By Gayle Somers, Catholic Exchange, May 30, 2025
Gayle Somers is a member of St. Thomas the Apostle parish in Phoenix and has been writing and leading parish Bible studies since 1996. She is the author of three bible studies, Galatians: A New Kind of Freedom Defended (Basilica Press), Genesis: God and His Creation, and Genesis: God and His Family (Emmaus Road Publishing). …
On Ascension Day, Jesus gives His apostles, a group of men singularly lacking in influence, a worldwide mission. How would they be able to pull this off?
Gospel (Read Lk. 24:46-53)
St. Luke tells us that as Jesus prepares to depart from His disciples and be taken up to heaven, He reminds them that God has always had a plan to save the world—a plan which was written in the Old Testament Scriptures over the course of centuries.
Many of these prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus’ time on earth, but not all of them. What remained was for God to send His Spirit to renew the earth, long promised in passages like Isaiah 44:3, Ezekiel 36:26, and Joel 2:28-29. Before His Passion, Jesus had told the disciples that it would be good for Him to leave them because then He could send the Holy Spirit, the “Counselor,” to enable them to be His witnesses (see Jn. 16:17).
It had been the vocation of Israel to be God’s witness to the nations ever since He formed them as His own people. They were to be a holy nation, a kingdom of priests (see Ex. 19:6) to mediate the knowledge of God’s goodness to those who didn’t know Him. Jesus renews that priestly vocation for His followers with the specific Good News that “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” could now be preached in His Name to the whole world. For this work, the disciples would need to “stay in the city until [they were] clothed with power from on high.” …