It’s good for a homily to make you think. When was the last time it led you to pray?
Seventeen years ago, Ricardo da Silva, S.J., heard one that did—and he never forgot it. He was a Jesuit novice in Birmingham, U.K., when the Rev. Paul Nicholson, S.J., his novice master, began his homily on Ascension Thursday with a striking, if perplexing, image from Medieval art: Jesus’ feet dangling in the air, his body swallowed by clouds.
For this episode of Preach, Ricardo invited Paul to return to that homily—and to reflect on what makes an image last. He speaks about how art and imagination can help a homily do more than explain the Scriptures—how they can invite the faithful into prayer. “You take an image and you say, ‘All right, what’s going to help people be able to appropriate that?’” he asks. “Not simply by hearing me, but by them praying with it.”
Paul is now director of the Jesuit Institute in the United Kingdom, which promotes Ignatian spirituality and supports formation in schools, parishes and dioceses. His most recent ministry was in the provincial office, where he served as assistant to the provincial and accompanied men in Jesuit formation. While based mostly in London, his work has taken him across the province—from social justice ministry in the north of England to directing Loyola Hall, a Jesuit retreat house near Liverpool. For nearly a decade, he served as the director of novices at the Western European novitiate in Birmingham, where he helped form young Jesuits from across Europe and as far afield as Guyana and South Africa. Among them was Ricardo, who had come to the novitiate from South Africa.
[Listen now and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or on your favorite podcast app]
Hearing Paul’s homily afresh nearly two decades later—now a pastor himself—Ricardo heard what he couldn’t have then: how the readings for the Ascension resonate with the experience of accompanying families through funerals—of standing beside them in grief and uncertainty, trying to make sense of the moment. “It’s exactly what happens,” he says. “We have our loved one departing us, and then everybody is saying, ‘He’s still with you, she’s still with you.’” Together, he and Paul reflect on how the feast can speak into grief and memory. Sometimes that’s through the lasting impact someone leaves behind. Other times, it’s through their belonging in the body of Christ that transcends death. “I think the basic idea is a good one,” Paul says. “It’s not like Jesus and the Holy Spirit are still with us and Auntie Mabel isn’t. Her spirit is still with us in some way. And if she was part of the body of Christ before she died, then that continues.”
The episode closes with practical advice for preachers: How to index homilies and maintain a useful repository, how too much preparation can flatten a homily and why “going in slightly nervous”—as Paul puts it—can actually help. “There’s a kind of life to it and a kind of immediate engagement that wouldn’t, for me at least, be there if I’d spent three times as long preparing it.”
The goal, as Paul puts it elsewhere in the conversation, isn’t to impress with clever ideas. “It’s more important to get people to a place where God can talk with them and they can talk with God, than to have lots of great ideas about what the preacher said.”
Scripture Readings for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, Year C
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9
Second Reading: Eph 1:17-23 OR Heb 9:24-28; 10:19-23
Gospel: Lk 24:46-53
You can find the full text of the readings here.
A Homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord by Paul Nicholson, S.J.
One of things I like doing on a day off is going around old churches. There are plenty of old churches in England. You might think that’s a bit of a strange thing for a priest to do when he finally gets a day off. Maybe it is, you might even think it’s a bit sad, and perhaps that’s true, but it is the truth. It’s what I like doing. It comes in handy for this homily, at least, because the image of what we celebrate in today’s feast is a popular one in medieval art—in stained glass, sculpture, paintings and in other ways. And it’s often portrayed in a very similar way across those different media and in different churches and different settings.
It’s an image that’s presented in two halves. The bottom half shows the twelve disciples, sometimes eleven if they’ve remembered that Judas is no longer with them, but often twelve standing round in a circle, looking upwards and looking, frankly, rather worried. Then, about halfway up the artwork, there’ll be a ring of cloud, and at the bottom of the ring of cloud, sticking out from it, are two feet. And that’s all you see. The assumption is that Jesus has now ascended, has returned to heaven, and is so passed beyond the top frame of the artwork.
Now, it’s a simple, naïve image. It always makes me smile. It’s almost a childlike view of what this feast is about. And obviously, it can’t have been precisely like that, whatever happened. Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut at the beginning of the sixties, said he’d been to space and he didn’t meet God there. And in some ways he’s not wrong. But if it wasn’t that, if it wasn’t Jesus returning through the sky like some kind of early space rocket, then what was it? What would we have seen if we’d been there on that day?
The truth of the matter is, we don’t know, and we will never know exactly. No amount of research is going to show us what it would’ve been like to be there, after all. The risen body of Christ after the resurrection, it’s very clear from all the Gospels, is unlike our own. It can, for example, come and go through locked doors, and yet at the same time, it (Jesus) can eat, share a meal with his disciples. What we do know and can know is that after appearing to his disciples for a short time after the resurrection, a short time traditionally marked as 40 days, the time came when this stopped. He’s not available like that. He doesn’t appear like that anymore. And we really can’t say much more than that.
Good news is, though, that the readings today aren’t really interested in the question of where Jesus’ body is. Now, that’s not their main concern. They have a different set of questions to ask. What these readings and this feast want to make us think about is the question, how does God continue to work in our world at this time, in our time? We don’t, as I say, live in a time when we expect to meet Jesus coming down the street towards us, or expect him to arrive unannounced when we’re in a locked room or a locked house. There had been a time like that. The Gospels, the disciples were very clear in their witness, but by the time that these readings were written, the writers knew that that time was over. It wasn’t likely to come again. They weren’t expecting it, certainly.
So what are we left with? Do we simply have to remember what he said and tell each other stories about him? Or was, and is, the God of Jesus still active in our own world, active here among us? Now, that’s what this feast wants to have made us think about. All three of the readings that the church presents us with here tell us that we can experience God still at work.
And indeed that there’s a name for that God at work in our world here and now. Today, it’s called the Holy Spirit. That’s put most closely in the first reading today, where we’re told the disciples will be able to witness powerfully when the spirit comes. The spirit at the point of the ascension, in the way the story is told, has not yet come upon them. But when the spirit comes, they’re to expect that when the spirit comes, they will find themselves able to preach powerfully in a way they haven’t been able to.
To this point, John’s Gospel, in fact, is even clearer: It’s actually better to live as a disciple now. It’s easier to be a disciple now than it was when Jesus was walking as a human being in Palestine those centuries ago. Because the work of God can be seen more clearly when it’s not tied to one particular place or person or time. If you imagine what it would be like if Jesus was still around in a way that he had been there, you’d either have to have cameras on him 24/7, or you’d have to be dashing off to the Holy Land to try and meet him. As it is, we can meet God wherever we are, and that’s what we’re celebrating here.
In a week or so’s time, we’ll be celebrating Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit in its fullness. But we can, today, on this Feast of the Ascension, take time to recognize God at work in our own world and in our own lives. So that, if you like, is the invitation of today’s feast and today’s readings, to ask yourself, what evidence can you point to in your own life that would demonstrate to another person who maybe asks you that God is at work there? What would you show them? What would you try and point out to them?
In the letter to the Galatians, Paul gives a list of what he calls the “fruits of the Spirit.” He talks about things like love and joy and peace, patience, kindness, goodness. And what he’s saying there, by calling those fruits of the spirit, he’s saying to you, when you can see those in your own life, either in yourself or in other people, then you can be sure that God’s spirit is at work, where you find yourself being loving or joyful or patient, where you find other people building peace or being kind or simply being good to you or to each other. There the spirit is at work there, God is at work.
God is at work in our world. In the Feast of the Ascension, God is still very much around. So if you recognize that, if you recognize God at work in that way, then you’ll know that today’s feast isn’t about clinging onto the last sight of Jesus’ feat before he finally disappears. What it is about is leaving church today, continuing to work alongside God, wherever you find him in the work that he continues to do through God’s spirit.
Let’s pray for eyes that are open to that, not looking skyward, feeling nostalgic, but looking determinately at our own world to see God at work and looking with determination too, to work alongside him in whatever it is we find him doing.
