A joyous and happy Feast of the Ascension for all of my fellow church calendar fans! Although this isn’t a holiday typically celebrated by many Protestants, it can be a very meaningful celebration for all of the disciples of Jesus.
What is Ascension Day or The Feast of the Ascension?
This holiday celebrates one of Christianity’s core beliefs: that Jesus bodily ascended back into heaven forty days following his resurrection. To commemorate this, Ascension Day is always celebrated exactly 40 days after Easter Sunday, which always places it on a Thursday, which is why it is called “Holy Thursday” in some regions.
But, if Ascension Day wasn’t a part of my faith heritage growing up, and I’m not liturgical, then why should I care?
While none of us are compelled by Biblical mandate to celebrate ANY calendar day as more sacred than another (The Apostle Paul makes this clear in Romans 14:5-6, when discussing Christian liberty), it can be incredibly helpful, as believers, to have certain observances dedicated to the remembrance and celebration of specific aspects of our faith.
The children of Israel practiced this principle in the Old Testament with the practice of erecting “Memorial Stones.”
You can find an account of this practice in the 4th chapter of the book of Joshua. After our titular prophet leads the children of Israel across the Jordan river (interestingly a symbol of death in later works of Christian art and poetry) God commands Joshua to take 12 stones out of the river and to create a monument of sorts for the express purpose of keeping the memory of the event alive in the minds of future generations.
For those of us alive today, many of the holidays and celebrations of the traditional church calendar are intended to be interactive monuments that allow us to not only call to memory the foundational narratives of our faith, but to become a part of them through celebration and ancient tradition.
In the “unprecedented times” (Am I the only one growing weary of that phrase?) that we live, it becomes all the more important for those of us who follow Jesus to soak in the meaning of what today symbolizes: This world isn’t all that there is.
Let’s close with the words of an angel, spoken on this day over two millennia ago to a distressed group of disciples straining their necks to look at the sky:
“As they stared into the sky, watching Jesus ascend, two men in white robes suddenly appeared beside them. They told the startled disciples, ‘Galileans, why are you staring up into the sky? Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but he will come back the same way that you saw him ascend.’”
Acts 1:10-11 TPT
Ponder Thoughts 