The fortieth day. From Easter to Ascension is a measured stretch of holy time, six weeks less two days, in which the Risen Christ walked among His disciples speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. Then, on this morning, He led them out as far as Bethany, and lifted up His hands and blessed them, and while He blessed them He was parted from them and carried up into heaven. The blessing was the last gesture. Et factum est, dum benediceret illis, recessit ab eis. The benediction did not end. It was caught up.
S. Luke gives us the account twice, in his Gospel and again in the Acts of the Apostles, and the doubling matters. The Ascension is not an appendix to the Gospel; it is the hinge upon which the Gospel turns into the Church. Without the Ascension, Easter is a private joy: He is risen, but He is here, only here, and the apostles are forever Galileans clustered around a remembered local figure. With the Ascension, the same Christ is at the right hand of the Father — which is to say, at every hand, in every place where God Himself is present. The bodily ascending of Christ is the universalising of His reign.
The Caroline Divines understood this with particular clarity. Lancelot Andrewes, in his Ascension Day sermon, dwells on the verb the Greek text uses: anelēphthē, He was taken up — passive, received, lifted by the Father into the Father's presence. The Son does not ascend by His own effort but is welcomed home. And the welcoming carries, with the Son, the human nature He took in the womb of the Virgin and bore through the Cross. Our flesh, says the Collect of the day, has been received into heaven. Where He is, we are, in head if not yet in members. Where He is, we shall be.
Where He is, we are,
in head if not yet in members.
This is what the Collect asks us to grasp: that we may in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell. The phrase is exact. The ascending of the heart and mind is not a flight from the world but a dwelling in the One who dwells with the Father. The Christian on Ascension Day does not look up at an empty sky and mourn an absence; she lifts up her heart, as the Sursum Corda has trained her to do at every Eucharist, and finds her Lord where He has always been since this morning — at the right hand of the Father, interceding for her, preparing a place. Sursum corda. Habemus ad Dominum. The liturgy knows what the heart is to do.
And yet — and this is the practical point of Ascension Day for those of us still in the body — the going up is also a sending out. The angels who appear to the gazing apostles do not let them stand long with their faces turned upward. "Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" The same Jesus shall so come in like manner; in the meantime, there is work. The Church has, from this morning, ten days to wait for the Spirit. She waits not in idleness, but in the upper room. The waiting itself is a labour. The vigil that began last evening, on Rogation Wednesday, continues now until Pentecost.
So this morning, lift up the heart. The Lord is gone where the Father is, but He is no further from us today than He was yesterday — He is, in the only sense that finally matters, closer. The bodily Christ at the right hand of the Father is the bodily Christ who, by His Spirit, is present at every Eucharist, in every Office of Morning and Evening Prayer, at every bedside where the sick are anointed, in every fellowship gathered in His Name. The Ascension is not a departure. It is the moment when the local becomes the universal, the particular becomes the everywhere. May our hearts ascend with Him, and remain there.