So, I still haven’t got back into the habit of fitting this into my week, but for what it’s worth, here are some Ascension Day reflections.

Maybe it’s because it’s always a Thursday. Ascension Day is easily the most underrated of the major feasts in the Calendar. In several European countries it’s a public holiday, but we Brits go to work like any other day. The CofE has even adopted the Feast of Christ the King despite that fact that (as Tom Wright always used to tell us at Wycliffe) we already have one of those and it’s ascension. Once, while working at a church in London, I wished a colleague a happy Ascension Day and he asked if that was something to do with the Queen. Despite having full major feast creds on paper, it’s not a day we make a big deal of in practice.

Perhaps there’s also just a degree to which the ascension is itself a doctrine we don’t value enough. I suspect there isn’t a single article of the Creed you could get more Christians to admit they wish didn’t happen than “He ascended into Heaven”. After all, wouldn’t it be much easier to discern Jesus’ will, settle theological controversies, and convince the world of the truth of the Gospel if he still had an address somewhere in Jerusalem? Doesn’t “he ascended into Heaven” sometimes feel like a feeble excuse for why we can’t simply produce the living Jesus? And aren’t Christians supposed to be longing for him to come back anyway?

I imagine most of us have wondered these things at one time or another, but the truth is that the ascension is wonderful good news. For so many reasons it’s a day fully deserving of a major feast status.

The collect for the day, as is generally the case with the BCP collects, focuses on practical matters.

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

It’s not one of the passages assigned for today, but this collect makes me think mostly of Colossians 3:1-4. The ascension means that we should have a completely different mindset and orientation. Our hearts and minds are to be set above where Christ is reigning.

The ascension means Christ is in heaven. Paul tells us that through our union with Christ we also are there already in a spiritual sense. Our lives are hidden with him in God. So then, our hearts and minds should be set above with him.

The idea of being ‘heavenly minded’ has, to some degree, gone out of fashion in Evangelical circles. Many of us will be familiar with the complaint that someone is ‘so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good’, though I must admit I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever met someone who really fits that description. If it’s a spiritual problem, I’m not sure it’s really our spiritual problem in 2023. There are also concerns about “Platonism”* in the way Christians have thought about heaven and the Christian life. Doesn’t such an emphasis on spiritually ascending to heaven denigrate the good world, the earth filled with countless material and sensory delights which God has made for us?

These aren’t exactly bad concerns in their place. But much though the heavenly Zion will descend to Earth with our Saviour in due course, for the time being both he and it remain in heaven. So for the time being our hearts and minds should be set on the Lord reigning from heaven and the innumerable throng of saints and angels that rejoice and worship in his presence. Even as we go about our business on here below, this is the scene which should thrill our imaginations, draw our desires, and excite our hopes.

In Colossians this also has some clear ethical implications for life on earth. Good though the earth may be, it is presently the scene where human sin plays out it’s sorry story. As people who pray that the Father’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, our focus on the ascended Christ should lead us to put to death what is earthly (i.e. not yet brought under Christ’s rule) in us.

Our big ascension day tradition (apart from reflecting on the ascension in Scripture) is making coronation chicken. We have a particular recipe passed down to us from my mum which takes a good 24 hours to make, so it becomes quite an annual ritual. For pudding, anything with a cloud like texture (e.g. merengue, marshmallow, candy floss) is good.

*I put Platonism in scare quotes because there are actually lots of different types of Platonism, each involving a slightly different collection of ideas and each putting those ideas together in a different way. Some platonic ideas are more useful to Christian thought than others and this all tends to get brushed under the carpet in rather hand wavy references “Platonism”. What people are usually getting at boils down to the idea that the material world is bad and the spiritual world is good. While it’s right for Christians to oppose that mindset, in reality not all Platonists share it anyway and lots of Christian thinkers who draw on Platonism explicitly argue against it.