Why Are You Looking Up?

Ascension Day and the nearness of heaven

This is Ascension Day. It arrives quietly, forty days after Easter, always on a Thursday, tucked into life’s ordinary rhythm of errands, meetings, emails, laundry, and dinner plans. There are no carols or lilies or great cultural machinery demanding our attention. And yet the Book of Common Prayer names Ascension Day as one of the seven Principal Feasts of the Church, alongside Easter Day, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, All Saints’ Day, Christmas Day, and the Epiphany.

The Ascension is not an afterthought to Easter. It’s not some divine farewell scene with Jesus drifting away into the clouds while the disciples stand around wondering what to do next. It’s the completion of the Easter mystery.

Photo by Andrew Ruiz on Unsplash

The crucified and risen Christ is taken into the very life of God. The One who shared our flesh, our grief, our hunger, our tears, our wounds, and our death now carries that humanity into the heart of heaven. That should remind us that our humanity is not something God discards or merely tolerates. In Christ, our humanity is gathered up, blessed, redeemed, and held forever in God. And that’s why this feast matters.

Ascension Day tells us that Jesus is not just a memory, not simply a teacher from long ago, not only an example we try to follow when we’re feeling up to it. The risen Christ reigns. The risen Christ intercedes. The risen Christ sends the Church into the world with the power of the Holy Spirit.

And we need that reminder, too, because the world is always trying to teach us a smaller vision of power. The world imagines power as domination, control, spectacle, threat, and force. But the Ascension reveals power as self-giving love. The One who is exalted is the One who washed feet, touched lepers, welcomed sinners, forgave enemies, fed the hungry, and stretched out his arms on the hard wood of the cross.

And just as the disciples are caught gazing into the mystery, the angels ask the question that pulls their eyes back toward the world: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” Don’t just stand there, staring at the sky, confusing paralysis with wonder. Don’t stand under an open heaven and forget the wounded earth.

Photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash

The Ascension doesn’t call the Church to escape the world; it sends the Church more deeply into it. Christ ascends, and the disciples are told to wait for the Holy Spirit. Then they will become witnesses, beginning where they are and moving outward, even to the ends of the earth. That is still our calling.

We keep Ascension Day because we need to remember that there is one Lord, and it isn’t Caesar, or empire, or fear, or despair, or death, nor the loudest voice in the room. Christ is Lord.

We keep Ascension Day because we need to remember that the Church doesn’t exist for its own preservation. We exist to bear witness to the reign of Christ, a reign made visible whenever mercy overcomes cruelty, truth confronts lies, forgiveness interrupts vengeance, and love refuses to give up on the world.

So yes, Ascension Day may come quietly on a Thursday, and it might not get much attention, but it tells us something essential. Christ has not left us; he has gone ahead of us, and he has lifted our humanity into the heart of God.

And now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ sends us into the world to live as people who know that love is already enthroned, mercy is already victorious, and the world is already being drawn toward God’s promised future.