As a child I never forget hearing one of my father’s friends referring to today’s celebration as the Feast of the Vertical Take Off! And that image of Jesus rapidly ascending through the clouds like a Hawker Harrier Jump Jet remains with me still.

In common with a lot of Catholics I was often puzzled by the Ascension and for years I couldn’t understand why it was kept as a special feast.

To me it had a bizarre kind of feel to it. All the other feasts made sense and were easy to relate to, they were more normal than the Ascension; they celebrated events in the life of Jesus which were something akin to what could happen to anyone.

Even Easter, the celebration of the resurrection, I could relate to. A normal person can not appear and disappear at will or pass through locked doors, but it was not hard to believe that Jesus could do those things in his risen and glorified body.

Also Pentecost with its great wind and tongues of fire was somehow more believable to me than the Ascension because it marked an important stage in the transformation of the Apostles from timid followers into fearless Evangelists.

I also found medieval representations of the Ascension, which show a pair of feet sticking through a cloud, faintly ridiculous.

But I suppose it was because I didn’t really understand what the feast was actually for that made me most puzzled.

Yes, Jesus had to return to the Father, I knew that quite well. And what other way could he go but up? Hence the vertical take-off!

But this feast is about much more than a feat of levitation. Like many people, I suppose I was lost in the mechanics of the operation which is actually the least important thing about the Ascension.

In the Creed we say: He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

We say this and yet we are not over preoccupied with sitting or standing, left or right, or indeed up or down. We tend not to think over much about what the actual chair is like or the nature of the particular seating arrangements in heaven.

We understand that these are merely ways of speaking about something really important which is the entrance of Jesus into his glory.

This glory is the glory that he put aside when he entered our world on the first Christmas Day. We ought to regard the feast of the Ascension as equally important as that of Christmas precisely because it brings to conclusion what was begun on that great day when he entered our world as a tiny babe.

Sometimes we can learn a great deal from the way artists down the centuries have struggled to portray a particular event from the Gospels.

If we look at an array of different images of the Ascension we see some quite varying approaches. As we have observed there are plenty of depictions during the mediaeval period of the Apostles gazing up at a pair of feet sticking through a cloud. There are also a good number showing Jesus with raised arms flying, as it were, up to heaven in a big whoosh!

But there are some others which show Jesus seeming to ascend rather slowly with his arms outstretched either horizontally or pointing downwards so that the Apostles can see them clearly. His hands, of course, always bear the wounds of the Cross.

What we ought to notice in these paintings is that Jesus returns to the Father to assume his glory in human form. From this we understand that he brings us with him.

This then is the culmination of Christ’s mission on earth. He returns to the Father but he does so in order to pave the way for us. In other words he opens the door to heaven that we might follow him and share in his glory.

The door is not shut behind him but wedged open so that everyone can follow. Again we find ourselves using very naturalistic language with this talk of doors and such things.

This wonderful feast of the Ascension marks the conclusion of Christ’s great work of salvation. The only thing left to accomplish is his ultimate return in glory on the Last Day when he will gather the nations into his Kingdom.

There are still things to be done, of course, and in a few days we celebrate the feast of Pentecost which marks the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Church and the beginning of its great work of Evangelisation.

This task of Evangelising the world is something that we are intimately involved in. Under the inspiration and urging of the Holy Spirit it is our task to follow Christ’s mandate and make his Good News known to the whole world.

Christ returned to the Father in human form but we must not forget that his human body bears the wounds of the Cross. And in a very real sense if we are to follow Christ and share in his glory our bodies too must bear some wounds.

You might say that this is inevitable. Anyone who spends any length of time on earth ends up a bit battered and bruised. The lot of humanity seems to be to live in what we sometimes call “this vale of tears”.

These sorts of wounds can come from clashes with our companions on this earthly journey or from the inevitable deterioration of our material bodies through illness and death.

But what makes the wounds Christ bears in his risen body different from those that he most likely suffered in the carpenter’s workshop is that they came about as an essential part of the loving sacrifice he made on the Cross of Calvary.

If we are to follow Christ and be welcomed into glory then on that great day when he calls us we need to be able hold out our hands and show the wounds of love.

We are, of course, speaking again in metaphors and it is not our physical hands that will necessarily bear the wounds—although this cannot be excluded. These wounds of love and sacrifice may not leave any external marks but they are already well known to God.

We don’t know the precise mechanics of Christ’s Ascension but we realise that it was one of the most significant events of all time and is what enables us to gain our true home in heaven.