by Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz
I am a big fan of Ascension Thursday. After all, I was ordained a priest on Ascension Thursday at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.
The following Sunday, it was Ascension once again when I celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving at the hospital where I had my pastoral assignment. How so? The Italian bishops’ conference transferred the solemnity of the Ascension to the following Sunday. With all the dioceses of New York State, we do likewise in Brooklyn and Queens. Make your way to New Jersey, though, and there the Ascension is celebrated on Sunday.
Why the difference? The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops granted each ecclesiastical province the authority to transfer this solemnity from Thursday to the following Sunday, eliminating this holy day of obligation on a weekday.
I am also glad to celebrate the Ascension on Thursday because this makes room on the liturgical calendar for the Seventh Sunday of Easter. That means another opportunity to preach about John’s apocalypse because the second reading comes from the apocalypse each Sunday of Easter. No other
New Testament book captures so vividly the paradox at the heart of Easter faith: it was by his death that Christ triumphed over death. The victorious lion is actually a lamb!
We are simultaneously baffled and amazed as we ponder this book about which St. Jerome opined that it contains as many mysteries as it has words.
It helps to remember that John’s apocalypse was written at the end of the first century, and that it was first intended for small communities of Christians living in urban centers of the Roman province of Asia, in present-day Turkey. It was originally for them that John wrote down what he saw and heard, to address their challenging predicament.
While they did not face the organized persecutions that eventually became widespread, Christians were regarded with suspicion for not participating in the ordinary practices of civic life. They did not eat meat that was sacrificed in honor of one or another of the many gods, nor did they frequent the public games and theatrical performances sponsored by local elites to gain favor with Rome, nor did they worship in the temples erected to honor the emperor.
Venerated as divine, the Roman emperor Domitian was invoked as “lord and god.”
Instead, the Christians owed allegiance to someone who had been executed on a cross. Daring to declare that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they gathered for worship not in temples but in each other’s homes.
The apocalypse describes glorious scenes of heavenly worship of the true God in deliberate contrast with the idolatrous worship that took place in the earthly temples of Roman Asia. There is no temple in the new Jerusalem that descends from heaven, not made by human hands, “for its temple is the Lord God almighty and the Lamb” (Rev 21:22).
Revelation’s earliest audiences refused to submit to the status quo, to a way of life that would have brought them considerable advantages in the public square.
Then, as now, followers of Christ are in the world but not of the world. Yet we are not to turn our backs on the world God loved so much that he sent his son. As missionary disciples, we are called to testify to the Gospel of the lion-who-is-a-lamb whom the powers of this world cannot silence or defeat, and who reigns by the unconquerable power of love.
Readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Acts 7:55-60
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20
John 17:20-26
Father Jean-Pierre Ruiz, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, is a professor of theology at St. John’s University.