The Ascension Explained Like You’re Five

Quick Insights

• After rising from the dead on Easter Sunday, Jesus stayed on earth for forty days and then rose up into heaven in front of his disciples.
• The Ascension was not Jesus leaving us forever; it was a new and better way of him being present to us through the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist.
• When Jesus went to heaven, he took his real human body with him, which means a human body now sits at the right hand of God the Father forever.
• Because Jesus went ahead of us into heaven, he opened a door that no human being could open on their own, and he promised to prepare a place for each of us there.
• From his throne in heaven, Jesus never stops praying and interceding for us as our eternal High Priest, which means he is constantly speaking up for us before the Father.
• The Ascension set the stage for Pentecost, because Jesus had promised that if he went away, he would send the Holy Spirit to guide and strengthen his Church on earth.

What the Ascension Actually Is

The Ascension of Jesus Christ is one of the most important and most underappreciated events in the entire history of salvation. People tend to focus on Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, and those are rightly celebrated with great reverence and joy. Yet the Ascension stands as the necessary completion of everything that came before it. Without the Ascension, the Resurrection would be a remarkable miracle without its full meaning, and the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost could not have been given. The Church has always taught that the Ascension is not simply a farewell scene at the end of Jesus’ earthly life; it is the triumphant culmination of his entire mission as the Son of God made man. The word “ascension” comes from the Latin word meaning “to climb” or “to go up,” and that is precisely what happened: Jesus, in his risen and glorified body, went up into heaven before the eyes of his disciples. This was not a spiritual or symbolic event that only happened in the hearts of the apostles. It was a real, physical, historical event that took place on the Mount of Olives, just outside Jerusalem. Luke records it in his Gospel with simplicity and clarity, telling us that Jesus “parted from them and was carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51). The Acts of the Apostles, also written by Luke, gives us even more detail about the moment, telling us that “a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9). Every article of the Catholic faith rests on events that actually happened in history, and the Ascension is no different.

The Forty Days Before the Ascension

To understand the Ascension properly, it helps to understand what Jesus was doing in the forty days between his Resurrection on Easter Sunday and his return to the Father. He did not simply vanish on Easter and then reappear briefly on a cloud. Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles that Jesus “presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). He ate fish with his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias (John 21:12-13). He invited the doubting Thomas to touch his wounds (John 20:27). He appeared to more than five hundred people at one time, as Paul reminds us in his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:6). These appearances were not ghostly or dreamlike; they involved eating, speaking, touching, and teaching. The number forty carries enormous weight in the Bible and in Jewish tradition, and this was not by accident. Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai receiving the Law from God (Exodus 24:18). Elijah walked for forty days to reach the mountain of God (1 Kings 19:8). Jesus himself fasted for forty days in the desert before beginning his public ministry (Matthew 4:2). The forty days after the Resurrection served a vital purpose for the apostles, because they needed time to have their minds and hearts formed, so that they could stop thinking of Jesus in merely human, earthly terms and begin to understand him as the eternal Son of God who had truly conquered death. Saint Augustine wrote that it was fitting for Jesus to remain with them during this period, because they needed to be gradually lifted from an earthly attachment to his physical presence toward a deeper, more spiritual understanding of who he truly was. Without those forty days, the disciples would have been wholly unprepared for the world-changing mission that awaited them.

The Event Itself at the Mount of Olives

The Ascension took place on a hill outside Jerusalem known as the Mount of Olives, a place already charged with deep significance in the life of Jesus. It was on the Mount of Olives that Jesus had prayed in agony the night before his crucifixion (Luke 22:39-44). It was from this same mountain that he now departed, not in sorrow but in triumph, with his hands lifted in blessing. Luke tells us that before he ascended, Jesus gave the apostles their great commission: he reminded them that repentance and forgiveness of sins were to be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (Luke 24:47). He told them to wait in the city until they received “power from on high,” a clear reference to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Luke 24:49). Then, while he was blessing them, he was taken up. The Acts of the Apostles adds that “two men stood by them in white robes, and said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’” (Acts 1:10-11). This angelic message is crucial, because it points immediately beyond the Ascension to the Second Coming, placing the entire event within the arc of God’s plan for humanity. The disciples, Luke tells us, did not stand there in grief. They “returned to Jerusalem with great joy” (Luke 24:52). This is a remarkable detail. When Jesus died on the cross, they were devastated and afraid. When Jesus ascended into heaven, they were filled with joy. Something had changed in their understanding, and the Ascension itself was the reason.

What “Seated at the Right Hand of the Father” Means

The Creed that Catholics recite every Sunday at Mass contains the phrase “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” People sometimes hear this and imagine God the Father sitting on a literal throne in a golden room with Jesus sitting in a chair beside him. That image, while charming, misses the deeper truth that the Church is proclaiming. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that by the expression “the Father’s right hand,” the Church understands “the glory and honour of divinity, where he who exists as Son of God before all ages, indeed as God, of one being with the Father, is seated bodily after he became incarnate and his flesh was glorified” (CCC 663). In other words, “the right hand of the Father” is not a location in space; it is a description of divine authority, honor, and power. To sit at the right hand of a king in the ancient world was to share in that king’s rule. Jesus, by ascending to the Father’s right hand, takes his place as the Lord and ruler of all creation. The Catechism further explains that being seated at the Father’s right hand “signifies the inauguration of the Messiah’s kingdom, the fulfillment of the prophet Daniel’s vision concerning the Son of man” (CCC 664). Daniel had prophesied centuries earlier that one “like a son of man” would come before the Ancient of Days and receive “dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away” (Daniel 7:13-14). The Ascension is the moment when that ancient prophecy finds its fulfillment. Jesus, who is fully human and fully God, now reigns forever as King of kings and Lord of lords.

Jesus Takes Our Human Nature into Heaven

One of the most astonishing truths of the Ascension is something that can be easy to overlook: Jesus ascended into heaven in his full, glorified human body, and he has not abandoned that body since. This is not a small detail. It means that right now, in heaven, there is a human nature at the heart of the Trinity. Jesus did not shed his humanity when he returned to the Father. He remains, for all eternity, the Word made flesh. The Letter to the Hebrews captures this beautifully, telling us that we have a high priest who has “passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God” (Hebrews 4:14), and that he “entered, not into a sanctuary made by human hands . . . but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Hebrews 9:24). The great Scholastic theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that it was supremely fitting for Jesus to ascend bodily into heaven, because his glorified body, having conquered death and the grave, belongs in the heavenly realm of incorruption rather than on the earth, which is a place of generation and decay. The Catechism teaches that the Ascension marks “the definitive entrance of Jesus’ humanity into God’s heavenly domain” (CCC 665). This is breathtaking when you think about it slowly. Before the Incarnation, no creature had ever stood in the fullness of God’s presence with a human body. Jesus changed that forever. He did not merely visit heaven on our behalf; he brought human nature into the divine life and made it dwell there permanently. Because he is the Head of the Body, which is the Church, his members can dare to hope that where the Head has gone, the body will one day follow.

Why Jesus Said It Was Good That He Was Going Away

One of the most surprising statements Jesus ever made came during the Last Supper, when he told his disciples something that must have shocked them: “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). How could it possibly be better for the disciples if Jesus, their teacher and Lord whom they loved, went away? The answer lies in understanding what the Ascension actually accomplished. While Jesus was physically present on earth, his presence was limited in time and space, as all physical presence is. He could only be in one place at a time. He could eat with his disciples in Galilee or teach in Jerusalem, but he could not simultaneously be with believers in Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Alexandria, and every other corner of the world. The Ascension freed Jesus from these limitations of physical presence, making way for the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus called “another Counselor,” to come and dwell inside the hearts of believers everywhere and always (John 14:16). Saint Leo the Great, the great fifth-century pope and Father of the Church, taught that the faith of believers actually grew stronger after the Ascension, because they were no longer relying on the evidence of their physical senses alone. They were called to relate to Jesus through faith, through the Holy Spirit, and through the sacraments, and this deeper relationship was spiritually richer than merely standing next to him in a crowd. Leo wrote that after the Ascension, “a better instructed faith began to draw closer to a conception of the Son’s equality with the Father.” The disciples no longer saw Jesus as merely a beloved teacher they walked with on dusty roads; they understood him as the eternal Lord who now filled all things.

The Connection Between the Ascension and the Holy Spirit

The Ascension and Pentecost are not two separate events that happen to follow each other on the calendar. They are two parts of a single, continuous movement in the mystery of salvation. Jesus himself made this connection explicit. In the Acts of the Apostles, he told the apostles not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for “the promise of the Father” which he had told them about (Acts 1:4). Then he explained: “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The Ascension, therefore, was the necessary precondition for Pentecost. Jesus had to return to the Father in order to send the Spirit. This is not a mechanical arrangement; it reflects the deep logic of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and the sending of the Spirit into the world is the fruit of Jesus’ completed mission. The Catechism teaches that Jesus Christ, “having entered the sanctuary of heaven once and for all, intercedes constantly for us as the mediator who assures us of the permanent outpouring of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 667). Think of it this way: a child at school is nourished every day by the food that a parent has prepared at home. The parent is not physically present in the classroom, yet the child experiences the love and care of the parent in every meal. In a similar way, Jesus, from his place at the Father’s right hand, continuously sends his Spirit into the hearts of believers, nourishing them with grace, truth, and strength. Pentecost, which came ten days after the Ascension, was the great visible outpouring of this gift, but the outpouring has never stopped.

The Ascension and the Priesthood of Jesus

The Letter to the Hebrews is the most detailed treatment in all of Scripture of what Jesus is actually doing in heaven right now, and it answers that question with a single, powerful word: interceding. “He holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:24-25). A priest in ancient Israel stood between God and the people. He offered sacrifices to God on behalf of the people and brought God’s blessing down to the people. Jesus is the perfect and eternal fulfillment of this priestly role. He offered himself once and for all on the cross as the sacrifice that takes away the sin of the world, and then he carried that offering into the heavenly sanctuary itself at his Ascension. The Catechism describes Jesus as the “high priest of the good things to come” who “is the center and the principal actor of the liturgy that honors the Father in heaven” (CCC 662). This means that every Mass celebrated on earth is not a separate sacrifice added on top of Calvary; it is the one sacrifice of Christ made present sacramentally, drawing its power from what Jesus accomplished on the cross and carried into heaven at his Ascension. Saint John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers in the history of the Church, understood the Ascension in this light, seeing it as the moment when our human nature, in the person of Jesus, was presented before the Father as the fruit of the whole redemptive work. Jesus does not stand in heaven offering new sacrifices; he stands there as the eternal Priest whose one offering never loses its power, continually presenting it before the Father on our behalf.

What the Ascension Tells Us About Heaven

The Ascension gives us the most reliable and concrete knowledge we have about heaven, because it is the account of someone we know going there. Jesus did not describe heaven in merely abstract terms, as a distant theological concept. He went there, in his body, before the eyes of his disciples. And before he went, he told them precisely why: “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:2-3). The Ascension confirms that heaven is a real place, not merely a state of mind or a poetic metaphor for feeling at peace. It is the place where God the Father dwells in his fullness, where Jesus now reigns at the Father’s right hand, and where the saints who have died in God’s friendship already share in the glory of the Resurrection. The Catechism teaches that “Jesus Christ, the head of the Church, precedes us into the Father’s glorious kingdom so that we, the members of his Body, may live in the hope of one day being with him for ever” (CCC 666). The word “precedes” is important: Jesus did not go to heaven in place of us, making it unnecessary for us to follow. He went ahead of us, like a trailblazer who clears the path so that others can walk it after him. Saint Paul captures this beautifully when he urges the Colossians to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:1-2). For the Christian, heaven is not an afterthought; it is the destination toward which every earthly day is oriented.

The Ascension in the Creeds and Liturgy of the Church

From the very earliest centuries of Christianity, the Ascension has occupied a central place in the professions of faith that Catholics recite. The Apostles’ Creed states that Jesus “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.” The Nicene Creed, recited every Sunday at Mass, affirms that Jesus “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” These creedal formulations are not decorative additions to the faith; they are among its most essential statements. The Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381, two of the earliest and most authoritative ecumenical councils of the Church, both affirmed the Ascension as a non-negotiable article of Christian belief. The liturgical calendar of the Church gives the Ascension the rank of a Solemnity, the highest category of feast day. It is celebrated forty days after Easter Sunday, always on a Thursday, in keeping with the scriptural account. In many dioceses around the world, including many in the United States, the Solemnity is transferred to the following Sunday to make it easier for the faithful to participate. Where the feast falls on a Thursday and is kept as a holy day of obligation, Catholics are called to attend Mass that day, reflecting the Church’s conviction that this event is not peripheral but central to the Gospel. At every Mass, the Preface for the Ascension proclaims that Jesus ascended “not to distance himself from our lowly state but that we, his members, might be confident of following where he, our Head and Founder, has gone before.”

The Ascension and the Second Coming

The angels who appeared to the disciples on the Mount of Olives said something that is often overlooked in discussions of the Ascension: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). The Ascension, in other words, carries within itself a promise of return. Jesus did not leave the world to abandon it permanently. He left in the mode of a king who has secured his kingdom and now reigns from his throne, while promising to return in power and glory to bring his kingdom to its complete fulfillment. The Second Coming, known in theological language as the Parousia, is not a separate and unrelated belief; it flows directly from the Ascension. Because Jesus ascended bodily, he will return bodily. Because he went away with his disciples watching, he will come back in a way that all will see. Saint Peter in his second letter reminds believers not to lose heart about this promise simply because time has passed: “The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The Catechism teaches that the Ascension means Christ “hides him from the eyes of men” for a time, but that “whence he will come again” (Acts 1:11) is absolutely certain (CCC 665). The Church lives between these two great moments: the Ascension, which marks the end of Jesus’ visible presence, and the Second Coming, which will mark the beginning of his fully visible and eternal reign. Every Mass is an anticipation of that final coming, which is why the ancient prayer “Maranatha,” meaning “Come, Lord Jesus,” runs like a golden thread through the earliest Christian writings (1 Corinthians 16:22).

The Ascension and Our Own Calling

The Ascension is not only a historical event to be admired from a distance; it is an event with direct and practical implications for how every Catholic is called to live right now. The angels on the Mount of Olives gently chided the apostles for standing there staring up at the sky: “Why do you stand looking into heaven?” (Acts 1:11). The point was not that heaven is unimportant but that, having witnessed the Ascension, the disciples now had urgent work to do on earth. Jesus had told them to be his witnesses “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8), and standing still was not witnessing. The Ascension gives Christians both a reason to act and a reason to hope. It gives a reason to act because Jesus has entrusted his ongoing mission to the members of his Body, the Church, empowered by the Holy Spirit. It gives a reason to hope because the Head of that Body has already arrived safely at the destination toward which all of Christian life is moving. The Church Fathers often compared the relationship between Jesus and his disciples to the relationship between a head and its body: where the head goes, the members will follow, provided they remain attached to the head through faith, the sacraments, and love. Saint Paul expressed this personal hope when he wrote to the Philippians: “Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20-21). Each Mass, each act of charity, each moment of prayer, each perseverance through suffering, is a small step in the same direction that Jesus himself went on the day he ascended.

The Joy of the Disciples as a Model for Us

Luke records one of the most quietly remarkable details in all of the Gospels when he tells us that after Jesus was taken up into heaven, the disciples “returned to Jerusalem with great joy” (Luke 24:52). The natural human response to watching someone you love disappear before your eyes would be grief, confusion, or at least a deep sense of loss. The disciples had already experienced devastating grief once when Jesus was crucified. Yet now, watching him leave again, they were filled with joy. This can only be explained by what they understood: that the Ascension was not a loss but a victory, not an ending but a fulfillment. They understood, at least in part, that Jesus was not abandoning them but going ahead of them. They knew he had promised to return, promised to send the Spirit, and promised that he would be with them always (Matthew 28:20). They knew that the door to heaven had been opened. Their joy was grounded not in ignorance of what had happened but in a genuine grasp of its meaning. Saint Leo the Great reflected deeply on this, teaching that the faith of the apostles was actually strengthened by the Ascension rather than weakened. Before the Ascension, they related to Jesus through the evidence of their senses. After the Ascension, they would relate to him through faith, and faith of that kind is both deeper and more spiritually transformative than mere sight. The Christian vocation is not to stand staring at the sky, but to carry that same joy into every circumstance of daily life, knowing that the Lord who ascended in glory is the same Lord who is present in the Eucharist, alive in the Holy Spirit, and faithful to his promise to return.

What the Ascension Means for Prayer and the Sacraments

The Ascension permanently transformed the way human beings can approach God, and this transformation is most visible in the life of prayer and the sacraments of the Church. Before the Incarnation, and before Jesus’ completed work of redemption culminating in the Ascension, human beings had no direct access to the life of God in the intimate way that Jesus opened up. The Letter to the Hebrews urges believers to “draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16), and the reason they can do this is precisely because they have a high priest who has entered that throne room permanently on their behalf. The Ascension is the foundation of Christian confidence in prayer. When a Catholic kneels and prays, that prayer does not bounce off the ceiling and disappear; it is carried to the Father by the interceding Christ, whose priestly prayer on behalf of his people never ceases. The sacraments, too, receive their power from the glorified Christ who acts through them from his place in heaven. Baptism unites the believer with Christ’s death and resurrection and gives them citizenship in the heavenly Kingdom. The Eucharist makes the one sacrifice of Calvary present on the altar and gives the faithful the body and blood of the glorified Lord. Confirmation seals the baptized with the Holy Spirit who was sent because Jesus ascended. Every sacrament is, in a real sense, a fruit of the Ascension, because it flows from the completed work of the glorified Christ who intercedes for his people as the eternal High Priest.

Common Misunderstandings About the Ascension

A few misunderstandings about the Ascension can cloud people’s appreciation of this feast, and it is worth addressing them directly. The first and most common is the idea that the Ascension means Jesus left us and is no longer really present. This misreads both Scripture and the Church’s teaching. Jesus promised, “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20). He remains present in the Eucharist, in the Holy Spirit, in the gathered community of believers, in the proclamation of the Word, and in the poor (Matthew 25:40). The Ascension changed the mode of his presence; it did not end his presence. A second misunderstanding is the assumption that the Ascension was a metaphor or symbol rather than a real historical event. The Catholic Church has always taught, and continues to teach, that the Ascension was a genuinely physical, historical event in which Jesus bodily went up into heaven. The cloud that hid him from their sight, far from suggesting a mere literary device, carries the deep biblical symbolism of the divine presence, recalling the cloud that led Israel through the desert and the cloud that filled the Temple at its dedication. A third misunderstanding holds that the Ascension is a minor feast, less important than Christmas or Easter. The Ascension is inseparable from both: Christmas prepared the way for the Incarnation, Easter conquered death, and the Ascension glorified the Incarnate Son and secured the fruits of Easter for all humanity. To separate any one of these events from the others is to misunderstand all of them.

The Ascension and the Church’s Mission

The Ascension did not mark the end of Jesus’ mission in the world; it marked the beginning of the Church’s mission in the world. Before rising into heaven, Jesus gave the apostles their final and definitive commission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18-20). This commission is not directed only at priests, bishops, and missionaries. It is directed at every baptized Catholic, because every baptized person has been incorporated into the Body of Christ and shares in his mission. The Ascension grounds this mission in the authority of the glorified Lord rather than in the merely human energy of well-meaning people. The Church does not evangelize on the strength of clever arguments or attractive personalities alone; she evangelizes in the power of the risen and ascended Lord who sends his Spirit to accompany his Word wherever it is proclaimed. The Acts of the Apostles, which begins with the Ascension and ends with Paul proclaiming the Kingdom of God in the heart of the Roman Empire, is itself a vivid illustration of how the ascending Lord continues to work through his followers on earth. Every time a Catholic shares the faith, serves the poor, forgives an enemy, cares for a sick child, or bears suffering with patience, they are participating in the ongoing mission of the Church that the Ascension set in motion.

The Ascension in the Old Testament Foreshadowings

The Ascension of Jesus did not appear in history without preparation. The Old Testament, read through Catholic eyes, contains several figures and events that anticipate and foreshadow what Jesus accomplished when he ascended into heaven. The prophet Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, accompanied by a chariot and horses of fire, before the eyes of his disciple Elisha (2 Kings 2:11). This event clearly pointed forward to something greater, because Elijah was taken up by an external force, not by his own divine power. Jesus, by contrast, ascended by his own divine authority, as Saint Thomas Aquinas noted in the Summa Theologiae, saying that Christ “ascended into heaven by his own power; first of all by his divine power; and secondly, by the power of his glorified soul moving his body at will.” Enoch also, the mysterious patriarch of Genesis, “walked with God; and he was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), a brief and enigmatic line that early Christian writers saw as another foreshadowing of the bodily assumption of a righteous one into God’s presence. The Psalms are filled with imagery of God ascending in triumph: “God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet” (Psalm 47:5). The vision of the Son of Man in the book of Daniel, approaching the Ancient of Days “with the clouds of heaven” (Daniel 7:13), is one of the most explicit Old Testament foreshadowings of the Ascension and was quoted by Jesus himself before the Sanhedrin (Mark 14:62). Each of these figures and images prepared the hearts of the Jewish people, and through the Jewish people the whole world, to recognize and receive the truth of what Jesus accomplished when he rose into heaven.

What This All Means for Us

The Ascension of Jesus Christ is not a historical footnote tucked between Easter and Pentecost; it is one of the great pillars on which the entire Catholic faith stands. It tells us who Jesus is, where he is now, what he is doing at this very moment, and where he is calling us to go. He is the eternal Son of God who became man, died for our sins, rose from the dead, and then carried our human nature into the very life of the Trinity. He now reigns at the right hand of the Father, not as a passive observer of human history but as the living, interceding, ever-present Lord who sends his Spirit, acts through his sacraments, and guides his Church through every age. The Catechism summarizes this with characteristic clarity and depth: the Ascension marks “the definitive entrance of Jesus’ humanity into God’s heavenly domain,” and Jesus, as the Head of the Church, “precedes us into the Father’s glorious kingdom so that we, the members of his Body, may live in the hope of one day being with him for ever” (CCC 665-666). That hope is not wishful thinking; it is a well-grounded confidence based on the word of the one who opened the door to heaven with his own hands and walked through it first. The disciples who returned to Jerusalem with great joy after watching Jesus ascend into heaven understood something that every Catholic is invited to understand: the Ascension is a reason for joy, not sorrow, because it means that love has won, that death has been conquered, that human nature has been exalted to the highest throne in all creation, and that the promise of our own resurrection and glorification is secure in the hands of the Lord who loves us without measure or end.