HOMILY PRONOUNCED BY MONS. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY.
SOLEMNITY OF THE ASCENSION OF THE LORD

Sunday, May 20th of 2006

HEAVEN

Brothers: Let us sing the greatnesses of the Lord who has called us in His son Jesus Christ to a new life, and He has made us to know the intentions of His mercy in the same person of His dear Son that by His cross and resurrection he leads us to the life in love that does not have end.

The mystery of the ascension of the Lord, it is a mean to think in our own ascension or descent. We ascend when we try to go up from the temporary realities to the ones of greater value, touching with our soul, the spiritual realities of our ego, of the men our brothers, and of God. We descend when we submerged ourselves in the matter and we drowned our spirit in the expired thing, in the twisted and corrupted thing of the existence.

We ascend when we fly more or less high, through the fascinating worlds of the spirit and of the art, of the sciences and of the technique. When through this screen, and with the eyes of faith, we recognize the greatnesses of the Supreme Being who is the source of all kindness.

We descend when we form ourselves before the three idols and to them we prostrate ourselves to them: the deities of the money, power and sex. Three deities that form the Trinity of the man from this earth and before which we (many men) prostrate ourselves.

The party of the ascension of the Lord, almost at the end of the Easter time, can not be understood, my dear brothers, out of the context of this glorious mystery of the Easter. We could say that we do not become disconnected from Him, because it is about a different way to understand and to express the same mystery of the resurrection. It reveals to us its important and ineffable aspect. When the words are missing to express an experience we resort to the poetry and the symbols that allow us to express something of that we can translate in words that always stay short, because they do not achieve to express everything.

We can not pass without paying attention that the resurrection is a mysterious reality that is beyond the possibility of a definition or a precise description. The fact is that some words are missing, and also a direct experience about that we express of this mystery in faith, is missing. If we would have this experience, we would not be here in the time and in the space giving testimony of it, because who is gone never return.

But, because of the narrations of the Holy Scripture, like the ones from today, we can approach this mystery that somehow we experience it in faith, and in the most intimate of our being of children of God, my brothers, these mysteries are not unknown for us, but all the opposite; but they are accepted and lived from the deepest of our being: there where our spirit is with God; with the God of a life totally different. There, in the privacy is where we have to enter to understand something about this sublime mystery.

That’s why the readings speak about a heaven. Other concept understood badly and out of phase of its mysterious reality. First, my brothers, it is not a place, but it is a situation, a way to exist differently, and superior to the earth one which is limited by space and time.

When we say that the Lord went to heaven, and we read that the apostles looked at upwards. We can not stay with the idea of that that place is in the highest of the Earth. No, brothers, we say and believe that heaven is symbol of a reality that belongs to the eternity, it means, it is something very close to God, omnipotent, eternal and extreme good. Going to heaven or being in heaven, dear brothers, has a meaning of faith. With those expressions, very typical of the biblical language, we profess our faith in other reality, and for that reason, connected with God. A reality to which everybody is called, and in which we have been introduced by the baptism as expression of our faith, as an existential adhesion to the Lord. Heaven is the destiny to which we walk with the practice of all that we have accepted in the obedience with our baptism; but also with the celebration of the other sacraments and the practice of the charity.

For that reason, my brothers, to think in heaven, to look for it and to desire it, it does not allow us to separate the feet from the earth. Because it is here, in the Earth, in the history that we are living as actors, where we gain heaven. We are going to Him as our last destiny passing through earth. We know that it is not our definitive motherland, but without passing through it, we do not arrive at the one that we expect it is the eternal one. The step to heaven is earth. We can not arrive at heaven without living responsibly in earth.

For that reason the risen Christ, according to the Acts of the Apostles, He sends his disciples with his spirit to the world to give testimony about what the had seen, heard and lived with Him. They stayed looking at sky, but they can not forget earth in which they have worked in order to the kingdom of God is received by all the men to be saved.

In the Gospel, it says that Jesus took them to outside of Jerusalem, and when he blessed them, he went away elevating himself in front of them. The one that descended to become man, he ascended to take with him the whole humanity (Eph 4, 8-10). We came for that: to save ourselves; it is the salvation, to arrive at God, the destiny for which we were created. While we achieve it, we are accompanied by the Spirit of Jesus that animates us not to become weak in the middle of the difficulties of the world.

Every Eucharist allows us to experience His mysterious, safe and joyful nearness. As to the disciples, also for us, today the mass is the place from which He sends us to be witnesses his in all the areas of the human activity. From the mass of every Sunday, we have to leave filled with an optimism that is born from faith in the certainty that God wants, with our cooperation, to make a new earth, that it is figure of a new humanity which has been created in risen Christ.

We always counted on the generous attendance of our, little girl, and celestial Lady who accompanies us with her example, her nearness and her maternal intercession in order to we reach what it has been promised to us, and that moves us to work for the others.

Amen.