Feast of the Ascension (2026)

Belief and doubt are antonyms.  The two concepts just don’t go together. In confessional situations doubt may be confessed as a sin.  The convicted Christian, it is thought, doesn’t entertain doubts. But is that true?

                We read five verses from the Gospel of Matthew that describe an episode from the life of Jesus that we reflect on in this liturgy.  We contemplate the Ascension of Jesus.  At a certain point, after the Resurrection, Jesus leaves the infant Christian community behind.  Two different scenarios are described in the Scriptures.  In one, it seems as if Jesus leaves the earth on the day of his Resurrection. In another, Jesus stays with the Apostles for 40 days.  He then leads them out to a mountain where he is taken up into heaven.              

                In Matthew’s Gospel, we aren’t really given a time frame.  The Ascension seems to flow out of Jesus’ appearance to the women at the tomb Easter morning.  He tells the women to send his followers back to Galilee.  And it is on a mountain there that he appears. But he is immediately taken from their sight.  The most disquieting thing about this account is that it says the Apostles “worship but they doubt.”

                The word for worship in Greek is pro-sky-ne. The word means to fall to one’s knees.  People fall to their knees several times in the Gospel of Matthew when they encounter Jesus.  We could think of how the magi fell to their knees to worship the infant Jesus.  We might also remember how the Apostles fell to their knees when Jesus walked on the water.

                For the gospel writer somehow, wonder, doubt, falling to one’s knees all seem to go together. If we look at the history of Christianity, we hear how many a skeptic has fallen to their knees after a religious awakening. 

                We could think of St. Paul’s conversion which is described in the ninth Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.  Paul is running to Damascus because he wants to stop the Christian faith in its tracks.  He is knocked to the ground with a flash of light.  Jesus calls out with the question, “Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me?”  Paul is driven from hatred of Jesus to worship in an instant.

                If we want a more contemporary example, we might consider C.S. Lewis.  He describes his conversion in detail in his writings.  Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast.  He was baptized as an infant. His mother’s father was an Anglican priest.  Lewis had several life experiences that caused him to be a professed atheist.  His mother died of cancer when he was nine.  His father sent him away to boarding school because he felt ill equipped to raise him. Lewis signed up to fight in the army during WWI.  He witnessed the horror of industrialized war.  Thousands died in front of him.

                He became deathly ill in the trenches.  He was then sent back to England. All these experiences caused him to deny God existed.  When he recovered, he went back to study.  He wrestled with philosophy, theology and resisted his Christian friends GK Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien’s attempts to convert him. Finally, in despair, while teaching at Magdalen College, he was driven to his knees one night in 1929. He professed faith in Jesus as the Son of God. As he put it, “I was probably the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He then became one of the greatest Christian apologists of the 20th century.

                Perhaps we see in C.S. Lewis our own stories. Or, we see friends of ours who struggle to believe.  We might also see a reflection of ourselves in the first Apostles who were given the great commission to “go out and make disciples of all nations.”

                When Jesus ascended, he placed the Gospel enterprise in our hands.  If we are truthful, we would probably say we are awed by what Jesus did in the world. We are impressed by how much the church has accomplished in 2,000 years.  We might also admit that the Church often disappoints us.  We are conflicted, but somehow, we are still drawn to follow Jesus. Are we hypocrites? No, we seek to know a God that we as humans can never quite understand. Somehow even though we doubt we still worship Jesus, who pushes us to believe, sustains us with hope and inspires us to imitate his unwavering love of others.