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When I think of my own discernment, that is, when I was trying to figure out God’s will for my life, like you, I got no clear sign from heaven. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be so that we have to keep coming back to God, even daily, for nourishment, strength, and guidance.

What preoccupied my mind for months, and even years, was whether I should become a teacher or a physiotherapist. One day I was sold on the idea of becoming a teacher and the very next day I was convinced physiotherapy was the way to go. Tired of being constantly torn between the two, I just let both of them go. Not long after that, a third option, certainly nothing I could have ever concocted on my own in a thousand years, emerged. I was this crazy idea of priesthood. I took a gamble in September 1989, and the rest is history, as they say.

What was it about teaching that appealed to me for so long, but didn’t result in me being a teacher? I suppose it’s about having something really valuable and precious that you just want to pass it on to others. It’s the desire to enrich someone else’s life with the very thing that enriches your life. Good teachers are always about enriching students’ lives to the point where they hope the student will even surpass them someday. Jesus, the Master Teacher, told us that if we believe in him, we will do greater works than he did. High praise indeed, but that’s the way good teachers talk.

And what about this incessant idea of wanting to become a physiotherapist? What was that all about? I can only chalk it up to some deep drive in me to be a healer without actually being a doctor.

So, teaching and healing went back and forth for years, as if on a sliding scale until I let go of both of those dreams. Like I said, what emerged was a third option, the unlikely option of priesthood. Looking back, while it wasn’t my calling to become a teacher or a physiotherapist, teaching and healing have, nonetheless, found their way into my life as a priest.

Teaching and healing were central to Jesus’ ministry as well. Some scholars say that is all Jesus did—he taught and healed, taught and healed. Unlike teachers of the Law, the Pharisees, Jesus taught with authority. His authority came from  being open, and remaining open, to the power of God working through him. He taught one thing—the Kingdom of God—the only agenda he ever had. Jesus was a channel of God’s love, mercy, forgiveness and justice by first being a person of integrity. He integrated his words and actions into a single message. He even said that if we didn’t believe his words, “believe me because of the works themselves.”

Just before Jesus began his public ministry, he was tempted by the devil in the desert who said to him, “I will give you authority over all the kingdoms of the world, if you will just bow down and worship me.” That’s the lie. The devil never ruled over the kingdoms of the world, and he certainly had no authority to give it away. Authority has always been Jesus’ as he says in today’s gospel, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.”

And there’s the thing. He wants to give away his authority, the authority of a good teacher, to you and me. That’s how trusting and that’s how risk-taking Jesus is. “Go and teach the nations of the world to obey all that I have commanded you.” He is the Master Teacher, and he commissions us to now become teachers as well. This is the pattern in Jesus’ life. Like a good teacher, he holds nothing to himself but gives it all away to us. He forgives and immediately tells us that we have the power to forgive. He casts out demons and has no problem giving his disciples authority over demons. He holds nothing to himself but gives it away freely to us.

So, he teaches and heals. Most of us grew up with the thought that Jesus came to clean us up, individually, from our sin so that on Judgment Day we might have an outside chance of going to heaven. If you read the four Gospels, Jesus doesn’t move toward sin. What does he move toward? Pain and suffering. Why? In order to bring healing. He is not into “sin management” as we have made him out to be. He’s into healing. He senses suffering and immediately his heart rushes ahead to the suffering one in order to bring healing.

It’s important in Matthew’s version of the gospel that Ascension happens in Galilee. On that first Easter morning, the startled women at the empty tomb meet up with an angel. The angel tells them to bring the message back to the disciples that if these guys want to see Jesus, who is very much alive, they are to go to Galilee.

Galilee is the backwater part of the Roman Empire. Nobody important comes from Galilee, and nothing important happens there. They are the forgotten people of the world. Remember, when Mary and Joseph were on the run with the child Jesus, they could not return to Bethlehem but, instead, went to Galilee. Galilee was the place where the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. Galilee, not Jerusalem where the elite lived, is where Jesus chose the first four Apostles, uneducated fisherman. It’s in the most forgotten place in the world that Jesus dreamt of the Kingdom of God and said to Peter and Andrew, James and John, “Follow me.” It’s also in Galilee on a mountain where Jesus gave his inaugural sermon and said, “You are the light of the world, so let your light shine, especially to those who sit in darkness.”

You might have noticed something strange in Matthew’s version of the Ascension story. He never mentions the fact that Jesus actually ascended back into heaven. (Now, I think he did). Matthew’s emphasis is not that we look up into the sky. His emphasis is that we go into the world as teachers, teaching with the authority Jesus himself freely gives us.

The Gospel of Matthew starts with an angel telling Joseph that Mary is to bear a child and that child will be known as Emmanuel, which means, “God is with us.” The last thing Jesus says to us before ascending into heaven is, “Remember, I am with you until the end of the age.” So, Jesus is with you at the beginning, at the end, and at every step of your life in between.

In the end, I did not get to be a teacher nor a physiotherapist. That’s O.K. What I did get instead is the very same thing you got—an assurance that God would be always with me wherever life would take me. I also got an invitation to return to Galilee, the place where Jesus first called each of us. This time we go back to be commissioned to be teachers and healers in a world that needs Jesus’ guidance and compassion.

Jesus didn’t meet the lost and the broken by waiting in the synagogue of Temple for them to come to him. He moved outward among the suffering of this world with healing in his hand. The Church, you and I, has real authority when it aligns itself with what Jesus called the “least  of my brothers and sisters.”

~Fr. Phil