As the Church prepares to close the 2026 Easter Season with Evening Prayer II next Sunday, I’ll share some final reflections on this juncture in the liturgical year.

Liturgical Anomaly

The “pastoral” shift of the Solemnity of the Ascension from the 40^th day after Easter (i.e., Ascension Thursday) to displacing the Seventh Sunday of Easter should upset liturgists. Almost one-fourth of the year is taken up with Easter, both in its celebration and its anticipation (German liturgist Adolf Adam rightly calls Lent the “Easter Preparation Period”). Properly celebrated, according to liturgical chronology and not canonical legerdemain, the times are symmetrical: 40 days for Lent, 40 days from Easter to Ascension. Lent is separated from Easter by a Biblically significant time period, the Triduum. Ascension is separated from Pentecost also by a Biblically sanctioned time period, the novena.  The Easter Season — counting the period from Ascension to Pentecost — is fifty days, longer than Lent which, as one author notes, indicates that the joys of reconciliation are greater than the sufferings of penance.  These parallelisms shaped Catholic liturgical and devotional life for centuries. Our current “pastoral” practice obscures it by distorting it.

The Divine and the Human

The Church features Matthew 28 as the Gospel for the Ascension. It contains the Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations.” What is often overlooked is the balance of the divine and human in the account. Jesus had spent three years “making disciples,” which included a distinct disciples’ cohort: the Apostles. What He had done He now commissions His disciples to continue: they are to go to the ends of the earth to “make disciples.” While God has primacy and takes the initiative, little of His images’ interaction with Him is purely passive. God normally expects man also to do something. Work is not primarily a punishment; it is man’s expression of his subordinate co-creatorship under God, where he takes the goods of the world to shape them for human purposes.  God expects man to contribute to the work in which He invites him to share.  Likewise, while Jesus provided the example of  “making disciples,” the task now passes to men — feeble men, sinful men, “men who “believed but doubted” — to carry on the work. Once more, faith and works complement each other.

Intrinsic Sacramentality

“Discipleship” is inextricable from sacramentality. Jesus not only wants people to profess doctrinal beliefs and live moral principles, but they are to do that sacramentally: “baptize them” in the name of the Trinity. Discipleship is thus not just some amorphous adherence to an inchoate idea of Jesus and His teachings — whether as Son of God or as the Semitic Confucius — disconnected from expression in a concrete sacramental act: Baptism. Sacramentality is therefore not an optional extra in the Christian life.

Redirecting Human Attention

Why didn’t Jesus stay around after 40 days? Why didn’t He just remain permanently for everybody and anybody who wanted to talk to Him? To ask him questions? To schedule an appearance on Colbert? Two responses: The first is faith, already previewed in the episode on the road to Emmaus, when the disciples do not recognize Jesus physically but in the Eucharist. The Real Presence is thus the privileged locus of encounter with the Risen Lord this side of the eschaton. The second is a proper focus on the world. The world is not our home. This is not our eternal destiny. Jesus goes “before us always” to show us the path… and that path leads to heaven. While the world will be renewed, it is clear it is as an extension of the “new heavens and new earth.” The former takes precedence. The “new heavens” is not taking its instructions from the “new earth.”

Unity of Doctrine

The Ascension winds together two doctrinal threads: soteriology and eschatology. Jesus took our humanity to heaven. Humanity is thus not alien to heaven. What was taken up by the Godhead in the Incarnation is taken up, forever — something already “second fruited” in the Assumption. And as the angels remind the “men of Galilee” in Luke’s Ascension account, the Ascension is just one way on Jesus’ itinerary. He will return as judge of the living and the dead, concluding human history and bringing it to eschatological fulfillment. Far from being merely something affecting Jesus, therefore, the Ascension has broader doctrinal significance “for us and for our salvation.”