Ascension Sunday – 17 May 2026
Our celebration of the Ascension comes to us at a strange and uncertain moment in our world. It can feel at times as though our horizon has narrowed, as though we are becoming increasingly trapped within fear, division, and uncertainty. Yet, into this world, the feast of the Ascension speaks a word of hope. How might we understand this hope?
Imagine for a little while a moment in our life which was full of possibility. Maybe it was when we first started school, or began our first job, or left home for the first time. Perhaps it was when we married, entered religious life, became a parent, or made some important decision about your future. A moment rich in possibility, full of promise. There may have been very little certainty about what lay ahead, yet somehow there was a sense that this was what life was meant for. Everything up to that point seemed to gather together and open outward into something new.
The meeting that the disciples have with Jesus in today’s Gospel is such a moment of possibility. They stand on a mountain in Galilee between two worlds: the world that has ended with Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the unknown future into which they are now being sent. The Gospel of Matthew tells us something very revealing: “they worshipped him, though some doubted.” Faith and uncertainty exist together. Courage does not mean the absence of fear. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles the disciples stand staring into the sky after Jesus is taken from them. It is such a human image. When the world changes suddenly, when certainty disappears, we often become frozen between nostalgia for what was and fear of what might come next. But the angels tell them: “Why are you standing there looking at the sky?” In other words: do not become trapped in absence. Do not mistake transition for abandonment.
The Ascension is not about Jesus disappearing from the world. It is about his presence being transformed. What at first seems to be absence becomes a deeper kind of presence. Distance becomes intimacy. Now, Jesus is no longer confined to one place or one moment in history. Through the Spirit he becomes present in every place where compassion triumphs over cruelty, truth over lies, reconciliation over hatred, and hope over despair. This is why the Ascension is ultimately a feast of freedom. As long as we believe that the present moment is all there is, we become imprisoned by it. We become trapped by the headlines, by fear, by cynicism, by the feeling that nothing can change. But the Ascension declares that our current horizon is never our final horizon. History is still open. Humanity still has a future. God is still drawing creation toward its fulfilment.
That is why St Paul prays in today’s second reading from Letter to the Ephesians that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened.” Christian hope is not optimism or naïve positivity. It is the capacity to see beyond the immediate and recognise that God is still at work, even amid confusion and loss.
Simone de Beauvoir once wrote: “To be free is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.” Freedom comes in recognising that we are never completely trapped by the circumstances before us. There is always the possibility of a new beginning. That is the promise of the Ascension. And perhaps this is the witness the world most needs from us today. Not panic. Not despair. Not nostalgia for a vanished past. But people who continue to live as though the future still belongs to God. The disciples leave the mountain no longer clinging to Jesus as he once was. Instead, they become his presence in the world. They go outward. They begin again.
The Ascension therefore asks each of us a difficult but important question: Have we lost sight of possibility? Have disappointment, exhaustion, or fear caused our vision to narrow? Have we forgotten that grace always opens horizons larger than the ones we can presently see? Because the message of the Ascension is this: we are not abandoned. Christ has not left the world. His presence has simply become larger than before. And therefore our future is never closed. In him, there is always a wider horizon still waiting to be explored.
