by Patricia Lull

When I was in college, I signed up for a seminar that explored contemporary religious communities. As part of the experience, we spent a week at the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican monastery in Mirfield, England.

One particularly gorgeous spring afternoon, we were called outside for a blessing of the fields. A film shot by one of the students in our group records a ragtag procession of monks in habits and students in jeans, all trailing behind a processional cross. That afternoon, words of blessing were spoken over the apple trees and newly planted vegetable gardens, following the ancient custom of blessing farmers’ fields during the days just before Ascension Day.

The Ascension of our Lord falls 40 days after Easter Day and is part of the festive seven-week season when we celebrate Christ’s resurrection. Coming 40 days after Easter, Ascension Day always falls on a Thursday. This year, the date is May 25.

How are we to understand this festival day in modern times? How does this day in late spring connect us to the life of Jesus and to our own lives as a Christian people in a culture where Ascension Day often passes with little notice in the church or in the world?

What the Bible tells us
In the Bible the ascension refers to the risen Lord’s movement from this earth to his regal place with God the Father in heaven. The ascension is closely tied to the story of Christ’s resurrection and to the promise to send the Holy Spirit to stir up and guide the community of faith on earth. It’s one of the events in Jesus’ life that links God’s power on earth to God’s power in heaven, while leaning into God’s promise that Christ will come again.

The most detailed account of the ascension is found in Acts 1:6–11. In this text, the disciples quiz the risen Christ about the timetable for restoring Israel. They want to know when God’s triumph over sin and death, realized through the crucifixion and resurrection, will be made obvious to everyone.

Instead of answering that question, Jesus reasserts that their call is to be witnesses to others throughout the world. Once more Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will be sent to empower them for this work. Then, we are told, Jesus is lifted up and disappears from their sight. As the disciples continue gazing up at the sky, two angels appear, asking them why they are standing and staring. These heavenly messengers remind the disciples of Christ’s promise to come again. In Acts, the story of Christ’s ascension leads into the story of the sending of the Holy Spirit to those same disciples on the day of Pentecost.

The ascension is also noted at the end of some of the Gospels. Mark’s Gospel concludes with Jesus commissioning the disciples to go into the whole creation as witnesses to the resurrection. Following this, in Mark 16:19–20, there is a brief reference to the Lord Jesus at God’s right hand and the Lord’s presence with the disciples as they follow the commission to go and proclaim the good news.

The description of the ascension in Luke 24:50–53 is closely tied to the account in Acts, which is one reason biblical scholars think that both books had the same author. Here again, we are told that Jesus is with his disciples outside the city of Jerusalem. After he blesses them, they can no longer see Jesus with their eyes. Rather than being saddened by his absence, Luke tells us, they were full of joy as they continued to worship God.

In the Gospels of Matthew and John there is no direct reference to the event we call the Ascension of our Lord, but in both there is a strong connection to the sending of the disciples out into the world detailed in Acts. Matthew 28:16–20 and John 20:19–23 both describe how Jesus sent the disciples out to engage all people with the power of Christ’s living Spirit.

Heaven and earth draw close
Because Jesus was no longer with his disciples in the way he had been before his death and in the days immediately after his resurrection, visible to their eyes and tangible to their touch, we might think of the ascension of our Lord as a sad occasion. But we miss the point of the ascension if we compare it to the grief we experience when someone we love dies. As Christians, we trust that the risen and ascended Lord is now present with us in a new and life-giving way.

Standing between the great celebrations of Easter and Christmas, and anticipating the Day of Pentecost, the Ascension of our Lord offers an opportunity to remember all the reasons why Christians are a people of deep and abiding hope. Even though we cannot see God with our eyes, we know that God is deeply involved in our lives and in our world.

That afternoon with the monks of Mirfield was the oddest experience for me. Staying with the monks with their antiquated robes, marking time by an ancient calendar that notes the feasts and seasons of the church year, pausing to bless the fields that would provide food for their table in the coming months, I felt as though I had been transported to an earlier century and a much simpler world.

In many ways I was transported that day to another time and place, but it wasn’t necessarily a simpler world. It was a place where heaven and earth draw close. The monks at Mirfield understood that no human undertaking — from gardening to welcoming young adults into their community’s life — stands apart from Jesus’ promise to be present and available to his disciples, here and now.

For the members of that religious community, that was a place where heaven and earth touched in delightful and surprising ways. Yet there was nothing unworldly about those monks. They were keenly aware of the global issues of the day. Members of the community had worked tirelessly in South Africa when apartheid was being challenged. In the early 1930s they had hosted another young guest named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who learned from them the value and strength of community life in preparing Christians for the most costly forms of witness in the face of tyranny and evil.

And so on the eve of the Ascension, the monks blessed the fields, asking God for a fruitful harvest, and they blessed their young guests, asking God to be at work in our lives. They expected God to be present in the ordinary and mundane moments of life.

Jesus present and near
Who do you know who could use an Ascensiontide blessing this year? Do you have friends who are discouraged or weary? Are there people in your congregation who are worn down by the many pressures and demands of life? How could you remind them that Jesus is not absent but very present and near at hand, ready to lend the power of heaven to bring about God’s purposes on this earth?

Some congregations will gather for worship on May 25 and others may choose to celebrate the Ascension on the following Sunday. Either way, this time in the church year affords us an opportunity to hear afresh the promise of Christ’s power and presence in our midst.