Gospel Reflection on Matthew 28:16-20
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
May 17, 2026
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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 all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
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I'm taking an online course in Buddhism and every month we require to submit an essay and it's all done online; and part of submitting the essay online is we are asked 'is this your own work?' and I tick the box attesting that this is my work, but the reality is that my essay is made up of many other people's ideas, phrases, metaphors, images.
We tend to think we're independent, we try to do everything relying solely on our own strength, we often overestimate our capabilities and think we're self-sufficient because we seem to have this dizzying freedom. But a more realistic picture is that we exist in a community of persons of which we are apart.
There's a wonderful African word for this: Ubuntu, which means 'I am because we are' and on this feast, the feast of the Ascension, were reminded that not only do we live as part of a wide human community, but we live our life as part of God, and God exists as somehow part of us.
Christians love the name first given to Jesus: he is Emmanuel, God-with-us; he took our flesh and came to live among us; but we tend to think of Jesus of Nazareth as a kind of one-off that God confined his taking on flesh to this one individual and all he borrowed was tissue, bone, marrow, blood, but we're going to understand that the Incarnation -which means 'in the flesh'- is about God taking every part of being a human being.
Think of God as a carnivore, or even better, omnivore: God eats all of us, our language, our longings, our fears, our imagery, our consciousness. In Jesus we encounter this incredible belief, that the infinite being who fashioned all of existence can now be found in our own fleshiness, in our culture, in our language, in our history, in our human desires, and our human longings; and the feast of the Ascension declares that God somehow having been raised from the dead, ascends into the infinity of God and he does so in the flesh: that means all things human are now part of the Creator who fashioned the universe 13 billion years ago. Now we are shaping God's world just as God once set out to shape our world by being born among us.
The Ascension celebrates the enormous trust that the Lord places in us: we've been incarnated into God just as God was once incarnated into us, and so we share in the very creative power of God and are now charged with bringing the gift of creation to its full realization.
In the Our Father when we pray 'lead us not into temptation' we're saying 'lead us not to give into the typical and destructive human tendency of always trying to do things by
ourselves and forgetting of whom we are a part'.
At his Ascension Jesus tells us that he is with us always and now we are always with God: such a gift such responsibility!
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