Ascensiontide: a short but purpose-filled season

EASTER 7A | ASCENSIONTIDE | 17 MAY 2026

Ascensiontide is the shortest liturgical season in the Christian calendar. Lasting a mere ten days, it begins with the feast of the Ascension, last Thursday, and ends with Pentecost, next Sunday. Today, the Sunday in between, is suspended between Jesus’ return to the Father and the coming of the life-transforming Spirit.

 It is a common misunderstanding to think that when Jesus ascended into heaven, he divested himself of the human nature that he had assumed at the Incarnation. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the man, Jesus, who is also the Son of God, who returned to his Father and it is the man, Jesus, who is also the Son of God, who is now seated at the right hand of the Father’ in heaven, interceding for us. He intercedes for us as both Son of Man and Son of God.

Ascensiontide reminds us that, in Christ, the ‘firstborn from the dead’, our wounded human nature, in all its variety and vulnerability, has been glorified and welcomed already into God’s presence. In Him, we are already on our way home to our final, fulfilling goal. “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” (Romans 14:8) The Ascension, in other words, has made the purpose of the Resurrection clear: we are destined not merely to survive death, but to rise with him into the glory that is God’s life. Where he has gone, the Collect for the Ascension Day Mass says, we, healed and transfigured, will in due course follow.

But the Ascension reassures us that, even now, God embraces our humanity, not only when we are moving towards Him in love, but even when we are spiralling downwards in the self-destructive behaviour we call ‘sin’. No matter what we do or where we go, we can never put ourselves beyond God’s reach and loving gaze.

If I take the wings of the dawn

And dwell at the sea’s furthest end

Even there your hand would lead me

Your right hand would hold me fast (Psalm 138)

Moreover, when Jesus ascended to the Father, he promised to send us the gift of the Holy Spirit, the  mutual love of the Father and the Son, who draws us into their love. When the Holy Spirit sweeps over us in the wind and flame of Pentecost, God gives us the grace to love as he loves, to see and hear one another as he sees and hears us, as opposed to seeing and hearing only what we want to see and hear. The Spirit prises open our closed minds and hearts, making us as vulnerable as Jesus was in this life and thus able to love genuinely and selflessly from the heart. The Holy Spirit reaches especially into those parts of our lives that are troubled, muddled, or struggling, to breathe new life and new hope into us, enabling change that we ourselves are unable to effect.

The Ascension, then, is the quintessential feast of Christian hope, renewing our trust in Christ’s promise that, despite all that might appear as evidence to the contrary, this world has been redeemed, and we, healed and made whole by the Holy Spirit, will be brought home to our Father and the endless happiness for which He created us. “I will prepare a place for you and will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you also may be.”