EASTERTIDE · THE FORTIETH DAY · PRINCIPAL FEAST
The Ascension of Our Lord
Principal Feast · The Enthronement of the Risen Humanity · The Forty Days Completed
Ascension — ah-SEN-shun · Olivet — OL-ih-vet · Bede — BEED (died on the Eve of the Ascension, 735) · Session — SESH-un (the sitting at the right hand) · intercession — in-ter-SESH-un · Acts 1:9
Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Forty days after the Resurrection — forty again, the number of completion and passage that runs through the whole of scripture — the risen Lord led his disciples out to the Mount of Olives (OL-ih-vet) and was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight. The Ascension (ah-SEN-shun) is the most neglected of the Principal Feasts in modern Anglican practice, and it is precisely for this reason the most important to recover. The Resurrection without the Ascension is a resurrection to this world; the Ascension without the Resurrection is a disappearance. Together, they are the complete statement of what God has done with the human nature the Son took in Mary’s womb: not abandoned it after the cross, not dissolved it in the Resurrection, but carried it in its risen form to the right hand of the Father, where it reigns as the eternal pledge of our own resurrection and the ground of all our intercession.
The theological content of the Ascension is the Session — the sitting at the right hand (SESH-un) — which is not a spatial statement about where heaven is but a statement about what the risen humanity of Christ now does. He sits at the right hand of the Father as the eternal High Priest: He ever liveth to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25). The intercession is continuous — ever liveth, without pause or cessation — and it is the intercession of the one who knows human nature from the inside, who has been tempted in all points as we are, who has suffered every condition of human frailty, and who carries that experience into the presence of the Father as the basis of his eternal pleading for us. Every prayer the Church offers is caught up into the intercession of the ascended Christ; every Eucharist is the Church’s participation in the one sacrifice that the ascended Lord presents eternally before the Father.
Bede (BEED), whose meditation is among the first in this archive, died on the Eve of the Ascension in 735, dictating the last verses of his translation of John’s Gospel to the end. When his scribe told him the final sentence was complete, he said It is finished — the same words spoken from the cross — and asked to be laid on the floor of his cell where he had been accustomed to pray, and he died singing the Gloria. He died into the Ascension: the scholar whose life had been the transmission of the Word went on the day of the feast that celebrates the eternal transmission of the Word from the risen Christ to the whole Church through time. It is entirely right that the Venerable Bede should die on this day. And it is entirely right that the archive which honours Bede should honour the feast on the eve of which he died.
The BCP collect for the Ascension is among the most theologically precise and most devotionally powerful in the entire book: Grant that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell. The petition is for the ascension of the heart — the interior movement of the soul’s attention toward the place where Christ is, which is the place toward which the whole of the Christian life is oriented. This is the theology of the sursum corda — Lift up your hearts — the eucharistic dialogue in which the priest invites the congregation to ascend in heart and mind to where Christ is before the sacrifice is offered. Every Eucharist is an ascension; every act of prayer is an ascension; every soul that turns toward God in love is ascending to where Christ already is, at the right hand of the Father, making intercession. The feast of the Ascension is the feast of that orientation: the compass set, the direction fixed, the destination named. In heart and mind thither ascend.
O Almighty God, who hast taken the human nature of thy Son beyond all heavens to the right hand of thy glory; Grant that our hearts may ascend with him, that where he is in his eternal intercession we may also be in our daily prayer, and that the one who knows our nature from the inside may plead for us with the full knowledge of what it costs to be human; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.