Ascension Thursday: A Gospel of Air

Today’s post for the Solemnity of the Ascension* is from regular contributor Dr. Nicolete Burbach, a theologian whose research aims to help the Church navigate its difficult encounter with transness. To read Dr. Burbach’s other Bondings 2.0 posts, click here.

The liturgical readings for the Ascension can be found by clicking here.

Strikingly, today’s Gospel reading doesn’t include the Ascension.

We learn of it instead from the Acts reading. This passage recalls and elaborates upon a “first book”: another text sent by the writer at some earlier date—which scholars suggest is the Gospel of Luke, in which the Ascension is depicted (Luke 24:50-53). We also receive a hint in the passage from the Ephesians reading, in which Christ is depicted as sitting at the Father’s “right hand in the heavens”.

Isn’t there something disorienting about this absence? On the feast of the Ascension, the Ascension is never fully present. It is only implied, or re-presented in an echo of another book that is itself not featured.

Of course, all our scriptural knowledge of Jesus is like this. No eyewitness to Christ’s life is alive today—nor indeed were the Gospels necessarily written by their attributed authors.

Yet in today’s strange arrangement of texts, we are confronted with this fact with a renewed intensity. We come to Church, seeking to hear about the Ascension. Yet what we receive is echo and implication: an encounter at yet another step removed, a lacuna around which the Liturgy turns, a Word dissipating into air.

There is something quite familiar in this. After all, what is the Ascension today?

We are told in today’s Psalm to “clap [our] hands” and “shout to God with cries of great gladness”. We are told to envision God mounting His throne, to sing hymns of praise, and that God is “king of all the earth”. The Gospel reminds us that we have been commissioned by Christ, to whom “all power in heaven and on earth” has been given. Ephesians tells us of the “hope that belongs to [Christ’s] call” and the “richness of his glory”.

We then come together in the liturgy to proclaim this glory, express this joy, and bow before the throne of God. Finally, we are re-commissioned when we are told to “go forth”.

Yet we carry our commission into a world radically at odds with this message, and I confess I struggle to read these exhortations without some bitterness. 

As a trans person, I hear them in a moment when triumph seems to have ceased: our ascent to full membership of society has stalled, our hard-won political gains reversed. I think also of my queer siblings around the world, subject to cruelties against which even the Church that proclaims God’s justice fails to provide a consistent witness. And in truth this speaks to the experience of so many other marginalised groups, as our societies descend ever further into fearful reaction, murderous nationalism, and genocidal complicity. 

The moral ascent of the past decades, born from the hard lessons of modernity’s many crucifixions, curves back towards the grave—and we are left to wonder: was God ever in this at all, or was it just the futilities of worldly politics, all power and violence? It is hard to praise God in an abandoned world. How can we cry out for joy when so many are left to weep?

The lacuna of the Ascension in today’s liturgy evokes this experience for me: it is hard to envision the Ascension as ascension. Easier by far to picture it as a disappearance—one that leaves a profound lacuna, into which all talk of faith disappears:

Christ promises in the Gospel, “I am with you always, until the end of the age”. Yet how can we hold on to this promise, when the Truth that undergirds it is no longer apparent? How can we even believe that an Ascension took place at all? Perhaps what disappeared never was. Perhaps we are just grasping at air.  

Christ disappears from earth, and so does heaven, and we are left beneath the empty sky.

We thus find ourselves in the place of the disciples: we cannot gaze up into heaven. Christ has passed beyond us, and we are left staring into the aether. And yet, a voice speaks to us:

…why are you standing there looking at the sky?
This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven
will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.

Do we expect Christ to come down again to prove he’s with us? Should we remain there on the mountainside, endlessly seeking reassurance, never allowing Christ to depart?

No. We are told that Christ will return—but in time. For now, we must go and baptise and teach. We must take up our commission, and not look back. We must continue to speak the Gospel, preaching truth amidst falsehoods, hope amidst despair, and liberation amidst oppression. We must proclaim Christ’s identity with the least among us: trans people, migrants, Palestinians, and all others buried with our age as it returns to the grave.. 

At the Ascension, Christ leaves us in what may appear as abandonment. Yet our commission is given at the moment of his departure. We become Christians the moment we are thrown into this seemingly abandoned world. To live in this world is what it means to be a Christian in the first place.

And this—despite the evils that confront us—is why our joy, our witness, and our commission can survive the world. There may be no reassuring presence—no glimpse of heaven, no moment of perfect joy. But we know this already: we, as Christians, are born of it. It is our burden and our nature, lighter than air, floating in the empty sky.

–Dr. Nicolete Burbach, May 14, 2026

*The Solemnity of the Ascension was traditionally celebrated on the Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter.  In some countries, the feast has been transferred to the Sunday after this date to allow for greater participation by the faithful in this celebration.  In other countries, the Ascension is still marked on the Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter.  

Bondings 2.0 is providing an Ascension reflection today, so that on next Sunday, we can offer a reflection on the liturgiccal readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter.