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     The feast of the Ascension of the Lord is now celebrated on the seventh Sunday of Easter in most of the United States.  Of course, there are many of us who remember it being celebrated on the Thursday before that Sunday.  We Catholic kids got the day off from school!  The liturgical emphasis was on Jesus rising into the heavens while the disciples (and we) watched in wonder.  The accounts in Acts (first scripture) and the Gospel According to Luke (gospel scripture) are by the same evangelist - Luke - and they leave us with a kind of fading out image floating off into the sky.  Perhaps that vagueness should  warn us that there is another, more practical, emphasis.  Indeed, the "two men dressed in white garments" give the gawking disciples a wake up call:  "Men of Galilee. why are you standing there looking up at the sky?"

     The other emphasis is on witness.  In both passages, the evangelist Luke speaks of being witnesses to Jesus, not only in Jerusalem, but to the ends of the earth.  This will be reinforced in the Pentecost account when the list of nationalities hearing the preaching of the disciples covered much of the world known to the evangelist at the time.   Indeed, by the time Luke composed his two works, the gospel had begun to spread through the efforts of St. Paul and others not only to Jews but to Gentiles.  That is still going on in our time.  How Jesus got back to heaven after the resurrection is a fascinating topic, but how he gets to other people is our job as witnesses.  AMEN