Happy Ascension Thursday!

We just got back from evening Mass where we celebrated the ascension of our Lord into Heaven 40 days after his resurrection on Easter Sunday. I thought about the apostles and the feelings they may have had as they saw their Lord and friend for the last time ascending into heaven. They may have felt they would never again have that sweet communion with Jesus that they shared on earth.

"And when he had said these things, while they looked on, he was raised up and a cloud received him out of their sight.

These momentary feelings of awe, wonder and loss were tempered by the fact that He told them that He would never leave them or forsake them. Two thousand years later I take great comfort in the fact that indeed He never has left us but has remained with us in the Eucharist. As the evening sun streamed through the stained glass windows above the altar I was so thankful that though He is ascended, He still gives himself to us through the sacrifice of the altar as the early Church believed and practiced and took great comfort in.

Justin Martyr said in 155 AD: For we do not receive these as common bread and common drink; but just as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have learned that the food over which thanks has been given by the prayer of the word which comes from him, [see 1 Cor 11: 23-26; Lk 22; 19] and by which are blood and flesh are nourished through a change, is the Flesh and Blood of the same incarnate Jesus.