Ascension of the Lord

Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen!

We enter the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord,
celebrated 40 days after the Resurrection .

In the liturgy of the feast we do more than remember and rejoice that Christ ascended to the Father 2000 years ago.
Through the Spirit in the Church, by way of the liturgy, we enter into that very event. The Lord's command, "Do this in memory of Me," brings us into the entirety of His Paschal Journey. We sacramentally participate in the anamnesis of the Lord's Incarnation, Passover, Ascension, Sending the Spirit, and Second Coming.

In Himself, Jesus has raised our humanity into Heaven's Glory.
That is why the members of His Body are able to to ecounter and to share in all the Mysteries of Salvation.

The Ascension, followed by and united to Pentecost, makes available to us a real life in the Way of the Incarnate Word, the Lord of Heaven and earth:
We hear the Word,
we do what the Word says,
we become the living, acting Body of the Word.

Without the Ascension,
our human nature would not be "opened up and lifted up" for the Spirit. Without the Ascension, our nature would not be opened up for all the Spirit's gifts to be poured into our humanity at Pentecost. And we would not be opened up for the Spirit "again and again" in the ongoing history of the Church, Christ's living Body.
Without the Ascension we could not receive the fullness of salvation!

We could not actually hear, and then do, what Jesus says we are to do in
the Great Commission at the end of Matthew's Gospel, 28.18-20:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted.
And Jesus came and said to them,
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you;
and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age."

Often we hear the phrase "What would Jesus do?"
Our answer is: "He is doing now what He has ALREADY been doing all along!"
The Lord has made Himself present and acting through the Spirit in the Church, so that "what He is doing" is in what we are doing in the Spirit as the living members of His one Body. In that light St.Paul's recollects us in the Life-giving Cross (Col 1.24ff ESV):

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.