming a particular world view on how world structures should be life-giving, promoters of justice, heralds of long-lasting harmony and peace
Cardenal and liberation theologians remind us that it is very dangerous for the Christian community to exile the risen Christ in heaven, relegating him to the afterlife, and neutering his revolutionary power, which has the capacity of changing the world for good. Jesus himself assures his disciples that he is always with them “until the end of times”. He is ever present, at the forefront, leading his disciples in the work of redemption and salvation.
There is indeed politics in the Good News, as there are beliefs and principles forming a particular world view on how world structures should be life-giving, promoters of justice, heralds of long-lasting harmony and peace. From a Christian perspective there is only one way for this to become a reality: allowing ourselves to be enveloped by the mystery of God, as Jesus and the disciples were symbolically overshadowed by the cloud which appears both in Luke’s account of the Ascension as well as in that of the Transfiguration. In Cardenal’s words, “the cloud is something which is visible but which also hides. It is the image of God, who reveals himself and at the same time remains hidden from us. Rather, God is revealed to us as a mystery; God’s presence is a void, and God’s being is nothing to the senses.”
This is why, in today’s second reading, the apostle wishes to his community in Ephesus, that God might bestow her with wisdom, clarity of vision and openness of heart to complete in everyone, from the here and now, that plenitude, which is already present in Jesus Christ, the head of his body the Church.