Actually, the placement of the first and third readings in today’s liturgy exactly reverses Luke’s sequence in his two books. The Acts of the Apostles is Luke’s sequel to his Gospel. So the third reading this evening comes from the very end of Luke’s Gospel, which comes first; whereas our opening reading came from the very beginning of the sequel, in which Luke tells the story of the early Church.
In any case, for Luke, the Ascension of the Lord is so pivotal an episode that he tells it twice: first at the end of his Gospel as the climax of his story of Jesus; and then at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles as the commencement of his story of the early Church. And the Ascension is pivotal for us today in our life as Christians as well.
What really happened on Ascension Day? The short answer is that we don’t know. Perhaps the story is just a symbolic way of saying that Jesus has returned to his Father in heaven. Or, perhaps Jesus really did literally lift off from the ground and soar up into the clouds. The priest and writer Robert Farrar Capon once commented that Jesus only needed to get up as far as the first cloud in order to make his point – a visual point that his disciples would have understood perfectly in terms of their own world view and cosmology. The underlying theological principle here is that God always accommodates himself to our limitations by speaking in a language, whether verbal or visual, that we can understand.
The question, then, is what difference it makes to us. It used to be fashionable for theologians to write books attempting to tease out the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith: that is, between the historical figure of Jesus about whom we read in the Gospels; and the Christ whom we worship and obey as Lord in the Church today. The Ascension teaches us, however, that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are absolutely one and the same person. In other words, the Jesus about whom we read in the Bible is not merely an historical figure who lived and died in the ancient past, but rather someone who is alive even now in the fullest possible sense of the word.
The Ascension is absolutely critical to our Christian faith because it addresses the question: Where is Jesus now? The answer is that he’s been exalted to the right hand of his Father in heaven, where he reigns as Lord over all creation.
Yet, precisely because he’s returned to his Father in heaven, he can be present for us in the Church here and now. We can know him not only as someone whose words and deeds we read about in the Bible as a distant figure from the past, but also as a living presence in our midst – and more specifically, as the one who still speaks to us in his Word, who still comes among us in his Sacraments, and who still claims our deepest loyalty, allegiance, faith, and obedience as our Lord and Savior.
Paradoxically, then, the Ascension marks the beginning not of the absence of Jesus from his Church on earth, but rather of his presence in a new mode. During our Lord’s earthly Incarnation, his presence to his disciples was localized in his human body. After his Ascension, however, Jesus becomes present in the Spirit wherever his disciples travel, wherever the Church gathers in his name, wherever his Word is preached, wherever his Sacraments are celebrated.
So the Ascension is both end and beginning. It marks the end of the story of our Lord’s earthly Incarnation at a definite time and place in human history. But it also marks the beginning of our story as the Church, the Body of Christ on earth, the community of those who continue his mission and find new life in him.
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