Ascension Day 1 June 2025
Readings: Acts 1. 1-11; Ephesians 1.15-23; Luke 24.44-53
Theme: ‘He ascended to Heaven’.
Today we celebrate the feast of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus into heaven. This feast is to be understood as part of the unfolding narrative of the Easter message. The resurrection of Jesus has inaugurated the transformation of the whole of heaven and earth in uniting in the resurrected body of Jesus these two dimensions. From now on heaven and earth will be in communication with one another through the Son of God. So, why does Jesus leave earth and ascend to heaven? What is the meaning of this part of the resurrection of Jesus?
To better understand the place of the ascension of Jesus in the scriptures, we need to realize that all these events of the Gospel narratives happen in order for the promises of the scriptures to be fulfilled. As it says in our Gospel reading for today, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you — that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ In other words, the meaning of the ascension is so that the promises that God has made may honoured. But what is the promise that the ascension fulfills?
As if to pre-empt our question, the apostles ask a closely related question in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles: ‘Lord, is this the time you will restore the kingdom of Israel?’ This motif of restoration of the kingdom gives us the interpretative key to unlocking the mystery of the ascension of the Lord. Jesus ascends so that the inauguration of the restoration of the kingdom of God may come to completion. In other words, the meaning of the ascension is mission. Jesus ascends so that the Holy Spirit may come and clothe the disciples of the Lord in the ‘power from on high’. This begins the process of the witnessing to the ends of the earth that Jesus is Lord.
But surely, Jesus could have done this himself? Why is it that he passes this mission on to his followers, through the Holy Spirit, as his resurrected body ascends into heaven? The infinite respect for the dignity of the creation that is displayed by God in this act of ascension is breathtaking. We have been created not as simply automatons following the ‘maker’s specifications’, we, as friends of Jesus, are participants in the creative and saving mission of God through the power of the Holy Spirit. The ascension is God’s allowing the child to take its first steps towards maturity. The maturity to which we are called is to be adopted as sons and daughters of God, co-heirs in the inheritance of the Son. So, perhaps one way to think of this is to understand the ascension of Jesus as the first step of a new form of incarnation. As Jesus goes up, this will lead to the Holy Spirit coming down upon us so that in the overshadowing of us by the Holy Spirit we may be transformed into the body of Christ on earth. Just as at the incarnation of Jesus, the Holy Spirit hovered over the virgin Mary and the child born in her was made holy, so too with us as the Holy Spirit descends upon us will we be made holy.
This transformation inaugurated by the ascension of the Lord is the birth pangs of the church, which will come to fruition in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the disciples at Pentecost. But for this outpouring to occur a space needs to be created. The vacation of the earth by the ascension of the resurrected body of Jesus into heaven opens up the space of the missionary presence and activity of the church to be the body of Christ on earth. The ascension of the Lord inaugurates the final meeting of heaven and earth through the missionary activity of the church in proclaiming the coming of the kingdom. So, the restoration to which the question of the apostles in the reading from Acts refers to is the coming of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. An early biblical motif is thus retaken by Jesus in this event of his ascension. God has promised throughout the Old Test to unite his people Israel. To redeem them from the powers of darkness and to set them free. As the Benedictus in Luke chapter one puts it, ‘Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he has visited his people, he has set them free, and he has established for us a saving power in the House of his servant David. This promise, now fulfilled in Jesus through his incarnation, takes a further step. The restoration of Israel is now understood in cosmic terms, and in terms of heaven and earth. The ascension of the Lord inaugurates this transition to expansion of the idea of Israel into the kingdom of God, on earth as in heaven. The consummation of this united of all with God is empowered by the Holy Spirit working in us to bring the message of Jesus to the ends of the earth.
The ascension of the Lord is thus the overture of the mission of the church to proclaim and to embody the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. Time, all of history, both human and cosmic, is the theatre for the unfolding of the final revelation of God, when Jesus will return and God will be all in all, as St Paul expresses it so enigmatically in 1 Corinthians 15.28.
So, my dear brothers and sisters, as we celebrate this feast of the ascension of the Lord may we, like those early apostles take heed of the message of the two men in white robes, and hear that message again in our context: ‘Sisters and brothers in the Anglican Chaplaincy San Pedro and Sotogrande, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.