Ascension Sunday

Saying farewell

There are two types of farewell - those where we are reasonably sure that we will meet the other person again, later in the day, week or year, and those where we say farewell never sure we will ever meet the other again in this life. We find farewells harder if the person is leaving on a plane for another country. While social meda have made the distance seem irrelevant, it is not the same as having the peron by our side.

The hardest parting of all is that of death, at someone's death bed, at the closing of the coffin, at the lowering of the coffin into the ground, or the closing of the panels or curtain at a crematorium. There is that incommunicable awfulness, of terrible heartbreak, of seeming finality.

That is why  we return to the extracts from the Last Supper all during Eastertide.

The Sunday Gospel has focussed us on Jesus' last words to his disciples the night before He died. They are His last words before He died, and they are read in part in Holy Week but in the context of the Resurrection they take on a completely different character. For us to hear Jesus say 'I will not be wth you much longer' takes on one character in the context of betrayal, Passion and death, and a completely new one in the context of His impending Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

And so we are to understand the parting of Jesus in that light, and indeed the parting of loved ones also in the light of Jesus victory over  sin and death -  that  'death has no power over our loved ones.'