Church of Jesus Christ of the Universe

By Mauro

27 May 2022

(Translated audio)

The Easter season is about to reach its end; we are between the Feast of the Ascension and Pentecost. I think it is good for us, who have walked a path, to begin to look at these holidays in their fullness, to understand them better, to understand them in all the extent they have.

After the resurrection, the Lord spoke to the Apostles for forty days1, as He is now speaking to us. In His second intermediate coming, He is preparing us for His glorious return.

The feast of the Ascension, like many other feast, is one that Lucifer hates very much, especially because the Ascension reminds us that nothing ends with the resurrection and that it must continue until we, too, go up to heaven. Mary Most Holy did it in fullness; She is the only one, together with Jesus, who also went up with His body; however, each of us is also called to this. The Feast of Pentecost, with the gift of the Holy Spirit, gives all the necessary and extraordinary graces to experience the path from resurrection to ascension.

It is as if the path to God were made in stages. The first stage is to recognise Jesus Christ and to know His work; to recognise that He has prepared a path, to welcome His forgiveness and what He has done. It is not enough to be touched and moved by His death, by the pain He suffered; we have to accept that pain and that love, because Love is the right word for it, and to understand that with that love He paved the way for us to embrace what we have been from eternity: children of God. This is the first step.

By accepting this, a path of continuous death and resurrection through and thanks to Jesus begins for us here on Earth. The old man dies and the new man is born continuously. The culmination is to let the old way of thinking die so that the new way can begin. In the Old Testament, it was described as the transformation of the heart: “I will give you a new heart”.2 This new heart, which is the spirit in us, is Jesus who has given us the grace to obtain it, and He gives it to us through the Holy Spirit: the first gift to those who believe in Jesus. He continually reminds us of who we are, where we are going, what Jesus said, what God the Father told us at the moment of conception, what we responded at conception. The Holy Spirit accompanies us not so much with extraordinary gifts, but with The Greatest Gift, which is to understand who we are, where we are going, what eternal life is and what the Ascension, ascending, is.

Almost all of the Gospel of Easter emphasises this: “Set your hearts on things above …“;3 “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.”4 All these passages remind us of the eternal encounter with Jesus Christ, which lasts for eternity.

Thus, the passage of the Ascension is really about a constant elevation of all things to God without stopping at the resurrection. One might even say, “If I am risen what more do I want?” If we stop, it means that we are still focused on the things of the Earth. Let me give you a trivial example: if I recover from a very serious disease, which would have led to my death, that is great, but if I do not take that disease as an opportunity to enter the life of the Spirit, it is useless. I have only extended my dimension here for a few years, and I will still have to meet the reality of the Spirit. So, if I do not take the opportunity to meet the Spirit, I have not understood anything, on the contrary, I will have an additional sentence because He will tell me: “You have had two possibilities instead of one like everyone else, because you are also healed”.

Therefore, the Ascension is the continuation of the resurrection. In the readings of the day of the Ascension, it is clear: the core for us, which is what St. Peter asked of us in one of his messages5, is to bear witness to Jesus living presence, but, above all, to His glorious return. This is our task. In these readings, He says it clearly at the end, when He ascends to Heaven and all look up and see the angels, who say: “Why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” What is that if not hope? Yes, faith, hope and love.

Thus, we have to have faith in all the things we have just said, and even more, and our hope is the hope in the encounter with Christ. The hope nourished by faith is the certainty that we will be with Him forever, that He will come back to take me. He said that He prepared a place for me. He said I must not be sad.7 He, who has overcome the world, prayed for me that the world would not win over me.8 9

Therefore, faith in Him and in His action nourishes this hope and love. I tell you that what is asked of us is our Love, our true Love, for each other and for the world; it is to live every day in this faith; to live immersing oneself in the dimensions of Ascension and Pentecost. We do not do it for the extraordinary gifts but for the gift of the certainty that Jesus has overcome the world. Our witness, which is Love for this world, is to testify that Jesus has overcome the world.10 He has overcome it for you and for me; He has overcome it in every situation, regardless of who I am, how I live, what burdens I carry. Jesus has overcome the world. This faith, nourished by hope, is our action of love, it is our true love for the world.

I suggest that, on the day of Ascension, you quietly read the Letter to the Hebrews, Year C.12 I will only read the last part as it contains everything: “Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.” 

Notice that this passage contains everything. We keep our hope, by accepting to be washed by His Blood, to be baptised in His Spirit, by passing through His flesh that also nourishes us through the Eucharist, believing that He gives us everything we need through the gift of the Holy Spirit. What is our hope? It is His faith, not ours. Our faith is in Him, and He paves every path as He has already done. He has overcome the world; He did it for you, for me and for everyone.

We have talked about our action in spirit. Remember that this is the action in spirit: faith that becomes very concrete because the action in spirit becomes faith in everyday life, in our problems and everything we have to go through. Faith! This is the action in spirit. This changes the world; this is love for the world.

Imagine if Christians were like this. What must Christians do in the world? We are not Christian because we are baptised! He says: “And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ.“ We are not Christian because we belong to an organisation. I mean Christians who belong to Christ, not only by name. If we belong to an organisation which may be called Catholic Church, Orthodox Church, New Church of Jesus Christ (I also add ours), but without the Spirit of Christ, we do not have what we are saying, we are not Christians. We do not become Christians even if we pray a lot, if we go to Mass every day, if we receive the Body of Jesus every day. We are Christians when we attend the Holy Mass with faith; when we pray, truly believing that Jesus has overcome the world, that He gave His life for us; when we believe that He loves us so much that He would give His Life again for us; when we believe that He will never abandon us. We become Christians when we believe that our journey in the world, with all the things we experience, is a springboard to the afterlife, that it is a path of death and resurrection. Thus, we no longer judge according to the spirit of the world if something is good or bad, if this or that happens to me, but we live in faith, hope, and love, Christ’s love. With this faith we, too, become love for others, and then we are Christians.

Look, we are in a different time. We have experienced it with the issue of vaccine supporters or opponents. Now all are pacifists; yet, Christians are not pacifists but peacemakers. To be bringers of peace is a different thing. Sure, how do you bring peace where there is war? We can bring peace where there is war, if we live our whole day in peace, if have peace in us and bring peace with what we do in all the situations we go through. How do we bring peace? We can only do it if we believe that Jesus has overcome the world. Without this faith, none of us can bring peace. Christians can only be peacemakers if they know with absolute certainty that only Jesus can resolve the situations of the Earth. There is nothing and no one who can stop a war, who can give us the graces to live in peace, personally, among us and among all peoples, only Jesus can do this. With this faith, we become peacemakers, and then we also do concrete actions, of course. However, if we do not start from this, we become pacifists. I hope you understand the difference. Only Jesus IS the Way, the Truth and the Life, only He.13

Many people of other religions, many atheists, are of good will. They are very close to entering the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus says to someone in the Gospel14, and we must accept them and help them take the step: “To be perfect you lack one thing: to believe in Jesus Christ”. Yet, we must not throw it at them but transmit it with our faith. This is the testimony. Many, although not baptised, are, in quotation marks, closer to being Christian than are the baptised. However, they are missing this step.

As always, you see that the Holy Spirit guides us in all situations of daily life. We must be honest and live every day with this transformation, examining if it is the spirit of the world or the Spirit of God that is guiding us. Faith will enlighten us and give us clarity to understand if we judge ourselves according to the world or according to God. Thus, our testimony, as we have been told, will become our life; remember that everyone in the world, whether atheist or of any religion, is able to recognise what spirit dwells in a person; everyone can notice it.

Therefore, if we live in the Spirit of God, our life will bear witness to it, and everyone will notice it. Those who said “yes” at conception will be attracted, those who said “no” will be rejected, and grace will be given to those who are undecided between “yes” and “no” to God. This is Easter time, and at Pentecost, the graces are renewed so that we may move forward during the whole year, but towards the Ascension. We can do this because, as always in faith, we are sure that Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit, but only to those who believe and only by grace.

I wish you all a good path. May Mary Most Holy bless us all, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

1 See Acts 1,1-3 NIV

2 See Ezekiel 36,26

3 See Col 3,1-2

4 See John 16,16-23

5 See Message of St. Peter the Apostle of 30 April 2020, “Announce the Glorious Return of Christ”, published in the book “Towards the New Creation – Vol. VII – 2020” and on our website

7 See John 14,1-3

8 See John 17,15-20

9 See John16,33

10 See Footnote 9

12 See Heb 9,24-28; 10,19-23

13 See John 14,6

14 See Mark 12,28-34