"Your flesh and blood is at the right hand of the Almighty" Ascension (observed) 2026

13. May 2026
Ascension
Mark 16:14-20, Acts 1:1-11, 2 Kings 2:5-15, Psalm 110

In the Name + of Jesus. AMEN.

The cloud took Him. You were not there, but you know what that cloud was. It was the moment when what you were holding, what was most sure, went from sight. The emptiness of loss. The disciples stood on the mountain with their necks craned, staring up into the empty sky. Then two men in white appeared. “Why do you stand gazing into the heavens?” (Acts 1:11) Maybe that question is yours this evening?

The Ascension is the feast the church does not quite know what to do with. White vestments, alleluias, the psalm calling for clapping hands and shouting to God with the voice of triumph — and yet most of us bring something like unease. Something like sorrow. The sorrow of a departure you did not want.

But that is not what happened. That is not Ascension Day. So let the Law say what it says.

You are flesh. That’s not an insult but a bare fact. Made from the ground, returning to the ground. The first parents had free access to the garden, to the tree, to the presence. That is gone. What stands between you and the holy presence of God is not distance. It is your nature. So, the answer cannot come from inside. Dust does not belong before the throne of the Most High. Sinners do not stand before the Almighty. The veil in the temple was not decorative. It said, “You do not come in.” The high priest went in once a year, with blood, trembling. And that was the closest anyone got.

The Law is not cruel. The Law is honest. When you imagine the right hand of the Father, the throne of the Almighty, you have no claim there. No right of entry. No access. Not merely unfamiliar, but unknowable. The gap between who you are and where God is cannot be bridged from your side. That is what the Law establishes. That is all the Law can do.

But then the cloud opens. When He was taken up, it did not take only His divinity. He did not shed His flesh at the gates of heaven like a coat left at the door. He who was born of the Virgin — truly born, in the way that birth is loud, bodily, and irreversible — He who walked tired roads, wept at a tomb, bled under thorns, and died — now He ascended. In the body. Our flesh. Human flesh. Mary's flesh. He took flesh and blood with Him all the way to the right hand of the Father.

One of the old fathers said it plainly: our very nature is enthroned today, high above all cherubim. Not His divinity alone. Our nature. The nature you carried into this room now sits at the right hand of the Father.

The church's confessors were careful here because there are a hundred ways to go wrong. His human nature did not dissolve into the divine, as though flesh became fire and the man became only God again. Not that. He laid aside the form of a servant, not the human nature. He still has it. He will have it forever. Our Brother, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, sits upon the throne of God. “All authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28:18) — in those hands. Human hands. The hands that were nailed.

The Ascension is not a mere spiritual ascent. Nor was it a dissolution of the body into something simpler. A man ascended. That man is enthroned. Close the eyes of reason. Rejoice without ceasing that our flesh and blood is placed so high at the right hand of God's majesty and almighty power.

Your flesh. There. What was accomplished at Calvary and what is given here are not the same moment. The Ascension is not yet the Supper. But hear what it establishes.

He is not up there — away from you, behind a wall you cannot reach. The right hand of God is not a place in the sky. It is His almighty power, His active presence that fills heaven and earth. Christ is installed there, according to His humanity, and from there He fills all things. Present everywhere, not only as God but as true Man. This is the ground of every promise He ever made. He said He would be where two or three gather in His name. He said He would be with His church to the end of the age. He said He would give His body and His blood. This is His promise. These are made by a man who has taken His flesh into the fullness of divine power and presence and will not take it back.

He intercedes for you in your own flesh. Jesus doesn’t make an abstract transaction somewhere above the clouds. A man pleads your case — One who has felt what you feel, who knows what Fridays weigh and what a tomb sounds like from the inside. “The Lord said to my Lord: sit at My right hand” (Ps. 110:1). He sits there. For you.

So, when you come to this table, you meet Him — not His memory, not a spiritual impression of Him. Him. In the same human nature He carried up into glory. His body and blood, given for you. The same body that ascended. He instituted this Supper precisely for this: the certain assurance and confirmation that He is with you, and dwells and works and is effective in you, also according to the nature from which He has flesh and blood. Not accomplished up there, delivered down here by some spiritual exercise. Given out. Here. Now. For you.

The angels asked: Why do you stand gazing? He is not up there, away, unreachable. He fills all things. He is here — in His word, in His sacrament — as surely as He was on the mountain before the cloud came. The cloud did not remove Him. It revealed Him. As the One who sits at the right hand of the Father. As the One who, in that human nature, fills all things. As your Brother, enthroned.

The church claps her hands today — not for something wonderful that happened to someone else, a long time ago. Your flesh and blood — this nature you walked in with — is at the right hand of the Almighty. And from that right hand, He gives Himself to you.

“God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet” (Ps. 47:5). He has ascended. Ascended, He fills all things. And so He is here. For you.

In His Holy + Name. AMEN.

Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School - Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin