He ascended into heaven. . .

There was a day when this was a day -- an occasion for us to pause what we are doing and come together in the Lord's House on the fortieth day after Easter.  Now it is liable to be celebrated at a more convenient time on the following Sunday or perhaps not at all.  Strange it is how the Ascension of Our Lord has become merely a phrase in the creed and virtually disappeared from the important feasts of the Church's life and our worship.

Early Christians regarded the Feast of the Ascension as one of the major feasts of the Christian calendar.  It was up there with Easter and even ahead of Christmas. It was the culminations of the festal calendar of  those festivals celebrating the events of Christ’s life.  The ancient Christians celebrated the feast in part by walking -- what we call processing -- outside as Jesus did when He was taken up from the sight of His disciples.  Processions imitated Jesus’ journey with the disciples to the Mount of Olives remembering how He had opened the Scriptures to them and filled them with joy.  Their celebrated of the Feast of the Ascension was marked with great joy and not loss or disappointment or even uncertainty (Luke 24:52). Joy is not so much the character of Christians today.  In fact, it is probably one of the reasons why we do not celebrate His departure to the right hand of the Father with the joy that the disciples once felt as they returned to Jerusalem. 

Ascension proclaims that Jesus, who left heaven and came to earth incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, has completed all things appointed to Him and returns to heavenly glory as the victor.  He ascends to the Father with you and me still urgent in His heart and pleads for those for whom He died and rose again.  His presence is no more the visible presence of flesh and blood as a man walking among us but the flesh and blood of the Lord who now presides at and gives Himself to us in the Holy Eucharist.  The visible presence of the Lord on earth has paused, but He does not cease to be with His earthly people in His flesh and blood sharing with them His divine life and we will once again at the time He has appointed see Him face to face.  Now, He rules over all things, sitting at the right hand of the Father on high, from which He came to us on earth.  He is no spirit unbound from body but the incarnate Christ who forevermore lives in human flesh and blood even as He ascends to reign at God’s right hand.  He said He was going to prepare a place for us and so He has gone until that day when He will return in glory having put all our enemies, last of all death, under His feet.

He rules by bestowing the Spirit whom the Father sends in His name upon His disciples -- even you and me.  In the Pentecost miracle, His Spirit unleashed His witnesses to tell what He has done and by this same Spirit He still sends forth pastors to proclaim this eternal Gospel to the ends of the earth, bestowing upon those for whom He died and rose the gifts He won.  This is a feast for those outside the realm of His Church even as it is for those within as the forgiveness of sins is announced in His name across the world to every tribe and nation.  With that absolution and restoration comes the promise that we will ascend over every sin, death and even hell itself, that our death is not the end of us or a release from our bodily prison but our rest until a new flesh and blood are bestowed upon us so that we might enter into the new heavens and earth He prepares.

Once the Ascension was a mighty feast commanding an octave at least or even more so a mini season of Ascensiontide, from the fortieth day after His resurrection until the fiftieth when the Spirit is given.  Now, sadly, it is not even a real day.  The noble hymns of the Ascension are given lip service and the Paschal Candle just suddenly appears by the font as if it had been in the wrong place before.  Our liturgical gestures are lost without that moment when His ascension is read, the candle is extinguished, and the focus placed now upon the means of grace as the vehicles of His presence among us.  As Norman Nagel once said, if Jesus is everywhere then He is nowhere at all.  We do not live in some spiritual world where you just might bump into God but in the concrete world where God has promised to be where He has attached Himself.  Our Lord lives among us in the Word and Sacraments.  We apprehend Christ not by sight but by faith, trusting in His promises but most of all in His promise to be with us always even to the end of the age.