Fourth Lenten Meditation: Learning to say goodbye

By Christopher Wells

In his fourth and final meditation for Lent 2025, Father Roberto Pasolini, the Preacher of the Papal Household, reflected on Jesus’ Ascension and “knowing how to say goodbye when all that is possible and necessary has been accomplished.”

In Jesus' bidding farewell to His disciples, Fr Pasolini said, He “showed us that it is possible to step aside, restoring history’s freedom and widening the boundaries of an ever more universal and inclusive hope.”

Final encounters

Following His Resurrection, Jesus met with His disciples to help them “avoid falling into an abandonment syndrome.”

Notably, in taking leave of Mary Magdalene, Jesus helps her overcome her fear of death. Mary, despairing at the loss of Jesus, is able to recognize the Lord only when He calls her once again to a hope of life. “This is the definitive conversion that the Resurrection wants to lead us to,” he said, namely “the uprising of a heart that refuses to remain locked in sadness and allows itself to be redefined by the heart of another.”

The world turned upside down

Father Pasolini went on to explain that the “insight” Jesus offered to Mary Magdalene was likewise extended “to all the disciples at the moment of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven.”

For a period of forty days – “a symbolic period of testing” – Jesus chooses “to dwell lovingly with His disciples,” ensuring that they will not fall into the temptation of “imprisoning the Risen One in a seductive and mesmerizing image.”

The papal preacher noted, too, that the promise that Jesus will return in the same way that He left this world shows us that “Christ’s glorious return at the end of time is anticipated… by the living witness of the children of God” who make Him present in the world in which we live.

Communion of desire and life

Finally, Father Pasolini said, “the Ascension of the Lord erases any possible regret over the apparent void of power that God seems to have left in human history.”

Jesus’ return to the Father, he explained, was “the essential condition for a more intimate and profound communion with Him through the Spirit, destined to be expressed in witness and service to others” – a witness and a service that extends to all of creation.

Something beautiful and new

Drawing his meditations to a close, Father Pasolini noted that the call for Christians, the members of Christ’s body, “to embody and witness the truth of the Gospel… may be the greatest hope to cultivate in this Jubilee: that as the Church repeats the gestures of her faith and tradition, the world might recognize in us something beautiful and new, capable of sparking a surge of universal hope.”

The papal preacher concluded with the hope that Christians might live up to their potential and their calling to become “witnesses and facilitators of a new humanity.”