Getting Ready to Pray
Ascension Thursday has mostly been transferred to the Sunday before Pentecost. So, this is most often Ascension Sunday!
We prepare for celebrating the Eucharist by the way we live our previous “Holy Exchange.” We pray to enjoy being believers. We pray to live as women and men who trust the spiritual gifts we have received beginning with Baptism and strengthened through Confirmation. We pray in the freedom of knowing who we are as gifts from God at this time and in this place.
We can pray as well with the quiet faith and presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Mary whose actions spoke louder than her words. We believe she is present in our “upper room” when we gather as Church. Her words are not recorded at Jesus’ death nor his Resurrection, but she stayed faithful while she watched what she could not change.
We too can pray for that same trusting of the mysteries.
Some Thoughts
The Acts of the Apostles, which is the scriptural history of the Holy Spirit’s working in the early Church, shares with us a tender story (First Reading).
We hear from the first chapter about how the early eleven returned to Jerusalem to pray: the ones who had watched Jesus ascend. We hear their names and then the name of Mary with whom they gather to pray in the “upper room.” That is all we hear, but there is much there.
There they all are in the former room of fear-and-hiding. They gather together in faith-and-finding. In the following verses they have to get down to busyness and business. They will have to find a successor to their fallen fellow-apostle, Judas Iscariot. That is in the future. What we hear is the group gathered together in faith, men and women, for the first time without his physical presence. Their prayer is not of terror, but hope.
Imagine this scene. They are all of the Jewish tradition which was strictly a male-first structure. So the men arrive back from Mount Olivet and there is Mary with other women waiting for them. Peter who knows his fragile past looks at Mary whose faithful past Peter also knows. So does Peter clear his throat and begin, as if nothing had happened, “Let us pray?” Mary had been ordained by the Holy Spirit to present the body and person of Jesus to the world. Not a cultic priest, Mary presided at the first sharing of his body by allowing him to share her body. Does Peter invite her to lead the prayers? Probably not, because that was not the tradition. This is such a tender time for them all.
The Gospel is a retrospect, a looking backwards in time. The scene is the “upper room” the night of His betrayal, arrest and personal sufferings. Jesus speaks to His Father on behalf of his little band of brothers. In the Gospel of John, Jesus on the cross is the supreme display of “glory.” It is the final and ultimate “sign” of the “authority” which the Father has given him, the “authority” of extending eternal life to all who would believe in his being “sent.”
Jesus prays for His followers who will remain in the “world” while Jesus is no longer in that same “world.” Jesus, who was sent into the “world” as a gift, has given the gift of life to his Apostles and is praying that they would remain consecrated. The “world” who has hated him and who will hate them, is both a place and a spirit opposed to goodness. They will suffer for their beliefs as they will soon see him suffer through hatred. Peter’s Epistle in our Second Reading reinforces this spirit. If we are “Christians” then we will suffer for the goodness of Christ life within us.
Mary, Peter, the early Church and the late, John Paul II and you belong to the goodness of God freely offered and not always received. Mary is still giving us the nod which again means, “Let us pray.” She who suffered for her faith until the Resurrection still welcomes us back to the community gathered together to receive Christ’s continuous prayer over us in the Eucharist.
