Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

In Ascensione Domini
1 June 2025

 The Church proclaims and believes the saving effects and value of what is called the Paschal Mystery.  The Paschal Mystery is the fulfillment in Jesus of the saving acts of God prefigured in the major events of the Old Covenant.  The Paschal Mystery is the new Passover by which the one, perfect, unblemished Lamb of God is offered for the sins of the world throughout all time.  The Paschal Mystery is the new Exodus by which the Lord frees believers from slavery in the kingdom of sin and opens a path, himself leading the way, so that we are guided to the Promised Land of Heaven.  The Paschal Mystery is the joining of heaven and earth such that what we experience here of God’s grace in the earthly sanctuary is a copy and a foreshadowing of the heavenly realities where Christ has entered in his resurrected flesh into the heavenly sanctuary to intercede for us before the Father.

There are four elements to the Paschal Mystery.  They are the suffering, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus.  By virtue of being transferred from its normal liturgical date this past Thursday, marking forty days since Easter, today we are observing this fourth element in the Paschal Mystery: the Ascension of Jesus.  It is a curious mystery, and one that often is sort of forgotten among the other three elements of the Paschal Mystery.

The Ascension shows the Lord Jesus to be priest, prophet, and king of the New Covenant.  We see the allusions to this threefold office of the Lord in the Gospel and other scripture passages.  Today’s selection from St. Luke hints at the kingship of Christ in that he led his apostles out to Bethany.  It was in that village on the Mount of Olives, as Jesus was approaching Jerusalem to die, that the people acclaimed him as king and he then made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  The Gospel selection also hints at the Lord’s identity as prophet.  Earlier in St. Luke, at the transfiguration, the great prophets Moses and Elijah had appeared conversing with Jesus about his exodus.  Like Moses, Jesus in the Ascension is coming to his departure, his exodus from Jerusalem to Heaven.  Like Elijah, his departure is marked by his being taken up into Heaven, from which place he will bestow a powerful sharing in his very Spirit.  The Gospel selection also hints at the Lord’s identity as priest.  In Bethany, before ascending, we are told that Jesus raised his hands and blessed the apostles.  This is a clear priestly gesture, something like Aaron is known to have done, and which priests still do today when imparting a solemn blessing over the people.

It is this identification of Jesus as the Eternal Priest of the New Covenant that helps us understand the ascension and how it connects the earthly sacrifice of the Cross to Heaven, thus making it an eternal sacrifice for all time, the saving power of which we then encounter and have made present to us at every Holy Mass.  The identification of Jesus as the Great High Priest stands out powerfully in the ascension.  God the Son is the Eternal Priest of the New Covenant who comes to offer the one perfect sacrifice that saves all mankind.  As Priest, God the Son prepares Himself in the womb of Mary, as in a “sacristy”, and vests for the sacrifice that saves us by vesting not in robes, but by vesting Himself in our human flesh.  Upon vesting, the Lord begins his procession, moving through various events of life and places as he makes his way up to the mountain of sacrifice on Calvary.  Vested in our flesh, he offers the perfect saving sacrifice on the altar of the Cross.  It is perfect because He is God and He can offer something more valuable than any one of us can do.  It is a saving sacrifice because by virtue of offering our very flesh, we ourselves are incorporated into that sacrifice that is an atonement for our sins.  On the Cross, Jesus is both the perfect priest making the offering and he is the very offering itself, making an offering to the Father in our flesh and with power to resurrect.  Upon completion of the sacrifice (and the resurrection being the sign that the sacrifice was accepted by the Father), the Risen Lord does not shed his vesture, but goes forth in triumph as priest to take this one saving sacrifice into the perfect sanctuary of the temple of Heaven.  There, still vested in our flesh, the Lord stands before the throne to intercede for us.  It is from Heaven that our Great High Priest joins the sacrifice of the Cross to the eternity of Heaven, thus making his sacrifice of eternal value, and constantly poured out for us.  The sacrifice of the Cross, then, is not just a sacrifice limited in time to one historical moment.  Rather, it is eternal and the Lord has no need to offer sacrifice repeatedly, as we heard in the Letter to the Hebrews.

This identity of Jesus as the Eternal High Priest, seen so powerfully in the Ascension, touches directly on our Catholic life.  In the Holy Mass, the Lord is not sacrificed again and again.  Rather, the one perfect sacrifice, eternally present before the heavenly throne, is something we access and have re-presented to us through the Lord’s Catholic Church and through the instruments the Lord uses by the priesthood in his Church.  Vested as priest in our flesh, the Lord went up Calvary and mounted the altar of the Cross to offer the perfect sacrifice for our sin.  In the Ascension, we celebrate that vested as priest in our flesh, the Risen Lord makes his triumphal entry into the heavenly reality, the sanctuary of Heaven.  There, our Great High Priest brings the sacrifice of the cross and makes it an eternal offering.

With this in mind, we can understand elsewhere in the Scriptures the Lord’s words to his apostles that it is better that he go.  With this in mind, we are not saddened by the ascension and we do not think of ourselves as somehow abandoned.  With this in mind, we believe that the value and the saving effects of the Cross are poured out to us in every time and place, especially in the Holy Mass, where the priesthood of Jesus in his Church makes present to us the same one, perfect, and eternal sacrifice of the Cross.  At the Ascension, the disciples were led east of Jerusalem to Bethany where they saw the Lord taken up and were told he would return in just the same way.  Where the traditional posture is maintained in the sacred liturgy, as we do at our parish, we all face the same way together, facing either literal, or at least, symbolic east, looking for and awaiting the return of the Lord.  Why is this a posture in all ancient Christian liturgies?  Because ascending in the east, as we heard in the Acts of the Apostles, “[t]his Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven”.  Yet, also like the disciples at the ascension we know that we cannot only gaze at the sky.  Rather, we must open ourselves to receive power from on high with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so that in this life and through this world our witness and our sharing of the good news draws others into the procession and exodus of our Great High Priest, leading us all to follow where he “our Head and Founder has gone before” (Preface I of the Ascension).