This is the reflection that was shared on Thursday, May 14th, for the Ascension Day service. 

 

The Ascension is one of the principal feasts of the Christian year – one of the Church’s most important stories. It tells of the resurrected Christ being taken into heaven.

This is, in some ways, the reversal of Christmas and the Incarnation, when we say that God humbled God’s self and took on flesh to dwell with us as one of us.

At the Ascension, Emmanual – God-with-us – ascended into heaven, continuing in the eternal and perfect unity of the Trinity.

It’s some potentially head-spinning, mysterious, theological stuff.

The Ascension is sometimes seen, I think, as being predominantly about God’s transcendence and glory – Christ seated at the right hand of God.

However, I think that it could also be said that the Ascension has something important to say about God’s down-to-earth-ness and abiding love for what is human.

Because as the story goes, it was our brother Jesus that was drawn into heaven – fully God, but also fully human. Human like us. With a body like us. A body with wounds. A body that had taken thousands of dusty steps. Who had held and been held by his mother. Who had cried and laughed and loved and eaten and gotten dirt under his fingernails.

On this feast of the Ascension, we can name that the resurrected and ascended Christ did not shed or abandon his humanity when he entered into glory. In this I think we can see an affirmation of the goodness of this world, the blessedness of matter itself, and the sanctification of a body that is just like ours.

As St. Athanasius wrote in the 300’s, “he became what we are that we might become what he is.” It is a very Incarnation and Ascension sort of thought.

As we celebrate this principal feast, may we see ourselves and share in the glory of Christ’s Ascension. As, I pray, we ‘become what he is,’ know that neither are we asked to abandon our humanity.

Give thanks for your body today, though it too may be carrying its own wounds, and for all that makes us human, like Jesus. It is our whole selves that have been blessed by Christ’s incarnation, that have been raised in Christ’s ascension, that God calls good and beloved.

Thanks be to God!



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