On this year’s church calendar, Ascension Day took place this past Thursday, May 13th. The Ascension celebrates the day that Christ, in the presence of His apostles, ascended bodily into Heaven. The Ascension occurred on the 40th day of Easter so the day always falls on a Thursday.
Paul Neeley writes that “Although no documentary evidence of the Feast of the Ascension exists prior to the beginning of the 5th century, St. Augustine says that it is of Apostolic origin, and he speaks of it in a way that shows it was the universal observance of the Church long before his time. Frequent mention of it is made in the writings of St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and in the Constitution of the Apostles.”
Steve Taylor explains that now, “God in Jesus is present through all time and space. The Jesus of the Gospels was bound in a body and by a time zone. After the Resurrection we see Jesus defying space by moving through walls and traveling quickly from place to place. The Ascension suggests that this movement through time and space is now complete, and that Jesus is now present at all times in in all spaces. He is both outside, and yet inside time. The fact that Jesus was God in the flesh, choosing to indwell humanity, give dignity to our bodies. The Ascension of Jesus has no record of the human body of Jesus being left behind, but rather, we have the nail scarred hands being taken to heaven. That means that we too are seated with God, carried by Jesus into a Trinity of love. God has embraced humanity. The celebration of our human bodies is complete. Now we are called to walk without God in visible sight, to walk in faith. We are called to believe in the guidance of God’s Spirit, to humbly seek discernment, to trust our intuition and to seek wisdom through the body of God. In the gap left by the loss of Jesus comes the infilling Spirit of God, who forms us as the new body of God. All of the gospels record Jesus commissioning his disciples (Matthew 28:18-20, Mark 16:15, Luke 24:48, John 20:22-23. We are now the hands and feet of Jesus. God has no body on earth but ours.”
Malcolm Guite writes that “the mystery of this feast is the paradox whereby in one sense Christ ‘leaves’ us and is taken away into Heaven, but in another sense he is given to us and to the world in a new and more universal way. His humanity is taken into heaven so our humanity belongs there too, and is in a sense already there with him.”For you have died”, says St. Paul, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God”. In the ascension Christ’s glory is at once revealed and concealed, and so is ours. The sonnet form seemed to me one way to begin to tease these things out.”
A Sonnet for Ascension Day
by Malcolm Guite
We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed .