The Ascension of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ Feast of our Lord.
Holy Day of Obligation.
Acts 1:1-12; Luke 24:36-53.
Read Luke 24:36-53
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Today we celebrate the great feast of the Ascension of the Lord. Christ, the theanthropos, ascends into heaven – bringing with him our humanity – to share in the glory He had with the Father and the Holy Spirit before all the ages. The Ascension is, therefore, a sign that Christ our God has raised us, not only from death to life, but into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity.
If this profound reality is true, why is our reaction to the Christian life we have been given, often like that of the disciples in today’s Gospel reading: “Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts?”
Perhaps, it is because we see this glorious life to which we are called as something that will only come later – in heaven. Our expectations of what is possible, in terms of experiencing the life of God, of being healed of our brokeness, of being transformed in this life, are set too low. So the feast of the Ascension becomes not a feast of present joy, but a feast of the deferral of joy to some undetermined point in the future. With this mindset – we expect too little of ourselves, and of our experience of life in the Church.
But in the hymns of today’s liturgy sing: When You had fulfilled the dispensation for our sake, and united earth to heaven: You ascended in glory, O Christ our God, not being parted from those who love You, but remaining with them and crying: “I am with you and no one will be against you!” (Kontakion of the Ascension).
Jesus united earth and heaven – permanently. In the feast of the Ascension, we do not celebrate Jesus’ departure from the world, but rather his profound integration with it, as St. Maximus the Confessor teaches, “…by His ascension into heaven, it is obvious that He united heaven and earth, for He entered heaven with His earthly body, which is of the same nature and consubstantial with ours, and showed that, according to its more universal principle, all sensible nature is one, and thus He obscured in Himself the property of division that had cut it in two” (Ambigua 41).
Our calling to become participants in God, partakers of the divine nature by grace (cf 2 Peter 1:4), is fulfilled in our ascended Lord. As a result, the kingdom of God is able to be experienced not just in some transcendent existence after death, but now, in our current lives.
Let us reflect on this reality today, and say with confidence in our risen and ascended Lord – Glory to your holy Ascension, O Lord!