The Lord’s Ascension

Thursday, May 29, 2025, is the Feast of the Lord’s Ascension, one of the most important but also most neglected festivals of the Church’s year. On Ascension Day, Holy Communion will be administered in the Chapel at Noon and 5 p.m.

According to the prophet Isaiah (55:11), the Word that goes forth from God does not return unto him void, but accomplishes that which God has willed, and prospers in its mission. In the Lord’s Ascension into heaven, we rejoice in the homecoming of the Word of God incarnate. He does not return void, but victorious, having accomplished the will of God for our salvation, having prospered mightily in his mission. Having offered in his own death upon the cross the all-sufficient sacrifice for sin, he ascends on high in triumph and takes his seat at the Father’s right hand, to reign with him in glory, “from henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool” (Hebrews 10.13). Ascended on high in human body and soul, he fills all things with his power, and reigns as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, in expectation of the day, when he shall come again in glory, to judge the quick and the dead, and to offer up his kingdom over the world to the Father, “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15).

The Ascension thus shows forth the completeness of Christ’s finished sacrifice: nothing now stands between man and God, nothing now prevents man’s return to God in Christ, nothing now prevents the outpouring of his Spirit upon all flesh. In the Lord’s Ascension, he returns home to the Father, in the humanity he assumed from Mary, when he was conceived and born; the humanity in which he suffered and died; the humanity in which he rose again. In his ascension, for the first time, humanity enters into heaven; humanity attains its end in God, human nature shares the life of heaven, and participates in the divine nature. Indeed, in the ascension of Christ, believers, who are members of his mystical body, have also ascended: invisibly but really we are already in the heavenly places in him, already blessed by all spiritual blessings, and already have attained our end. Outwardly and visibly we remain in the world; inwardly and invisibly we are already sharing in the life of God. That gives us an entirely new orientation and perspective to our lives: “seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth; for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1). When we hear in the liturgy: “Lift up your hearts”; let us lift them up unto the Lord; lift them up in praise and prayer of faith and love to that place, where we are present with Christ in his unity with the Father, where Christ nourishes and sustains our souls with the bread of eternal life and the cup of everlasting salvation.

The heavenly perspective established by Christ’s Ascension is the key to the Christian understanding of the Lord’s Supper. Christ’s presence in the Supper is to be understood not in earthly but in heavenly terms. Concerning the words of Christ over the elements of bread and wine, Thomas Cranmer wrote: “the old doctors [the catholic church fathers] do call this speaking of Christ tropical, figurative, anagogical, allegorical; which they do interpret after this sort, that although the substance of bread and wine do remain, and be received of the faithful, yet notwithstanding, Christ changed the appellation thereof, and called the bread by the name of his flesh, and the wine by the name of his blood… “not that it is so in very deed, but signified in a mystery”: so that we should consider, not what they be in their own nature, but what they import to us and signify; and should understand the sacraments, not carnally, but spiritually; and should attend, not to the visible nature of the sacraments, neither have respect only to the outward bread and cup, thinking to see there with our eyes no other things but only bread and wine; but that, lifting up our minds, we should look up to the blood of Christ with our faith, should touch him with our mind, and receive him with our inward man; and that, being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father, which taketh away the sins of the world; by whose stripes we are made whole, by whose passion we are filled at his table; and whose blood we receiving out of his holy side, do live for ever; being made the guests of Christ, having him dwelling in us through the grace of his true nature, and through the virtue and efficacy of his whole passion; being no less assured and certified that we are fed spiritually unto eternal life by Christ’s flesh crucified, and by his blood shed, the true food of our minds, than that our bodies be fed with meat and drink in this life: and hereof this said mystical bread on the table of Christ, and the mystical wine, being administered and received after the institution of Christ, be to us a memorial, a pledge, a token, a sacrament, and a seal”.