Ascension Day
Ascension Day is my favorite liturgical holiday. It’s the day we celebrate the risen Jesus who after 40 days of multitudes seeing Him, listening and eating with Him and even touching His wounds, literally ascends beyond the clouds while His followers watch from ground level. The event alone is miraculous, and the theological significance is breathtaking. Of many implications, the Ascension marks Jesus’ return to His heavenly throne. Now having defeated sin and death, He returns to claim universal leadership once again. So much of our understanding of worship points to the reality that, as Paul says in Philippians 2, He has the name above every name and every knee bows, every tongue confesses that He is Lord. To be quite honest, that’s actually not my favorite part.
I once read a quote from an early church father that went something like this: “when Jesus, God who became man, ascended into Heaven, he brought humanity with Him and placed us in His Father’s heart.” I’m sure I’m butchering the quote, but I hope you get the jist. On one hand, I believe that we have always been in God’s heart and God’s heart has been pursuing us since before we were born. But I also believe that at the Ascension, something in the heavens shifted. I imagine God the Father embracing God the Son who now has flesh on; and God the Father now making contact with the love that was always in God’s heart. What was internal, implicit, intangible becomes external, explicit, touchable. I imagine God the Father exclaiming “more human hugs please!” and the Holy Spirit then replying, “I got you fam!” Maybe my spiritual imagination has run away with itself. But this scene of God touching humanity and falling in love with us all over again is what I think about every Ascension Day.
As we are [hopefully] beginning to enter the post-Covid world, many of us are receiving hugs for the first time in a year. Even us introverts and hug-averse folks are grateful to finally be able to touch a shoulder without fear of getting or giving someone a crazy virus. There is something so essential to the human experience that requires physical connection and touch. And if it’s true that we’ve been made in the image of God, I wonder if that desire to physically connect is an echo of God’s heart to physically [re]connect with humans that were made in original goodness. As I imagine Jesus ascending into Heaven and running into the eternal arms of God the Father, I can hear Jesus whisper, “I’m bringing the rest of us soon - just you wait!”