In the famous dispute between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli over the Eucharistic presence (or lack thereof), Zwingli argued that Jesus’ body could not be present in the Eucharist because he had ascended and was located at the right hand of the Father. Luther, though taking Jesus’ words of institution of the sacrament literally, did not take the Ascension so literally and so did not see that as a problem.
This is not a sermon on the Eucharistic presence of Christ but, in preaching on the Ascension, it is interesting that the Ascension was triangled into the Eucharistic debate. What this debate shows, vis-a-vis the Ascension, is that the event is overflowing with paradoxes about time and place.
Actually, such paradoxes go back to the dawn of creation. God, for all God’s Infinity, chooses to become involved in matter by creating it and tending it; giving the world freedom to grow even at a microscopic level, as contemporary nuclear physics teaches us, and culminating at the level of the human will. God also intensified God’s involvement in the world at certain historical moments, most importantly at the Red Sea and the Jews’ return from their Babylonian exile. God deepened God’s involvement with the material world by entering it as Jesus of Nazareth, a man vulnerable to rejection, taunts, and the nails on the cross. It is these considerations that supported Martin Luther’s contention, in continuity with his patristic and medieval inheritance, that the Ascension had nothing to do with Jesus leaving, let alone forsaking the created material world, but rather that the Ascension was a deepening and intensifying of Jesus’ involvement in our world.
After all, relating to God and to God Incarnate is not something that involves time and place in the way we experience time and place in all other relationships. If a friend or lover is away, that person is not there, although a certain level of closeness can still be experienced via letter or a phone call or Zoom conversation. But God can be both closer and farther at the same time in profound ways. Jesus tries to prepare his disciples for this combination of closeness and distance when He tells them that when he goes away, the Paraclete will come to make him more profoundly present than He was when He was physically with them. Getting back to the question of Eucharistic presence, it is worth noting that the Holy Spirit is invoked to bring the risen and ascended Christ into the bread and wine.
Unusually, there is a choice between two collects for this Feast with significantly different takes on it. The collect to the effect that Jesus ascended into Heaven that He might fill all things is much closer to my approach, especially with the petition that we “perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages.” The idea of ascending to where Christ continually dwells, as the other collect would have it, seems to be at cross purposes with this approach unless we understand our ascending to where Christ is to be allowing Christ to draw us (and all creation) to himself as promised in John 6. Or, perhaps we can take ascending to where Christ is to be a broadening of our view of life to the perspective of the ascended Christ, which is another way to let Christ fill all things.
So, Ascensiontide is not an end; it is a new beginning. It is not about saying good-bye to Jesus; it’s about greeting Jesus anew every day in ever-deepening ways.