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You have heard the logistical specifics from Saint Luke. You know the factual story. You hear about this most momentous event in the life of your Lord every Thursday night 40 days after Easter.

The sinner that you are sometimes wrestles with the basic truth. It is, from the world's point of view, a fantastical story---a man rising into the clouds. Yes, it is a miracle, the last miracle that the visible Lord performed. It was awesome, and frightening, for the "12" to see Him floating further away. But was He? Was He floating further away? No, you know that the answer is no. It is a deep-theology reason. It is intense Christological meta-physics. It is the stuff of God-reality. It is scriptural---the Word existing as He reveals His fullness.

What happened between the time of the Lord's Garden Resurrection and His mountaintop elevation? During this period Christ did two seemingly contradictory things.

He was no longer with His disciples. He vanished from their midst after revealing His victory and first-fruits life. He was still with His disciples. He kept coming back into their presence with successive meetings. The purpose of His appearances was twofold. In the first place, Christ wished to confirm the disciples' faith in His resurrection. In the second place, He wished to give them further instruction concerning God's kingdom.

The ascended Jesus no longer shows Himself in a visible form. Does that bother, offend or trouble you? NO! It does not stress you in the least because you believe His Word. You are evangelical-Catholic Christians who trust His Scriptures and trust His Church. You are Lutherans who understand His "means of Grace."

The Resurrection, that mystery in Joseph's hillside tomb, has no witnesses and needed none, since the risen Savior "showed Himself alive after His Passion by many infallible proofs." [Acts 1.3] But after the Ascension from Mt. Olivet, the Savior no longer shows Himself in a visible form to you, His believers on earth. So, in distinction to Easter Sunday, Ascension Thursday took place visibly before the eyes of the Galilean fishermen.

The truth of the event is historically verified for the whole Catholic Church by the eye-witness of the Apostles. It became part and parcel of their Apostolic Preachment.

The ascension took place in an actual upward motion. He Who descended from Heaven into the Blessed Virgin's womb; He Who descended down into the Jordan river; He Who ascended high upon the crucifix, ascended for the final time to the right hand of majesty. What does this mean?

He ascended slowly, and dramatically. He might simply have disappeared, as He had vanished out of the sight of the two Emmaus disciples, but He did not. He was deliberate in His visible finality. As the dogmatician Hollaz writes "it pleased Him to go upward, in order that the disciples might testify of His actual ascension more clearly and confidently."

Christ's ascension accomplished a two-fold goal.

The end of His ascension was not only that He occupied the Paradise of the Redeemed, i.e. heaven, but that He also took possession of the "majesty on high," the "right hand of God." The "right hand of God" is not a mere seat of honor or a seat of rest and repose as the false teaching Reformed maintain, but the heavenly throne of Christ's exalted humanity. The Savior never sheds His flesh; His Incarnation is forever. Scripture teaches expressly in many places "He ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things." [Eph. 4.10]

Peter, in his Pentecost sermon, taught that Christ by His ascension did not enter into a "rest," or into an "inactive state or condition" but into an active divine dominion. Meyer correctly remarks that by Jesus being now a "ruling monarch" His presence is even more real: "prior to His ascension, Christ indeed was Lord and Messiah, however, in the form of a servant, but after laying this aside He has become Lord and Messiah in consummate perfection."

It is so sad that Jesus' ascension, by which He occupies universal dominion according to His human nature, is misused by the Protestant sects to actually "exclude" Christ's human nature from His omnipresence and universal rule in the world and, in particular, in the Church. It makes a difference. The Word is to be believed. The word can not be broken.

Our beloved Formula of Concord rejects the protestant heresy that wrongly hold that because of His ascension into heaven Christ is so enclosed and circumscribed with His body in a definite place in heaven that with the same (His body) He cannot and will not be truly present with us in the Supper. What hellish hogwash. How dare anyone turn the Lord into a "bug trapped in heavenly amber," a "body trapped in an infinite iron-lung" until the end of time, unable to act and "be" as the God He is.

With a wicked anti-catholic agenda, the reformed have for centuries willfully mistranslated Acts 3. 21, so as to arrive with a pre-conceived result. The original text of Saint Luke says Christ must occupy heaven, not Christ must be received, or be circumscribed and enclosed by heaven. Who is holding whom? Does the Lord hold His Kingdom in His blessed punctured palm, or is He pinned up in a Petri dish is heaven's holding tank? Lutheran-Catholics, with our brothers of all ages of orthodoxy, refuse to change Luke's verb into a "passive;" and refuse to make Scripture bow Its knee to the arrogance of Zwingli and his ilk.

Strong words are mandated because it makes a difference. The Word is true. You need to know and believe that you have an eternal "High Priest" Who Is on the throne of majesty in the heavens. You need to take comfort that by "heaven" we don't mean the blue sky of the birds and planes, or the black expanse of the stellar solar systems. Rather we believe as the Word instructs us that "Christ is made higher than the heavens"[Heb. 7.26] Hence He rose in an invisible manner above all heavens.

The "right hand of God" is anthropomorphism, or a figure of speech. The "right hand" is a way of describing an attribute of God by which He does His work, namely, His unlimited power, or His omnipotence.

The Lutheran Confessions, a clear and accurate commentary on Holy Writ, state that "God's right hand is no fixed place in heaven, as the errorists assert, but nothing else than the almighty power of God, which fills heaven and earth." [Trigl. 1025, F.C., SD VIII, 28] Saint, where the God-Man has promised to be for you, in His Word and in His Sacred Ordinances (the Sacraments) there He is; all of Him, the total package, the Personal Union of the Divine and the Human, Jesus' Flesh and Blood. It makes a difference. Because your Brother Christ Jesus Ascended to fill all things, He has ascended into the Baptismal fonts to fill you full of the Water from His side; the water which gushed out from the cross. He has ascended into every pulpit in His church which preaches the full Apostolic power of His life and work, to fill you with forgiveness and strength. He ascends every chalice and paten to feed you His body and blood; not his absent body and blood; not his spiritual body and blood; not His "representational" body and blood, but His divine and human real and genuine Body and Blood.

It makes a difference.

Again, and finally, the Formula of Concord gives you all the Peace, the "Concord" of the Word of God when it says: "We hold, [Augsburg Lutheran Church holds] that in His Church and congregation on earth He is present as Mediator, Head, King, and High Priest, not in part, or one half of Him only, but the entire Person of Christ is present, to which both natures belong, the divine and the human; not only according to His divinity, but also according to, and with, His assumed nature, according to which He is our Brother, and we are flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone." [Trigl. 1043, F.C. S.D. VIII, 78]

This is the Feast of The Ascension of Our Lord.

In the Name of The Father and of The Son + and of The Holy Ghost