Is there a less-noticed Christian holy day than Ascension Day? If there is, I can’t think of one. (Mind you, I’m not including saints’ days in this category, for various reasons.) Part of that, no doubt, is that it falls on a Thursday, so it can’t even get the casual-mention-in-the-bulletin kind of notice—you have to schedule a special service for it, which it seems nobody much does. (Of course, many Protestants never did; but though Catholics are supposed to, from what I can see, a lot of them don’t anymore either.) More than that, though, I don’t think most Christians in this country see the point; I would expect that most of us would affirm that Jesus died and rose again would also affirm his ascension, but have no sense whatsoever that it matters. To us, it seems more like a clerical detail than anything else. Jesus left, but he didn’t die, so, OK, he just sort of took off and disappeared, instead. If anyone came along and said, “No, no, he didn’t ascend into heaven, he just did thus-and-such,” we wouldn’t think it was all that important; we don’t think this matters.
The thing is, though, it does matter, because the ascension is important—quite profoundly so, in fact. It’s no mere afterthought to the resurrection, nor is it just a footnote to the work of Christ on the cross; rather, it’s the necessary completion of that work. Without the ascension, the resurrection is incomplete; it’s only in the ascension of Christ that all that he accomplished in the resurrection is truly fulfilled.
Now, I imagine that sounds strange to a lot of folks; it’s certainly not the way we tend to talk at Easter, or the kind of thing we usually say about the resurrection of Christ. There’s good reason for that, because the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are the central event of human history, and it’s there that the saving work of God was accomplished; we don’t want to do anything to take the focus off that truth. However, if in emphasizing the resurrection we forget about the ascension—as we too often do—then we risk losing much of the meaning of the resurrection as well. It’s only in strongly affirming that Jesus ascended into heaven that we can truly say with the people of God throughout the ages that he is risen from the dead.
There are several reasons to say this, but they all come down, ultimately, to one key truth: Christ didn’t come just so we could be “saved” in the sense that we get to go to Heaven instead of Hell. That’s certainly part of the story—part of what Christ did on the cross was take our unrighteousness and give us his righteousness, so that by his sacrifice our sins could be forgiven—but there’s more to it than that. Jesus’ purpose, his mission in this world, wasn’t only to make us legally right with God so that we could skip out on going to Hell—it was to make us right with God in order to heal our alienation from God, to remove the obstacle that kept us from having a right relationship with him. This is where the importance of the ascension comes in, because while Jesus’ death and resurrection are the core of that work, the ascension was necessary for its application to us.
You see, while Christians these days are accustomed to thinking of the Old Testament priestly system as merely a relic of a dead past, it isn’t really; as Hebrews tells us, it’s just been relocated, to a different priest, of a different priestly order, in a different temple. Jesus is our great high priest who offered the final, ultimate, total sacrifice for human sin; and under the Old Testament law, the Torah, what was to be done with the sacrifice for the nation that was offered on the Day of Atonement? The blood was brought into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God, and presented before his throne. That’s what Jesus was doing in his ascension: he was bringing his sacrifice before the throne to be presented to the Father. Having done that, he then took up his place as our high priest, bringing our prayers to the Father and interceding with him on our behalf.
Of course, all this was only fully completed and realized at Pentecost, when God poured out his Spirit on all his people; but that’s a post for another day.
