“Go and tell my brothers, that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” (Jn 20:17). So said the Lord to Mary Magdalene on Easter Sunday. There’s no doubt that she fulfilled that commission. And what she proclaimed to the apostles, the Lord’s brothers, the Church proclaims through this feast to all his brothers and sisters with ears to hear: the mystery and grace of his Ascension.
Today Jesus goes to the Father. He returns to his Father. He is gently, lovingly “lifted up” to his Father; there is no violence in his going. The ending of the Lord’s life on earth answers to its beginning. The Ascension and the Annunciation clasp hands. The Son of God came down from heaven, says the Creed, and became flesh, with only an angel and a young Jewish woman knowing it. Today he returns to his Father, with the apostles, two angels and surely that same woman, no longer young, as witnesses. The circle is complete. The human nature assumed in the Incarnation is now assumed into heaven.
“I am ascending, says Jesus, to my Father and your Father.” This is not a purely private matter between the Father and the Son. This is not Jesus receiving a knighthood in some heavenly Buckingham Palace. We are included. The Lord returns carrying his whole humanity, his whole story – conception, birth, babyhood, boyhood, manhood, his family life and public life, his death and resurrection, his wounds and his power, his sacrifice and its acceptance by the Father and in all of this he is carrying us, the cargo, as it were, of our shared humanity. He is going to his God and ours. He is going as the Head of a body and that body us. He is lifted up, not like an Artemis II, not on a journey through space or around the moon, but beyond every constraint of time and space, of the created world, “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come”, and lifted up, carrying us, our humanity. The movement that began with the Father raising his Son from the dead culminates in the Father enthroning him at his right hand. Today, says the Roman Canon, we celebrate “the most sacred day on which your Only Begotten Son, our Lord, placed at the right hand of our glory our weak human nature, which he had united to himself”. This is the Good News Mary Magdalene carried to the apostles and with the Spirit’s help we too. Today we are relocated. Today we find our true home. Today “we are seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:6). In principle, this is true for every human being and concretely for every person bound to Christ by the Holy Spirit. And so the dignity allotted us from the beginning now comes to its full flower.
Recently, a friend lent me an account of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that followed, 1917 to 1921 (just over a century ago). It’s not a nice read. What stands out is what human beings could do to one another: the bestial cruelty, the romanticised violence, the determination of whole classes as worthless, the contempt for human dignity. Would that it were a one-off, an isolated blip in history! But we know it’s not; it’s a repeating pattern. It’s endemic, again and, humanity “descends” – as we say so significantly – into barbarism, into degradation, into inhumanity – not just on battlefields but in bedrooms, behind closed doors or high walls or on the streets, in prisons, in hospitals even.
Pope Benedict XVI talked once of how we humans rebel not so much against this or that (particular commandments), but rather against “the greatness of being chosen”. We “attempt to shake off being chosen”. We rebel against being loved and raised by love, and so we rebel against ourselves. We descend rather than ascend, we diminish ourselves rather than grow to our full stature. We descend into whirlpools of self-destruction. Christ’s Ascension is the counter-force, the upward call. The Pope spoke of the “courage to accept the divine dimension of our being.” “Go and tell my brothers that I am ascending to my Father and your Father” and that his elevation enables and begins ours. That each of us has a throne awaiting us. To “tell this” – in how many ways! – is the mission on earth that flows from the Ascension into heaven.
The Ascension proclaims that life is not a stumble along a dimly-lit corridor that runs from the date of our birth to that of our death. It’s a journey from baptism to eternal life, says the Creed. As St Paul says, it’s an enlightening of the eyes of our heart – to a new horizon, to a hope, to spiritual riches, to a recognition of the immeasurable greatness of the Father’s love, and the infinite dignity of every human being for whom nothing less than a shared throne at the Father’s right will do, his Father and ours.
St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 13 May 2026
