Ascension Day

Why is Ascension Day so neglected? (It probably does not help that in Britain – unlike secular France – it is not a public holiday.) I think it is because we find it hard to understand what we mean when we assert in the creeds, that Christ ‘ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.’ That may reflect the modernist obsession with ‘what actually happened’ – which makes much of our reading of the Bible problematic. We are not comfortable with mystery and metaphor; we are cowed by an over-respect for what we think of as scientific facts.

But the important thing about the Ascension is not so much ‘what actually happened’, but the significance of the event. For the accounts we rely upon Luke and Acts, which give us the only explicit narrative of Jesus’ ascent ‘into heaven’. Indeed, we are given two distinct accounts: one to finish the Gospel, which ends where it began, in Jerusalem, and one to begin the Acts of the early church, which traces the growth of that Spirit-filled community from Jerusalem to Rome. The writer is telling us that Jesus’ life and ministry have a beginning and an end; but the life of the church continues - in the power from on high, promised by the glorified Lord.

Although the other Gospels (apart from the later ending to Mark) do not describe an ascension, it is implicit in the accounts of the appearances of the risen Christ in both Matthew and John. The former ends with the commission to the disciples on a mountain in Galilee, with the promise ‘I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’ Since there are no further accounts of appearances, this is clearly both an end (as in Luke) and a beginning of a new relationship with God (as in Acts.) And in John, there is the message given to Mary Magdalene in the garden ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’  It seems that John is saying that resurrection is completed by ascension (so Mary must not try to cling to Jesus during the transition.) And that is supported by the way that in the Epistle to Hebrews, the language of exaltation largely replaces that of resurrection.

The theological point is that the victory of Christ really transcends our comprehension. It is not a resuscitated human being whom the disciples encounter and in whom we believe, but a human being who – in a physical but not restrictedly material form – is now united with the divine glory. That may be why Luke makes such a clear connection between the Ascension and the Transfiguration which prefigured it (and why Matthew places his main account of the appearance of the risen One on a mountain in Galilee.)

Why the Ascension should matter to us is hidden in the insight of Hebrews that the exalted Christ is now for us a ‘Great High Priest’ who represents us in the glory, the presence of the Father. He is not further away from us as a result of ascending to the Father. Rather he is closer than he could ever be while subject to the limitations of material and historical existence.  Now he ‘always lives to intercede (for us.)’

But he is still the incarnate One, and still bears the wounds of his Passion. The Word made flesh continues in some way to be fully human as well as fully divine. In words of A.W. Tozer ‘there is a man in heaven.’ This means – in a way we cannot grasp fully – that there is an eternal bridge between humanity and God, between the two realities we call ‘earth’ and ‘heaven’. In Jesus’ exaltation, our humanity is re-affirmed and shown to be ‘capax Dei’ – capable of sharing in an intimate relationship with the Divine.

Is Ascension Day important? It certainly is!