The Ascension, however, also brings Our Lord very close to us, because he entered into his glory as God the Son made man, wearing our human nature and with all the experience of human life and human suffering behind him.  The Mount of the Ascension is significantly the Mount of the Agony in Gethsemane; the hands he lifted in final blessing bore the imprint of the nails.  He and we are truly kin indeed.

But not only is he made close to us in understanding and sympathy through having shared our earthly life, he is now present with us wherever we may be, for Ascension Day marked not only the end of the old kind of relationship, but the beginning of a new.  Previously, whether he was with the Apostles had depended on his physical presence, and often they had found that without him they were unsure and ineffective.

What a dispirited and craven band of men they were on Holy Saturday, hiding away in the Upper Room and starting at every footfall on the stairs.  “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5), he had warned them and they had proved it by bitter experience.  But now they had the assurance of his parting words, “I am with you always, even to the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).