Today is the Solemnity of the Ascension, at least in many parts of the Catholic world. Some dioceses (including most in the U.S.) translate the feast to the following Sunday, and our Orthodox brothers and sisters on the Julian calendar celebrate it later in the year, since they just recently celebrated Easter.
The Ascension feast was highly symbolic to me when I began reading the Church Fathers and discovering the Church Year in college. Along with the Epiphany, the Feast of the Ascension was a thoroughly biblical holiday that I hadn’t celebrated as an evangelical Christian. It became a symbol to me of the incompleteness of the evangelical church year, which in my experience at the time (in college), generally consisted only of Christmas and Easter (as days, and not seasons). Growing up, I remember observing an expanded church year, celebrating Advent and (sometimes) Lent.
When I began researching the Ascension feast, I discovered that the Ascension was very important in early Christian theology, and it was regularly portrayed in art. In fact, the lion (Jesus) conquering the dragon (Satan) is a symbol of the ascension in early Christian artwork. As a part of the paschal mystery, along with the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Ascension constitutes an important part of the mystery of our salvation. This holiday gives us a chance to reflect on this important part of Christian theology.
I want to note that it was around the time I was discovering the Ascension feast that I encountered criticisms of the biblical ascension, e.g. claims that the Ascension was based on outdated science, which pictured the universe as three-tiered, Hades below, heaven above, and earth in between, literally. C.S. Lewis and others have addressed this concern, reminding us that whatever cosmology the biblical writers may have had, the Ascension event was supernatural, but had to be rendered in natural language. Thus, even if the biblical writers did conceive of Jesus going “up” to heaven (either based on what they observed, their cosmology, or both) this is not to say Jesus is still floating in space somewhere!
Image: “Ascension” by Giotto
