Solemnity of the Ascension - 2025
Dear sisters and brothers,
Whether we celebrate the Ascension on a Thursday or a Sunday, we often picture the Ascension as a farewell—as Jesus rising into the sky, departing for a higher realm, leaving the world behind. But if we remain with this image, we misunderstand the heart of the Gospel.
The Resurrection and Ascension are not two separate supernatural events in time but two aspects of one eschatological unveiling. Both represent the disclosure of Jesus as the Christ—not through physical transformation or relocation, but through God’s act of revealing.
The Resurrection is the decisive unveiling: it is the moment Jesus is no longer understood merely as a man who died, but is encountered in the proclamation as the living Christ—the one who now stands in radical nearness to God. It is the interruption of history by the eternal.
The Ascension, then, is not something after the Resurrection in the sense of sequence, but a deepening of its meaning. It marks not a change in Jesus’ status but a change in our recognition of that status. It symbolizes that Jesus is no longer locatable as one figure among others, but has entered fully into the mode of divine presence: the mode of event, proclamation, call.
So, the Ascension is not the story of Jesus leaving us. It is the proclamation that he is no longer bound by time and place. It is the moment we realize that Christ no longer belongs to the past. He is not a memory to be preserved, nor a figure to be found in the clouds. He is the one who now comes to us in the freedom of God’s Word, claiming us here and now.
“He was lifted up,” the text says. But this lifting is not a movement into space—it is an unveiling. What is revealed is that Christ is no longer a figure among others. He has become the call that breaks into our world from beyond it. His life, his death, his love—these are not archived moments. They have become the shape of God’s address to us.
This is why the disciples are not told to stare into heaven. “Why are you standing there looking up?” the angels ask. That question still echoes for us today. Faith does not gaze upward. It listens. It hears the call to witness—to speak, to go, to live differently because we have been encountered by the one who now reigns not from above, but from within the very event of proclamation.
The Ascension proclaims that Christ is risen not into the sky but into the Gospel itself. He is present wherever the Word is heard and believed, wherever the broken are comforted, wherever bread is shared in his name. He is risen into the life of the Church—not as a memory or example, but as the One who speaks through it.
So the message of the Ascension is not “He has gone away,” but “He has gone ahead of you.” Into Galilee. Into the world. Into the life you are called to live.
And where he is—there you are being drawn. Not into the sky, but into the freedom of faith, into the world reclaimed by grace, into the bold hope that God’s future is breaking in, even now.
Amen.
