Celebrating the Ascension
The seventh Sunday after Easter always comes three days after the feast of the Ascension. We celebrate Christ’s ascension into heaven 40 days after Easter, which is always on a Thursday. Then, 10 days later, we celebrate Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured on the disciples to empower them in ministry.
The Ascension doesn’t always get much attention (probably a mix of being on a Thursday, and also getting lost between the two great feasts of Easter and Pentecost). However, the Ascension is absolutely crucial to our lives as Christians in the world today. In the Ascension, Christ was seated at the right hand of the Father, thus assuming his rightful place as the world’s true King and true Lord, the one to whom “all authority on heaven and on earth” has been given (Matthew 28:18).
This has significant implications for our life and mission as a congregation. We are called neither simply to “hang on here until we die” nor to seek conquest of the world – both of which we’ve seen far too often throughout church history with disastrous results. Instead, we can confidently and lovingly proclaim that Jesus is in fact the world’s true King, the world’s true Lord, trusting that, while he is in heaven, seated at the right of the Father, he is also present with us through the Word, the Spirit, and the Sacraments. We also trust that one day, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” It is then that, to use Paul’s language (possibly echoing Isaiah 57), “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10).
So, rather than seeking to escape the world out of fear, or seeking to conquer the world in a triumphalism completely incongruent with Jesus’ example of suffering love, we confidently and lovingly announce that Jesus is the world’s true King, and that he, rather than coming again to destroy the world, will come again to claim it, to re-create it: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Peace,
Chris