Ephesians 1:15-23 – 5/12/2026 – The Ascension of the Lord
[God] has put all things under [Jesus’s] feet and has made [Jesus] the head over all things for the church, which is [Jesus’s] body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Ephesians 1:22-23
One of Jesus’s epithets is Emmanuel, “God with us,” which points to one of the distinctive, central doctrines of Trinitarian Christianity, that in the incarnation of Jesus, his birth as a human being, God became human and lived among us. The disciples had Jesus among them, in the flesh. While on earth, Jesus’s followers could hear his voice, ask him questions, lean on him physically, and have the companionship that is possible only in face-to-face encounters with another human being. Those who were with Jesus during his time on earth were close to God in a way that no one else ever has through the physical intimacy they had with the Son of God who lived among them.
Today’s Feast of the Ascension marks the end of Jesus’s time as an embodied human living on earth among us. Both before and after the Resurrection, the disciples could be called followers of Jesus in a literal sense of walking along the road as Jesus led. The Ascension Feast is primarily a celebration of the glorification of Jesus that occurred through his returning to the right hand of the Father, a feast that pairs with the similarly glorifying feast of the Transfiguration. Whereas the Transfiguration was followed by a continuation and heightening of Jesus’s earthly ministry, the Ascension marks the last moment that Jesus is a bodily, earth-bound human until his future return in glory.
Jesus’s sudden absence from the disciples and from this earth forces the disciples to relate to Jesus and therefore to relate to God differently. God’s presence has changed, and so how they understand that presence must change too. No longer can a follower of Jesus give him a hug, receive a laying of hands blessing, ask a question, or simply trod the path beside Jesus. God’s presence now takes other forms. The presence Jesus promises, the Holy Spirit or in John’s Gospel called the Paraclete or Advocate, can also be called “God with us.” However, this “God with us” is quite a different sort of “being with” than the disciples had with the human person Jesus.
Somehow the Holy Spirit dwells within the human person creating an intimate connection between God and self. Instead of asking Jesus a question, God speaks directly to us without any intermediary. The distance between God and human has been erased. This means that Jesus’s absence in the Ascension makes possible an even closer relationship or interconnection between God and humans. While reassuring that God is still with us, now closer than ever, a problem remains. While Jesus was with the disciples face to face, there could be no question which direction Jesus was leading them. With the Spirit however, we can be wrong about which direction God leads. It is possible and quite common to mistake our own will or another’s for the Spirit speaking to us directly. God may still be with us, but this presence of the Third Person of the Trinity can often feel like a complete absence, a presence so silent and imperceptible that it feels like no presence at all.
In church each Sunday we hear the words of one of the four canonical Gospels. They record the words and ministry of Jesus Christ. The difficulty for us 2000 years later is to translate Jesus’s words to people who lived, ate, worked, and traveled with him to words for us who have never met Jesus face to face, who have never had the benefit of his physical presence. That we have the Spirit indwelling in us and the Sacrament to nourish us with another kind of physical presence is perhaps little comfort when confronted with the kinds of trials and difficult choices where we would benefit from being able to sit down at Jesus’s feet and talk it out with him.
Though we have the Spirit and are without the embodied human Jesus until his return, Jesus is with us in another way that points toward the meaning of the Christian life in general and another reason to celebrate the Ascension as a Feast of joy. Each of us individually has the Third Person of the Trinity as God dwelling within each of us, but we have God with us in another way as well. Today’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians tells us that the Church is now Christ’s body. No longer a single human, Jesus is still human and still God with us in the actual living flesh but now Jesus’s body is the collective of all the assembled believers across the entire earth. Christ’s one body is made out of the many bodies of the baptized scattered throughout the earth. To be together in assembly with other believers is to be united into that one Body. We, as a church, become Christ. We are Christ.
This presence, this becoming Christ as the church and being with the Christ as the church is still different than the presence of Jesus the disciples had. It is still a different matter to talk to Christ now than it was for them. As we miss the experience the disciples had of living with Jesus and yearn for living with Jesus again at his return, we are tasked with finding the same meaning in the presence of each other. The other is not just like Christ, the other is a part of Christ, literally and without qualification. It is in the human other, our brothers and sisters, that we can find sustaining presence and words of wisdom. Problems of knowledge and discernment are still there, but those problems might seem minimal or at least manageable when we see that they come with the joy of communing with Christ himself while eating with our fellow humans in community. It is that human community that is the body of Christ, that is God with us.
Further Reading: The dialectic between the presence and absence of God is an ongoing theme in my theological reflections, including this post on the paradox of presence.
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Dionysus on a Bike 
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