The Ascension of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ; Our Venerable Father Isaac, Hegumen of the Dalmatin Monastery (406-25)
Rank: of our Lord
Holy Day of Obligation
Read
Acts 1:1-12; Luke 24:36-53
When I was a child, I thought of the Ascension as a sad feast, and I don’t think I’m alone. After forty days of singing “Christ is Risen” over and over, it’s hard to adjust to liturgy without all the joyful shouting, singing, and ringing of bells. As a kid, I often thought that we were celebrating Jesus leaving the disciples, which didn’t seem like something worth celebrating.
But several years ago, I heard a homily that helped me understand the Ascension in a more positive light. Today, the Church doesn’t bring the season of the resurrection to a close so much as focus her attention on one of the most important results of the resurrection – the fact that humans now share in the divine life through Jesus Christ. So many of the hymns of this feast talk about Christ ascending to heaven where he is enthroned at the right hand of God the Father: what that means is that our human nature, which Christ took from the Virgin Mary at the incarnation, is now so close to God that it exists in heaven. And don’t think of heaven as a physical place somewhere above the clouds (or at the far reaches of the galaxy), so much as the place where the immaterial God is manifest in all his love and glory, worshipped by the angels. Now humanity has reached that place! Today’s feast, in other words, is the celebration of our potential for true union with the Holy Trinity.
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