Go throughout the world: At 1:1, Ef 1, and the Ascension of the Lord in Mt 28

## I. The first reading: Acts 1:1-11

Luke begins the Acts of the Ascension of the Lord by recounting what he narrated in his Gospel: Jesus appeared alive after His passion, providing many convincing proofs, and appearing to them for forty days, speaking about the Kingdom of God. He commands them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The apostles inquire if this is the time when He will restore the kingdom to Israel. Jesus replies: “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority… but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:7-8). Then He is taken up into heaven while a cloud hides Him from their sight. Two men in white appear: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up at heaven? This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come back in the same way as you watched Him ascend into heaven” (v.11). The promise to return frames the entire mission of the Church: the time between the Ascension and the Parousia is a time of testimony.

## II. The second reading: Ephesians 1:17-23

Paul, reflecting on the Ascension of the Lord, prays that God would grant the reader “the spirit of wisdom to understand… the hope of His calling, and the riches of the glory of His inheritance among the saints” (Eph 1:17-18). The power of God who raised Christ is the same power that acts in believers. This power seated Christ “at His right hand in the heavenly places, above all principality and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (vv. 20-21). “He has put all things under His feet and gave Him as head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (vv. 22-23). The Ascension is not a withdrawal of Christ; it is His exaltation to the point where He can be head of a universal body, the Church, at all times and in all places.

## III. The gospel: Matthew 28:16-20

In the Gospel of Matthew, after His resurrection, Jesus commands His disciples: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28:19-20). This mission is preceded by His Ascension, which marks the end of His visible appearances and the beginning of the Church’s mission in the world.

# The Ascension of the Lord and the Missionary Mandate

According to Matthew, the Ascension of the Lord coincides with the missionary mandate. The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain that Jesus had indicated to them. When they saw him, they prostrated themselves in adoration: “but some doubted” (Mt 28:17). Matthew’s honesty in recording doubt at the very moment of adoration is revealing: Paschal faith coexists with human fragility. Jesus approaches and speaks: “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth” (v. 18). The Ascension is not a limitation of Christ’s power; it is its universalization. “Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I have commanded you” (vv. 19-20). The missionary mandate is trinitarian: the mission proceeds from the authority of the Son, is carried out in the name of the Trinity, and is sustained by the permanent presence: “Behold, I am with you always until the end of the age” (v. 20). The departing Jesus is not the abandoning Jesus; he is the Jesus who remains in a new, universal, and definitive way.

## Mary and the Ascension of the Lord

Acts 1:14 informs us that after the Ascension, the disciples returned to the Cenacle and “devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” Mary was present at the Ascension and was in the Cenacle waiting for the Spirit. She who had welcomed the Spirit at the Annunciation now awaits, with the whole nascent Church, the Spirit that will come upon all. Ephesians 1 contemplates Christ as the head of the Church: Mary is the most eminent member of this Church, the one who has received the grace of the head in its fullest measure. Tradition calls her “above all angels and all saints,” not for any merit of her own but because of the fullness she has received from the risen Son. Matthew 28 ends with “I am with you always until the end of the age”: Mary, in her Assumption, is the creature who most fully lives this permanent companionship with the Son. While the disciples still await the end of time, Mary is already in the presence of the risen Son, interceding from there for all who still journey through time between the Ascension and the Parousia.

# V. Conclusion: The Ascension of the Lord as a Missionary and Marian Mystery

The presence of Mary between the Ascension and Pentecost is not a biographical detail but a theological key. Luke, the only evangelist to name her among those “devoting themselves to prayer with one accord” (Acts 1:14), presents her as a living link between the time of the Son and the time of the Church. She who conceived the Word through the action of the Spirit at the Annunciation is now in the Cenacle, at the heart of the community that will receive the same Spirit to give birth to Christ’s Body in the world. As Pope John Paul II reminds us in *Redemptoris Mater*, there is a pneumatological symmetry between Nazareth and the Cenacle: the Spirit who descended upon Mary to form the humanity of the Son now descends upon the Church to form its mystical body, and Mary stands in both moments as mother and disciple.

Ephesians 1 sheds further light on Mary’s place. If Christ is the head of the Church, and if the Church is “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:23), then Mary is the primordial expression of this fullness. In her, the Church has already attained what the whole of humanity strives for: full communion with the glorified Lord. The Assumption is the continuation of Mary’s mystery in the light of the Lord’s Ascension: just as the Son was elevated in body and soul to the right hand of the Father, so too was Mary raised in body and soul to be with the Son. The Ascension opens the way; the Assumption shows that this path reaches its destination in a human creature, the first fully redeemed member.

Matthew 28 confirms this Marian reading. The promise “I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:20) is uniquely fulfilled in one who already lives in the unveiled presence of the Son. Mary’s motherhood, received at the foot of the cross (“Behold your Mother,” Jn 19:27), now extends to the whole Church on mission: she accompanies the disciples sent to all nations, interceding from heaven so that the missionary mandate bears fruit. Therefore, Mariology and the Ascension of the Lord are inseparable from a missionary ecclesiology: wherever the Church goes, Mary precedes through her intercession, and wherever the Church arrives, Mary awaits as an icon of what the Church is meant to be.

# The Theology of the Ascension of the Lord

The three liturgical texts for the Solemnity of the Ascension converge in a single theological movement: what appears to be a departure is, in reality, the instauration of a new presence. Acts 1 recounts the historical event: Jesus is lifted up and a cloud takes Him out of the disciples’ sight, but two men dressed in white redirect their gaze from heaven to earth, from contemplation to mission. Ephesians 1 offers the cosmic key: what happened in Jesus concerns everything that exists, as He was constituted head over all things for the Church’s sake. Matthew 28 translates the event into a mandate: the universal authority of the Resurrected becomes, within the Church, a universal mission supported by the promise of a presence that knows no end.

The Ascension is therefore simultaneously a goodbye and a sending, an absence and a presence, an end and a beginning. It marks the end of appearances and the beginning of faith that believes without seeing; it is the absence of the visible body and the presence in the sacrament, in the Word, and in the Spirit; it is a goodbye to the disciples of Galilee and a sending to disciples of all nations. Matthew 28:20’s *Ecce ego vobiscum sum* (Behold, I am with you always) is not consolation for the grief of departure; it is the formula for the new history in which the Lord is closer to the Church by being at the right hand of the Father than He would have been had He remained in a single place in Galilee.

In this mystery, Mary is the figure that unites all the threads. She is present in the Ascension as a mother; in the Cenacle as a disciple; lives in the Assumption as the primacy of the glorified Church; and intercedes as the mother of the pilgrim Church. Contemplating her in the Ascension of the Lord is to contemplate the promised destiny for all baptized: to go, announce, baptize, teach, and finally be lifted up to join the Lord who promised to be with us always until the end of the age. *Ecce ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi*: this promise encompasses the entire history of the Church, and first and foremost, the Mother who embraced it and lived it in fullness.

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