peanut butter

jelly

crackers (Ritz, 

Saltines, Club)

pancake mix

pancake syrup

100% juice boxes

100% fruit/vegetable

juice bottles

Ascension Day falls forty days after Easter.  That means that the Feast of the Ascension always falls on a Thursday; this year, it's on May 29.  Though Ascension Day is one of the major feast days in our liturgical calendar (there are seven major feasts), because it always falls on a Thursday, it seems often to get lost as a holy day.  (Pentecost, for example, falling 50 days after Easter, is always on a Sunday, so we always celebrate it at church.)

The story of Jesus' ascension into heaven is told explicitly only by Luke, in both the eponymous gospel and his sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, though it is referred to in other gospels and in some of Paul's letters.  Luke tells at the end of his gospel and again in the very beginning of Acts, that some forty days after the resurrection, Jesus took the disciples a few miles outside Jerusalem, and that he was carried up and away.  Luke says that Jesus was carried into heaven, and Acts adds that he "was lifted up, and a cloud carried him out of sight." 

An online search of images of the Ascension show a lot of paintings of a triumphant Jesus, arms outstretched, standing on a cloud as the disciples stare open-mouthed.  One image I saw was of a stained glass window with nothing but a cloud and some feet peeking through.  It is an astonishing story, and it is easy to get hooked on wondering "what really happened" or what the disciples witnessed and tried later to describe.  But it seems to me a more helpful meditation would be on what effect the Ascension had on Jesus' first disciples, and on how it affects us.

Perhaps because Ascension Day always falls in the late spring, I think of this as a kind of graduation story.  The disciples had spent the past three years following Jesus first as their teacher, and then as the messiah, the anointed Son of God.  They had experienced Jesus' horrifying death, and then became witnesses to the resurrection.  In the days after Easter, Jesus continued to teach them and to care for them.  And then, a last lesson and a sort of graduation.

The story of the Ascension in Luke and in Acts, about Jesus' last physical encounter with the disciples, begins as so many stories of Jesus and the disciples begins.  Jesus gathers them into a group and carefully teaches them.  Luke tells us that "Jesus opened for them the scriptures."  After reminding them that his life and ministry fulfilled the promises of scripture, Jesus told them, "You are witnesses of these things."   Then he promised them that they would be given the help they would need, the power of the Holy Spirit.  Finally, he blessed them.  And then, however it happened, Jesus left them, left the physical world of humanity, and assumed his place with God.

It does feel to me like a graduation story.  After the Ascension, Jesus would never physically be with the disciples again.  Jesus had to trust that what he had taught them would be enough, that the people he had chosen would be able to continue to follow the way of Christ.  It would be up to them to spread the good news of God's kingdom.  Jesus promised the disciples that God would send them the help they would need, namely the power of the Holy Spirit because from then on, it would be the disciples who would teach and feed and heal.  They would be called upon to bear witness, to speak the truth, and to lead others.