ALL
May 31, 2023
Fr John Riccardo
“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 behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28:18-20).
This was the Gospel we heard proclaimed at Mass recently on the Solemnity of the Ascension of our Lord Jesus. This is, perhaps, a good week to reflect again on these words of Jesus, especially since we just celebrated Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit is richly connected with His words.
What exactly is involved in that “all” of which Jesus speaks when He says, “All that I have commanded you”?
Certainly, one would want to start with the revelation of God that Jesus has definitively given. God is made known in an absolutely unique way in Jesus, and especially in His life, death and glorious resurrection, and the disciples are sent out to tell everyone of the one, true God who is Love – something no one had ever dared to imagine. Also included in this “all” is the fact that the God who is Love has created us for friendship with Himself, and, in fact, to share one day in His own abundant life (cf. 1 Peter 2:4).
“All,” however, includes much, much more.
Jesus wasn’t sent only to teach us about God and prayer and related things. As the Church teaches, and as St. John Paul II constantly repeated, “It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear” (Gaudium et spes, 22). In other words, Jesus doesn’t only reveal God to us; He reveals us to ourselves. He teaches us, by His words and His life, everything about what it means to be fully human. This includes how to work, how to rest, and how to eat meals. It includes as well the truth about marriage and sexuality, about friendship, and about forgiveness. He likewise taught us about politics, education, and money. In short, when Jesus sends the disciples out to teach the nations “all” that they have been commanded, this means something akin to, “Teach them what it genuinely means to be human.”
Here’s where Pentecost comes into sharper focus. The Holy Spirit is given by the Lord to not only give the disciples the courage to go forth and teach, but power from on high to live this new life, to be a kind of working model of what authentic humanity looks like. The Spirit gives us power to be human in a new way, in the way that we were originally created to be: worshiping the one, true God, and exercising dominion (not domination) over this world which God created and loves.
We are, then, sent out into the world to evangelize, but also to do all we can to be active agents of re-creation in all the areas that the Lord has taught us about. We need to be reminded, or at least I do, that God loves this world. He loves it so much that he not only willed it into existence, but became man so as to rescue it from the clutches of the enemy.
The enemy defaces and mars God‘s creation. And to be sure, while Jesus is the only one who ultimately will make all things new when He gloriously returns, ours is the mission right now of not only spreading the gospel, but of putting the gospel into effect in all those places where the enemy has bent it, doing what we can to bend it back into conformity with God‘s original plan.
In order to do this, we all need all the power, all the courage, all the wisdom, all the gifts, and all the help we can get from the Holy Spirit.